Optimizing Your Company’s PR Strategy For Maximum Marketing Potential

Trying to grow sales? Stop and look at the bigger picture, learn how optimizing your company’s PR strategy can improve marketing.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

If you run a business, you’ve likely already spent a great deal of time trying out various marketing strategies for pushing sales, reaching clients, and expanding your company’s visibility. What you may not yet fully realize is that there is a bigger picture than just targeting sales prospects alone to grow your business. For your company to truly capitalize on your sales potential, you need to optimize your public relations angle.

Here are a few tips that can help you accomplish this task.

1. Look Beyond Immediate Sales

If you are transitioning into developing your company’s PR image from a sales marketing background, this is the first hurdle you need to overcome. Marketing is all about increasing sales, but PR is all about developing relationships with the public at large. What might seem to be a good marketing strategy for boosting quarterly numbers may not necessarily improve your company’s overall public appeal.

To do this, you need to think less in terms of short-term financial goals and long-term existential goals. Ask yourself some key questions about the nature of your company. What is your company’s ultimate purpose? What social or moral causes does it affect? Does your company connect to the community beyond buying and selling goods?

If you do not yet have an answer to these questions, then you should start by brainstorming about how your company can connect to society in these terms. Once you determine these factors, then you can start working on implementing actions for community outreach. For example, if you trying to market a solar power system, it might behoove you to establish a working connection with local communities that focus on supporting, exploring, and further developing solar energy technology.

2. Cultivate Your Social Network

Having business connections is not enough for quality PR work; you need to develop close, personal relationships with key people in your community who impact the causes you want your company mission to embody. This will help expand the reach of both your business sales and your general public image. Making the right connections and then nurturing those relationships is essential to amassing the largest possible social impact for your brand identity.

Try to identify the head of industry and public opinion leaders in your local and intermediate community. Establishing friendly working relationships with journalists, news platforms, bloggers, and online personalities can help get your foot in the door to large public events and more expansive communities which will, in turn, enable you to further spread your company vision and mission statement.

Just remember that the difference between a PR strategy and a great PR strategy requires not only that you identify and connect with these individuals, but that you do so out of sincerity. A genuine, personal connection is far more likely to help both you and your associate rather than a strictly business partnership.

3. Maximize PR Content Distribution

The next step to an optimal PR strategy involves making the most of the social network you have established. Use your connections and spread the word. You want as many people throughout the general public to hear about your company and the good that you represent for the community at large.

Take advantage of all potential resources for outreach. If you do not have a website, get one running as soon as possible to push company-direct statements and updates. Set up an email newsletter to alert subscribers to upcoming events and relevant stories, and buff up your social media with regular posts and interaction with members of the community.

You will notice that each of these steps closely mirrors the same type of marketing strategies you likely used to successfully land sales, and that is an intentional part of this strategy. Good PR from a business should utilize the same strategic methodology that is effective for growing short-term sales. In other words, look to the successes you have had in sales marketing and try to envision how those strategies can be repurposed for spreading your brand identity and company vision to the general public rather than just targeting potential customers with relevant product materials.

4. Gauge Public Opinion

One of the most important aspects of maintaining a great PR strategy once you get into a comfortable routine is to constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve your messaging. You also need to reinforce relationships with key opinion leaders and keep your image fresh and relevant to as much of the general public as possible. Understand that your image will not satisfy everyone, but the more you refine how and where your company directly addresses the public the more of the general public will be on your side.

In addition to your efforts to publish your company message and any relevant information to the public, you should also find ways to collect and analyze public feedback. Gathering feedback is the best way to determine how well your strategy is working and in what ways you need to improve. Interacting with the general public via social media, online chat, a customer service phone line, or through email communications are reliable ways of finding out how people view you and your company.

Furthermore, putting out public opinion polls and organizing in-person public events are other good choices for gauging how well your PR campaign is working toward cultivating a good relationship between your brand and the general public. Of course, this knowledge alone will only highlight your strengths and weaknesses. Making the right course corrections will require taking that knowledge and applying it to your next actions.

5. Publish Information Strategically

What you share with the general public needs to accomplish two critical goals: inform the public of your company’s vision and appeal to their sentiments. Both of those goals play hand-in-hand because a weak vision is seldom appealing and a strong vision falls short without a good delivery.

Your content needs to be creative, maximizing the intersection of marketing your company’s goods and underscoring your brand’s existential purpose. Flashy headlines and catchy one-liners may grab people’s attention, but quality content wins out in the end.

Whether it is company updates or sharing stories from community events, every PR piece needs to be informative, entertaining, and easy to understand. Your PR messages can highlight your company’s goods and services, but they should focus more on relating to members of the general public and reflecting how your long-term goals will benefit the community.

Developing a great PR strategy takes time and energy to fully accomplish, but it is worth the effort to establish your company as more than just another business. The ultimate goal of your PR strategy is to fully integrate your company as a pillar of the community, representing their hopes, dreams, and aspirations, and to fortify your business so that it can potentially remain a long-standing part of society for generations to come.