Why Public Relations is Important for Your Business

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Many company executives dub public relations as “free advertising.” That couldn’t farther from the truth. It’s neither advertising nor free. In fact it can be expensive, very expensive depending on how it’s used, because it is a labor intensive and time consuming process. Still while it’s almost cliché today, public relations can make the claim that it gives your company the best return for its marketing dollar.

PR Works Through Intermediaries: Because it’s compared to advertising, public relations is perhaps the least understood of any marketing tool. The basis of public relations is to use intermediaries to communicate with and to influence your audience. These intermediaries can be industry spokes people, investors, stock analysts, industry analysts, trend setters, employees, customers, and even the print and electronic media. Usually your company has little control over these intermediaries, or influencers, which makes PR so challenging.

PR is Messy: On the other hand, advertising you gives you that control. You not only get to craft your company’s messages, fit it with a supporting graphic, and then put it where you want your audience to read it and when you want them to read it. And you pay for that control. To get people to listen, you have to persuade several key influencers that your company, its products or services are worth their time to think about. You have to have your act together. They just don’t have the time to spend on half-baked ideas. Having your act together for an important influencer means that you: -Know your competition well -Know your industry inside out -Know the context that your product or service is used in -Know your customers (and have references) -Know their interests -Know why what you have to say is important to them

PR is Personal: In advertising, you may have demographics for your audience. You may have even conducted market research and focus groups to pin down their needs. But as individuals this audience remains largely anonymous to you. You communicate to them more as a group with common interests, rather than as individuals. By its nature, advertising is a mass communication.

There really is no “mass public relations” approach. Every communication to an influencer is unique and customized for that influencer. It’s time consuming and means stepping out of your company’s framework and thinking like a skeptic. By doing this you can discover why what you have is important to the industry influencer you want to approach. By its nature PR is more of a one-to-one communication.

PR Builds Credibility: People are skeptical of advertising. They know advertising is “bought and paid” for. In an era where we are all exposed to thousands of messages a day, everyone is jaundice media critic.

PR increases a company’s credibility, because it operates through a number of trusted intermediaries. And those intermediaries communicate to a specific audience that looks to them to filter out the nonsense. If your messages are selected to be communicated, then they gain credibility because of the intermediaries’ credibility.

This is the process that expands the PR communication. This is the process that links a significant portion of the content of national publications and almost all the content of trade publications and newsletters to public relations professionals.

PR is Precise: With advertising, you can calculate the responses and the audience impact that you have. It’s like a controlled experiment that’s being performed over and over again. PR is less predictable because you have to get the intermediary to understand your key message points and to reiterate them in his messages. This means carefully aligning these with the intermediary’s messages. It means understanding his need and the audience’s need and where your company and its messages fit into that environment.

PR is Relationship Based: Good PR means establishing ongoing relationships with several key influencers (and thus their audiences) and understanding how your company can become a good information source for the influential. But that relationship is based up your company’s ability to provide these things: -Thoroughly understanding the influential’s need information -Timely response to the influential’s request -Unique access to key executives within your company -Honestly stating your case (and if you don’t know something saying so)

PR is Opportunistic: Your PR communications with influentials don’t always have to be about your company. Providing access to your customers so that the influential can see how they are solving problems using your company’s products and services is an important way to provide more information. Sure the influential knows that you aren’t going to give him a customer who’s unhappy, but without your help, he’s not likely to get access. And he will have the opportunity to talk to your customer about your competition as well as look at what they are doing more broadly than just your company.

So PR isn’t free advertising. It’s a labor intensive and time consuming effort. It means thinking opportunistically and assessing “what’s news worthy” about your company with a critical eye. If your company can do this, then PR can help it appear bigger, more influential, and more important that it might otherwise be.
 
От: Re: Why Public Relations is Important for Your Business

Wow, great one. Thanks for sharing it with us. Could not say more. But one company should think more of its presentation on the web. PR is the best way to tell the world about your business and products. One of my best activities, when it comes to promoting. :) Why, because you can be much more creative in your PR in order to ring the bell in your potential clients. ;)

Yes. In this time every company need to have good PR, without it - fail after fail.
 

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