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13, January 2012

PR – the building blocks of a start-up business

Efficient at creating awareness of a new brand quickly, PR is a fantastic way to engage with your target market and ensures that you’re spreading the right messages to as many potential customers as possible.

This can be done through issuing news releases and feature contributions to your industry’s key magazines and regional newspapers, along with liaising with journalists to establish good working relationships.

Another important thing to remember about PR today, is that it doesn’t just create media coverage across traditional mediums, including print, TV and radio anymore. A good PR strategy now incorporates online, as well as offline activity. From traditional and online media to blogs and social media activity, there are numerous avenues that can be pursued.

However, PR is often clouded by misunderstanding, and many people are not fully aware of what it can achieve for a business. This is particularly the case in America, where the profession is so misunderstood that the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) is currently undertaking a “redefinition” of PR.

This is mainly due to the difficulty of measuring the success of a PR campaign, which at the moment, can only be evaluated by the AVE (advertising value equivalent) of a press cutting or by the quality or amount of coverage achieved.

We recently attended a meeting with a client of ours, which has created a brand new business and launched a range of new products. After issuing a number of news releases to their target media, and having achieved good coverage, we’d got together to discuss the results.

They reported that after we’d arranged for samples of the products to be sent to an industry expert for a review in a key industry title, he’d liked them so much, that he’d passed them on to several of his peers, who soon began contacting the client to ask when and where they could get hold of the products. This also led to a supplier hearing about the products, and agreeing to distribute them to a number of leading names within the industry.

Additionally, the client received a large number of enquiries and sales leads from people who had read about them in the articles we’d achieved.

Despite the problems associated with the evaluation of PR activity, the campaign had achieved a significant, positive impact, and in a short space of time, our client had progressed from preparing for the launch of their first range of products, to establishing a loyal base of customers.

As a business continues to grow and develop, incorporating additional tools into the marketing strategy is incredibly valuable, but it’s all about getting off to the right start.

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