PR advice for Small Business

By : Administrator
Published 22nd May 2014

One thing most new businesses struggle with is marketing and PR.

Most people are familiar with marketing and it's many forms, online, such as forums, blogs, directories, social media etc, or offline such as flyers, newspapers, networking etc.

But what about PR? What exactly is PR?

A lot of people assume PR is simply Press Releases, and firing off occasional ones to PR Web or a similar distribution service will do the job

For those that don't know (including me for a long time ) PR stands for Public Relations, and it's pretty much intertwined with marketing. 

Public Relations is an archaic term that put simply is how you communicate the public face, image and reputation of you and your brand. It includes all on and offline activity and is (or should be) a key aspect of your marketing strategy. 

You are probably doing a lot of PR already without even thinking about it. Social Media, forums, blogs, commenting, anything that communicates your brand, business ethos, values or reputation.

Customer service is a key aspect of PR. How you or your team deal with customer enquires or complaints. Conversations on the phone can lead to a ripple effect you might not have considered, a favourable review on your Facebook page, a tweet, or a comment in passing at a networking event. Likewise you can expect the opposite effect with bad customer service.

Press Releases

One of the hardest aspects of generating favourable PR exposure is via news and media services or approaching journalists. This is traditionally where the Press Release comes in, where something newsworthy is crafted into a Press Release and sent out to various news organisations in the hope of some exposure.

Unfortunately in the digital age, this tactic (along with everything else) has been abused, with businesses pumping out Press Releases which have morphed into sales spam rather than newsworthy events. The rise of online PR distribution services hasn't helped.

But gaining exposure from news agencies or industry related organisations is a key tactic to growing your business, generating exposure, traffic to your website and can also be a good source of Google safe link building, as your news gets picked up and re-churned by different sites.

So if you think you have something that is genuinely newsworthy rather just a self promo sales pitch, then get it sent over to your local media. Try approaching your local papers. Make their life as easy as possible. Most regional papers are a shadow of their former selves, with minimal in-house staff, so the easier you make it when passing news, the more likely you are to get stuff published.

Find out what format they want any copy in, attach images/pictures that they can use. Most regional papers have an online version, so make sure you include a weblink. If you are incredibly lucky, you may get picked up by the nationals.

HARO

Another way of flirting with journalists is to be proactive and be used as a source for a story they are creating. A good way of doing this is by joining the HARO (Help a reporter) network. Until recently this was primarily USA based, but they just expanded the network to include the UK.

Completely free, and although have yet to score any success myself, it certainly seems a good idea at face value, so shall give it a try!

So if this has been of any use to anyone, feel free to share it and give me some positive PR 

Otherwise let me know your own PR stories or experiences, good or bad. Anyone managed to get some national exposure, and did you capitalise on it? Or was it a damp squid?

Be interested to know if anyone has used HARO and had any success?


Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn
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