Do You Really Need PR or Can Your Business Grow Without It?

You might be able to make an incredible garden. Your flowers could bloom brightly, with gorgeous, healthy green stalks. You could have a prolific bed of herbs, flourishing fruit trees, and magnificent vegetable beds. What’s more, you could do all of this with only soil, sun, and water. That’s all it would take. But your crops would be better protected with bird nets and natural insect repellents. Your garden would yield more if you regularly replaced the soil’s spent nutrients with potting mix or compost. With a greenhouse, you could cultivate tropical plants. 

Starting a business is very much the same deal. Your business might thrive just with a good location, clever marketing, and good products/services. But it could thrive so much more with the use of digital PR services.

What is PR?

Companies like Premium Links that offer digital PR services offer them because they simply work. While it might not, in the strictest sense, be “necessary,” using digital PR is proven to have positive effects on brand visibility, brand engagement, and audience outreach. 

But what does “digital PR” mean anyway? PR stands for “public relations” and is defined as “the business of giving the public information about a particular organisation or person to create a good impression.” 

Digital PR means using means such as email marketing, digital advertisements, online SEO, social media, and more in order to carry out a PR campaign.

Why Do We Use PR?

As stated earlier, PR is used to generate a favourable image of a person, business, or brand. There are many reasons we might do this. For young companies without much traction, an early digital PR campaign can be an early boost in developing an audience. PR can make your brand stand out against the noise of the wider internet, and when done right, it can lead potential clients right to your digital doorstep. 

Using PR with an existing audience allows you to maintain your brand image in the eyes of your clients. Having them sign up to a mailing list, for example, allows you to showcase your business’s development, new products, sales, as well as causes you support or don’t support. 

A good example is the Old Spice “the man your man could smell like” campaign. The initial ad attracted extremely positive results and saw a boon in sales for Old Spice. However, the company then turned the advertisement into a PR campaign, having the actor answer questions from social media as the character. This gave Old Spice, as a company, an image of being good-humoured, personable, and charming.

PR is also used as damage control in the fallout of scandals. Many companies often fall short of client expectations in a variety of ways. PR allows companies a platform to acknowledge the mistake, take accountability, and make up for it. 

When used well, the right PR can show people that a company isn’t just a money-grabbing entity in cyberspace. It’s a people-run operation, and the people who run it care about the people who engage with it.

When Do We Use PR?

In the very early stages of your business’s operation, you should be focusing your time and energy on marketing.

Marketing differs from PR in that the former is there to primarily promote your business, that is, the products you sell or the services you offer. The latter is there to get a more personal message to your audience. Where marketing shows people what you do, public relations shows them who you are. 

When your business is just getting started, you want to focus on marketing because your product and/or services are the cornerstone of your business. Once you’ve begun to get a proper clientele up, then you can start focusing more on the public relations aspect of things. Things like aligning yourself with certain charities or influencers, or releasing behind-the-scenes content of the processes of running your business, or of the day-to-day activities of you and anyone else involved in your business.

Such content not only helps build visibility, but it also allows potential clients to see who you are, and to develop a very special form of brand loyalty to you, making you a source of entertainment, and encourages your audience to engage with your brand directly, as well as other beneficial effects.

Do You Really Need It?

The short answer is “yes.” The long answer is “yes, but maybe not right now.” 

If your business is just getting off the ground, focus on your marketing strategy and content. Showcase your product, get client testimonials, and start a slow but consistent content flow. 

Once you gain more traction, start to increase the amount of PR content you release, and show your audience exactly who is behind the brand.