Business Growth Tips: How To Use PR To Grow Your Business

Businesses need to create and maintain a positive public image if they’re going to attract and keep customers. And if they want to get to the top of their industry, they’ll have to project the image of being a leader in their niche. Your success in the world of commerce basically begins with making the right impression on your target audience.

You can achieve this with a smart public relations strategy. Whether it’s an eye-catching press release, an endorsement from a leading influencer or a stellar performance at an industry event, there’s more than one way to capture the public’s imagination. And if you get good at this, you could draw a lot of goodwill and patronage your way.

If you would like to grow your business with PR, here are six things you need to do, starting today.

Understand Your Audience

Know who your audience is, as a group, and at the level of the individual. Understand their motivations, their tastes and preferences, their loves and hates, and their hopes and fears. Know them just as well as you know your brand. Learn what triggers their decision to engage a brand like yours. Then seize on it, and make it yours.

Unlike marketing, PR doesn’t require that you speak only to your prospective customers. The point of a public relations campaign is to get in the good books—or, better still, the great books –of the public. It’s a catalyst for further engagement that’ll eventually lead more people to your doorstep.

Be Clear About Your Goals

Have a clear vision of what you’d like to achieve with your public relations strategy. It could be projecting your business’s reputation, boosting its prestige, drumming up more goodwill for it, or simply getting important information about your brand out to the wider world.

When you define your aim, it’ll be easier for you to choose and roll out tactics that’ll help you achieve them. You’ll know exactly what you want to achieve, and how you can achieve it.

Use The Right Platforms

How will you connect with the people in your target audience? Where can you find them? These are questions you’ll need to answer. For example, if yours is a fashion store for corporate women, you can amplify your brand’s reach by getting on the blogs, radio shows and TV programs that they read, listen to, or watch.

Create Brilliant Content

So you’ve found the spot that your preferred segment of the public frequents (whether it’s traditional or new media). How do you catch their attention? How do you keep them interested in what you’re saying?

You can do this by creating content that they’d want to consume. It could be a press release about something that’ll make them sit up and take notice. Or it might be a pleasant review of your brand by someone they admire and respect. Whatever it is, craft it to make a good impression on your audience.

Engage The Media

A lot of PR efforts boil down to making it to the news. And to achieve this, you’ll need to have something newsworthy about your business that’ll attract media coverage. For example, a partnership you’ve struck with another organization that could positively impact the lives of many people.

But it’s not enough to have news worth reporting. You also have to build relationships with journalists (or media houses) that are likely to cover the sort of thing you do. This will make it easier for you to get a spot on their news and program cycles.

Get On Social Media

Social media is great for PR. It enables you to reach a much greater number of people than other channels, and at a comparatively lower cost. With it, you can converse with the public, share press releases, re-share testimonials, nurture a community, and shape your business’s public image. It’s perhaps the most underutilized PR tool, one that could transform your brand if you learn to use it effectively.

Final Words

There’s a lot that a decent public relations strategy can do for your business. While there’s no shortage of tactics you can adopt, it’s not always clear how to go about making them work. We’ve presented you with tips that could solve this problem for you. Apply them to your enterprise, and you’ll see positive results roll in in good time.