What is PR and what value does it provide?
It’s a question we often get. A good analogy: imagine that your most important prospects are at a cocktail party and every person they chat with talks about your company in a highly positive way. It’s highly likely your prospects will be more receptive to your calls and more likely to purchase your products or services after hearing positive stories and praise from multiple third-party sources.
Venture capitalists and investors attending the cocktail party would be more inclined to invest in your company and might appraise your products or services at a higher level. Local government officials in attendance may be more receptive to initiatives you are looking to undertake. Prospective employees might be more likely to consider working at your company, and existing employees would likely feel a greater sense of pride and loyalty.
Good PR is like that cocktail party, creating positive buzz, interesting stories, and relevant feedback about you and your brand for your audiences. It may include coverage in publications, articles and blogs, awards and recognitions, feedback on the internet, social media and in print, broadcast, and digital media, all layered in together. It can also influence perceptions in your community with employees and prospects, organizations and associations, your industry, analysts, and potential investors and acquirers.
“A public relations specialist is an image shaper,” according to The Princeton Review. PR’s goal is to generate positive publicity and word-of-mouth for an organization to enhance or maintain its good reputation. PRSA defines the role as a “strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”
This positive feedback or buzz is what we aim to create and amplify with public relations. PR helps to curate the story of how you and your organization want to be perceived in the eyes of others—whether those are employees, financial stakeholders, customers, prospects, and/or the public. It sets the tone for the entire organization.
How can PR help raise your valuation?
How can PR and media relations improve company perception to improve growth and increase valuation? Good PR does this in multiple ways:
- Tells the story of your organization and what it stands for.
- Set the foundation for how the company consistently communicates about itself across all marketing channels to persistently resound with audiences.
- Provide a third-party perspective from customers and media that can be leveraged across marketing for added credibility.
- Build authority for the company beyond what it is saying on its own website.
- Build credibility to align the company with other relevant and respected companies, organizations, and affiliates.
- Educate audiences and increase awareness overall.
- Differentiate from the competition.
- Support lead generation and sales efforts
- Increase SEO, including driving visitors to company websites through organic search and building authority through valuable backlinks
- Increase loyalty among employees, thereby reducing recruitment costs.
PR enhances your reputation, puts you in control of your story, frames your narrative across websites, media, collateral, and content. PR demonstrates thought leadership, expertise, and commitment to your industry and community at large.
Educating audiences, gaining funding, enhancing a company’s reputation – not one of these can be achieved through web copy, digital ad spends, print advertising, or SEO alone; it takes a comprehensive and integrated marketing and PR plan to achieve success. Credibility gained from media relations can help to advance each of them.
Consider just two examples of clients leveraging PR and media relations in different ways:
A start-up digital health client of Clearpoint’s wanted to increase awareness. In one year, we obtained about 70 media hits and 10 interviews with industry analysts. It was included in numerous industry reports and gained a highly coveted Gartner Cool Companies Award, which we further leveraged in blogs, online content, social media, and the web. All this propelled the organization’s image to a completely new level, resulting in a beneficial acquisition by a public health plan.
In another case, a financial technology client wanted to educate prospects on the value of its solutions and increase awareness about new products in the U.S. and Europe. With 220 media hits in one year, including appearances on CNBC, NASDAQ TradeTalks and in stories on Reuters, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal and numerous financial publications in Europe, that client is now experiencing exponential sales growth. It has even had purchases come in immediately following individual press releases going over the newswire.
What are you looking to achieve for your business?
PR helps you to increase credibility, exposure to audiences, and create a positive perception and more. Contact us to find out more.
Email: info@clearpointagency.com