How will PR help my business?
PR is a marketing activity, so the ultimate goal is simple – more sales. But although
one article or one campaign can (occasionally) see a short-term surge in
enquiries and sales, generally it’s a long-term build. Don’t go into PR
thinking your sales will skyrocket in 2 weeks – you’ll be disappointed.
This long-term build is supported by an increase in shorter-term benefits, namely:
credibility, SEO and brand-awareness and these should be your primarily focus –
from them, sales will come.
It’s important to understand these shorter-term goals / benefits so that your PR activities
are tailored to making quick, meaningful strides to ultimately boosting
sales.
Don’t get bogged down with one benefit and focus all your energies on it – when you work
on a variety of activities that support all three benefits – the results are
exponential.
Many activities / articles can tick more than one box too.
Credibility
Credibility or ‘gravitas’ (as a few posh PRs call it) feeds that need for potential customers to see ‘social proof’ and to build trust.
According to a 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report “81% [of consumers] say trust impacts their purchasing decisions” so it’s important to build trust with your potential customers.
Getting articles in trusted, well-known publications (especially where they are heralding you as an expert or giving your product or service a big ‘thumbs up’) helps you build that trust and trust means more sales.
Once you have these articles, pepper your socials and website with them – shout them from the rooftops: “the [insert fancy publication name here] loves us”. It will go a long way.
SEO
One of the most powerful benefits of PR is a boost to your SEO. In a nutshell, SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the activity of appearing first on search engines when your key words (such as your service / product type, brand name and/or location are typed in).
The higher up you are, the more people will click onto your website.
When you get an article online, you may get a backlink to your website. When search engines see you have backlinks from websites they like (such as online publications) that gives you a boost and you’ll appear higher up the list.
How much a website is liked is called your ‘Domain Authority (DA) rating’ and you’re rated from 1-100 (100 being the best rating).
You can find out yours (and others) here: https://moz.com/domain-analysis.
To give you an idea of the Domain Authorities of publications, as of 2022:
§ Daily Mail – 94
§ The Sun – 94
§ The Telegraph – 94
§ The Metro – 93
§ Huffington Post – 90
§ Yahoo – 78
§ The Express – 76
Backlinks from these websites will boost your own Domain Authority.
There are tons of other SEO activities you can do (such as working on meta tags on your website or writing blogs) but backlinks are the most powerful way to up the ante.
Some Digital PR and SEO agencies charge £1,000s for backlinks – don’t do it, do it yourself using this book and send me a bunch of flowers instead.
Brand awareness
This is a classic reason for doing PR but as many small businesses tend to focus on it over the other two, I purposefully put it third to highlight the greater importance of credibility and SEO.
The idea of brand awareness is a simple one – you want your target market to know you exist (and then you want to keep reminding them).
Most publications have media packs (usually available on their website) which will document who their reader is. It’s then just a case of targeting those publications.
For example, if your target market is 25-34-year-old women with a disposal income, you might want to be in Cosmopolitan Magazine.
Watch the video:
