If you own a business, you can save a lot of money by doing PR yourself instead of hiring a PR company. However, you need to be creative, real and determined to grow your business. Here are some important tips in PR:
Tell a story about your brand
When doing PR, you need to tell a story of your brand to make your clients understand you, your business and the brand. In business, consumers are loyal to brands they know and understand unlike what they cannot explain their origin or even what it’s made of. Therefore, tell a story of how your brand came to be, how it has advanced over time and where you see it in future. In the long run, you can have an emotional attachment with your consumers as they understand you and your business. Additionally, you can tell your consumers the main objective of your business, the protocols and ethics you follow or anything else relevant about your business.
Connect with top influencers
If you’ve kept up with the industry reports and top influencers, you have a lot of knowledge about the industry and all you need to do is network with them. Ideally, you should have a list of blogs or sites these influencers write for and try keeping track of what they write. After taking some time analyzing and understanding what they write, you can then find where you can comment to engage with these authors. It may be in a blog post, a Twitter chat or a Facebook post. When you network well with these influencers, you build your name and that of your brand in the industry. However, you shouldn’t force comments or promote your brand to avoid losing the objective. You should be trustworthy and authentic with what you comment about to avoid ruining your chances of improving your business.
Keep up with the industry
To be able to perform in your industry, you need to be informed and knowledgeable. Therefore, you are supposed to read a lot to make sure you are updated and knowledgeable to handle different problems which might emerge. Also, in this modern era of technology, you can set up google alerts, Twitter mentions, Linked In accounts, Instagram and Facebook accounts to connect and know what is happening in your industry.
Internet can give you the breakthrough you’ve been looking for, therefore use it optimally. As a way of being informed and set, you can follow industry influencers to know what they are doing and what they are up to. Additionally, you can use specific sites such as IFTTT to get articles that have specific keywords you are looking for. With all that at your disposal, it’s very hard to miss anything in the industry at any given time.
Do your research and be informative
As discussed about keeping up with the industry, you should do a thorough research before contributing to a conversation or the industry. This makes your readers get necessary information from you and you become dependable depending on how informative you are.
Normally, you should neither comment nor post about anything unless you clearly have enough information to support to support yourself. Hence, you should really study about the outlets you want to pitch to make your contribution have an effect and later help those who are reading what you wrote.
Perfect before pitching
When doing PR for a small business you are starting, you should aim on perfecting the product you’re selling or the services you are offering. Therefore, you should get opinions, ideas and suggestions about your product or service from a small group of trusted people before getting to the press. Once you get to the press, you product should have perfected to avoid getting negative customer reviews which would tarnish the name of your product or service. You should aim on getting high quality service or product as they market and sell easily.
Have a creative and objective oriented pitch
Even though you may think what your business is offering is the best, some people will differ with your opinion. Therefore, you should remain objective when pitching your brand or product to make your brand outstanding.
In addition to being creative and personal when crafting your pitch, you should tell a story about your brand as discussed earlier. The story should be short, sweet and precise. If you are sending your pitch through mail, your subject line should be attention grabbing to avoid your mail being marked as spam.
When your business grows, you can hire a PR company to help your company reach new height. However, for a small business, your drive and commitment can help your business grow.