In a nutshell, public relations is about getting the right messages to the right people. When these strategies are properly implemented, they can help an organization create a stronger brand image among their potential market, which is highly beneficial to their survival in the industry.
Public relations (PR) is an aspect of marketing that plays a vital role in building and establishing an organization’s credibility in its industry. This is made possible by bridging the trust gap between businesses and their potential clients.
Reputation is a tricky thing to manage. How the public perceives your business’ practices greatly affects your company’s reputation, resulting in one of two outcomes: good or bad. Find out how effective or weak PR strategies can benefit or hinder your company’s growth.
How Effective Strategies Can Benefit Your Company’s Growth
One of PR’s main goals is to create messages that can impact people’s lives in a good way. Such messages are usually combined with a call to action, which can lead to your campaign’s eventual success depending on what you want to achieve.
To make this effective, you will have to really know your market to create targeted messages relevant to them. The professional world is made up of different industries. That’s why you must write for your target audience, not just to the public.
Press releases that can directly speak to the right people are important because they show that you care about your audience. This can be difficult to achieve immediately when you’re still establishing your name in the industry, but not if you have experts who can guide you along the way.
For instance, if you’re hoping to widen your reach to include the people in the tech industry, then you can find a PR agency specializing in technology and use their expertise to craft the right messages. This is crucial because such industries are difficult to permeate when you don’t have the appropriate connections.
Once your strategies are in effect and receive a positive response, the chances of increasing your business’ leads, sales, and profits can become higher. Successful strategies can also open doors and do wonders for your business, propelling you towards the future without many obstacles in the way.
How Weak Strategies Can Hinder Your Company’s Growth
Ineffective strategies can hinder your business’ growth without you expecting it. Nowadays, it is so easy to get a bad reputation from mistakes that you overlooked or failed to notice before disseminating messages to the public.
Political correctness, social relevance, and accuracy of information are important aspects of marketing that many companies struggle with when they’re working against time. Especially now, when the entire world is connected through digital channels, a single mistake can be detrimental to your business’ growth.
When your company experiences scandals or disasters of any nature, having a good PR team can come in handy. They should be able to identify the primary source of the scandal, know how to shut it down or counter it with positive messages, launch the appropriate response, and maintain a semblance of credibility while dealing with a disaster.
But if your strategies are weak or inappropriate, any attempt to counter such threats to your company image can be futile. Consider this example of a weak or misdirected strategy so that you can have a better grasp of the gravity of the situation:
In a press release your marketing team disseminated, an influential figure in your industry was mentioned in a rather bad light, which you overlooked immediately until the issue has spiraled out of control through social media.
Your PR team then decided to spam the internet with positive articles about your company in an attempt to cover up the mistake instead of owning up to the mess and issuing an erratum or an apology to the person involved.
Doing this can make your existing clients lose trust in your credibility because you don’t have the basic decency to apologize for an honest mistake. Rather, you chose to hide behind disguised attempts to clear your name and reputation.
A series of wrong decisions can hinder your business’ growth and set you back completely, even more so because you’re still in the early stages of building credibility. When worse comes to worst, it can lead to the demise of your business.
Knowing the roles that public relations and marketing play in your company’s success or failure are important because it can provide you with room to make deliberate choices. Bad business decisions can be difficult to reverse, but it is not impossible, and it certainly gives you lessons to learn from.
