Brand marketing is at the center of overall marketing strategy and controls the marketing communication direction. However, does your brand marketing strategy cover all possible avenues? Public relations has been gaining attention recently, but several organizations fail to fully grasp its strategic significance.
The global PR industry is valued at $97.13 billion, and the number is expected to reach $129.35 billion by 2025. Despite the extensive spending and prospects, it continues to be treated as a support function, and its vast potential goes largely unrecognized. Understanding PR's impact on branding and exploring it as a strategic function can significantly improve brand equity.
This blog post will address how PR adds value and justify why it deserves to be treated as a core part of any brand's marketing strategy.
What is Public Relations?
Let's briefly talk about what PR is before we discuss its importance. Public Relations (PR) is the strategic dissemination of information from an individual or organization to their target audience. Publicity is the process of creating public awareness for you, your brand, your business, products, or services through media coverage, celebrities, influencers, and other forms of communication. Publicity is one element of promotion and marketing.
The Media are the communication outlets or platforms used to deliver information or data. The term refers to components of the mass media communications industry, such as print media (newspaper, magazine), the news or broadcast media (radio and television), and the internet (social media, blogs, podcasts, etc.).
Publicity is carried out for many reasons, such as generating brand awareness, recognition for a company's new products or services, converting the general public to customers, resulting in greater visibility and potentially increased sales and influence.
For many, gaining positive and consistent coverage in the media can have an incredible impact on their brand and the work they do. Good publicity establishes one as an expert or authority in their field. It can have a multiplier effect as people become aware of one's brand message, achievement, and impact. Therefore, they become a reliable resource, gaining the public's trust and interest.
The fundamental purpose is to cultivate public image or control the narrative.
The Importance of Incorporating PR Into Your Brand's Marketing Strategy
PR has historically been a critical component of political strategy, and its commercial applications remained largely unrecognized until recently. However, organizations slowly started to deploy PR for marketing creatively, and it helped them improve their ROI by leaps and bounds.
Following are some of the ways in which PR boosts brand equity:
1. Improves Brand Awareness
Advertising through brand channels through traditional and digital media is essential, but it has limited effectiveness because the source of communication plays a significant role. People are more attentive to content from publications, celebrities, and influencers; therefore, using the PR route significantly improves results.
Another reason for higher effectiveness is that people crave communication from their favorite media personalities and engage with content they share. Since engagement improves brand recall, PR marketing boosts brand awareness.
2. Trust Building
Brands always claim how impressive their offering is, and customers have become numb to self-praise. However, word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing has always been effective.
Getting someone people look up to and trust to talk about your brand's quality will improve credibility and instill trust. While this approach increases the chances of people purchasing your product or service, you will still need to ensure your offering is up to the mark. Otherwise, both your and the influencer's credibility will be diminished.
3. Creative Expression
PR marketing through digital media has recently become popular due to higher consumer consumption of social media content. PR application shows better results because it allows brands to collaborate with creative partners.
Content creators and influencers have a dedicated following because people enjoy the content they create. Partnering with them involves giving them creative control over-communicating the intended message.
Therefore, PR collaborations help brands capitalize on their reach and add creativity to communication dissemination. Creative content draws people's attention, which helps improve brand recall and image.
4. Reach Amplification
As mentioned above, PR marketing relies extensively on media, celebrity, and influencer partnership. Partnering with such individuals and the press can help you capitalize on their collective reach, which is often higher than the reach of an individual brand.
The higher reach is especially significant for new or medium-sized brands struggling to improve their awareness.
5. Improvement in SEO Ranking
One of the best reasons for adding a comprehensive PR strategy to your marketing mix is its impact on SEO ranking. Brand endorsements with the press, content creators, influencers, and celebrities draw more attention and engagement on digital media.
The higher your total engagement, the better your SEO ranking will be. Therefore, a successful PR campaign will organically push your content to the top when people browse for related keywords. Hence, PR marketing also helps you earn free advertising on digital media.
6. Crisis Management
Crisis management is the most traditional and effective application of PR, however, PR experts have found creative solutions for crisis management for brand marketing.
The first principle of responding to a crisis is reacting quickly. Hence, partnering with media channels to dispel any damaging information is the first PR action when countering a problem. However, the work doesn't stop there.
As your publicist, we will also reach out to prominent, trustworthy personalities and engage them to endorse your brand. Their favorable overt statements or covert actions for the brand will help diminish negative opinions.
7. Establishes Media Network
Finally, one of the best benefits of using PR is the network it helps you establish. PR involves working with the media.
Fostering connections with the press benefits your brand, as publicity is the most significant element of public relations. It's a unique marketing tool that employs the media to convey information to the general public. It is a channel in creating public awareness for you (as a brand), your business or practice, products or services through different forms of mass communication: press releases, blogs, news articles, podcasts, radio, tv interviews, and internet features.
Wrapping Up
In a nutshell, PR is integral to marketing and branding strategy, and businesses need to treat it more seriously to avail its benefits. Having a dedicated team of PR experts working for your brand beyond handling crises has multiple benefits.
At Rachel Dares PR, our years of experience, expertise, and dedication to the craft give our team an edge over our competitors.
We also have a diverse service portfolio. We have worked with doctors, entrepreneurs, authors, speakers, pro athletes, artists, brands, social influencers just to name a few, and have successfully established their public image. Connect with us through our website or email us at Rachel@RachelDaresPR.com. We look forward to working with you.