Call it what you will, PR or Public Relations or Marketing Communications or Marcoms is a vital element in growing market success. I have met many companies with excellent products, but with low levels of market presence. It shows that many companies are still not implementing good PR practice, and this limits their revenue growth.
Good PR supports revenue growth in a number of ways:
1. PR creates awareness — PR is one of several activities that raises awareness of your company. Your PR material may find its way to your target customers on-line, in print, at events or by word of mouth. It is vitally important that your PR is entirely consistent with your brand and strategy. The purpose of PR at this stage is to make target customers aware of you.
2. PR makes you a contender — Once your target customers know about you, your PR should help them consider you as a potential supplier. Your PR should build your credibility and reputation by demonstrating that you deliver results and satisfy your customers. Announcing new customer contracts, customer case studies and supplier awards are all good examples. You need a PR programme to deliver consistent information about your company on a regular basis over an extended period of time.
3. PR generates advocates — Your existing customers are a target audience for your PR. They will continue to see, hear and read your PR communications but they are viewing it in a different way. If your company delivered a good product and is continuing to deliver a good service, then you should be making them feel good about their choice. You may decide to have a customer conference or some other customer programme. The objective is to tap into their expertise to guide your product roadmaps and to build customer loyalty. Loyal customers become PR advocates.
4. PR works while you sleep — Your PR messages will spread out into the market. The messages and information will be seen by new customers you hadn’t targeted and can build awareness in adjacent markets or geographies that you can address in the future. In this situation, you have no control over the chronological order in which your PR will be seen. The announcement of a new product may be a year old when it is first seen by a perspective customer, but the reader now knows your company name and something about your portfolio.
The main message is to see PR as a necessary part of your every day dialogue with existing and target customers and other key market influencers. It is not an add-on. Even if you use an external agency, remember that everyone in your company is also doing PR every time they meet a customer or tell their friend what they are doing at work.
PR is not “soft and fluffy”. PR is there to build and support your revenues. When you look at your revenue performance to see if you are winning or losing, ask yourself the same question about your PR. Are you winning or losing? If you are winning, how will you stay ahead? If you are losing, who is winning? And what are you going to do about it?
If you would like have a chat about your current PR, including working out whether you are winning or losing then contact us.
Milner takes special care to measure and record PR performance on a monthly basis for clients. An example of client PR analytics provided by Milner: