When Does Your Company Need PR Work?

By Ben Allen, Guest Contributor

Public relations is a form of marketing that helps improve how the public and target markets view a company or specific person. This can be done by working with a company’s “image,” mitigating damages from a bad decision or incident, helping make connections with local communities, and participating in non-profit causes or charities.

PR work can mitigate a damaging event or even boost your sales.

Many think that PR is only a strategy to use when things go wrong — that it’s only useful to clean up a big mess or scandal. That isn’t the case though. Smart companies are constantly doing PR work, because if you improve how the world views you, it’s another positive selling point over a competitor.

Now, not every business needs to do PR work constantly. But calling in the PR agency to help after the scandal has hit the world, or your business is bleeding customers, is too late. Knowing when to start doing PR work can help mitigate a damaging event or even boost your sales if done well.

Looking To Grow Brand Awareness
PR shouldn’t only be used for fixing problems; it’s also incredibly useful to help boost your company’s reach and help people build brand awareness. If you have a wide target market and are struggling to get more leads into the top of your marketing funnel, consider a PR marketing strategy.

Public relation strategies focus heavily on getting the word out to a target market and highlighting a company in a positive light. Depending on the audience and your situation, this could be contacting new stations or newspapers, getting involved with events or charities, or anything that can put your company in front of people.

From that increase in attention, your company needs to transform those people into leads. Make sure that those working on PR coordinate with your marketing team to make sure people can smoothly transform from hearing about the company, to leads, to eventually sales.

Launching A New Product
You’ve spent all your time and energy creating a new product or service, and you want it to succeed. One of the hardest barriers for a new product is getting the word out. You can send out emails to customers or put up ads, but getting the world’s eyes on your new product is no easy task.

PR people are specialists in getting the world’s attentions. They can help craft a good press release and then get that information published on relevant news sources. Your company made a new product that can revolutionize your industry? With the help of PR, you can get that information spread to everybody that it’s relevant to.

Lawsuits, Scandals, and Bad Reviews
When things go wrong for the business or if it looks like your business is getting a bad reputation, you need to do some PR work right away. You won’t be able to make the bad influences go away, like a lawsuit or a scandal, but you can help control it and negate some of the damages with positive actions.

Ideally, you need to start doing PR work before the scandal hits, not after. If you are aware of something that could lead to a larger problem (whether it’s a lawsuit, or expecting a large amount of negative reviews) start influencing the public now. Do charity work, boost your positive image, and get out there.

Then, if and when the news breaks or the storm of negativity has passed, get working on rebuilding your image. Take steps to prevent further mistakes that can lead to a massive scandal, be public about those steps, and then show the world you are looking to improve both yourself and your communities.

If Employees Are Unhappy, Customers Will Be Too
A clear warning sign you’re going to need PR work soon is if your employees are unhappy. That includes being unsatisfied with the work they are doing, having negative views of the company as a whole, or disliking the direction of upper management. If you have one or two workers that are unhappy, but the rest are satisfied, you should be fine. But, if most of your employees are negative, expect a similar wave of negativity to come from the rest of the world.

If your own employees aren’t buying into the image or beliefs of your company, neither will customers. That negativity will spread, both whenever employees interact with customers and when talking about it in their personal lives.

In order to fix this, you need to combine PR work with your HR department. The PR side will work on aligning the company’s image to what the employees want, and HR will work on helping satisfy the needs of the employees to make them like working for the company. Your company culture needs to align with how you want the public to view you. Want customers to believe you are a forward thinking, charitable, and honest organization? Start with showing that message to your employees.

PR work can do a lot to help improve your company’s reach and image. It’s not just for fixing your reputation when things go wrong, it can be very useful in growing your business. Keep it in mind when you are needing an awareness boost in your marketing and combating negativity.
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