In this blog, we talk you through some of our key PR services and which business scenario(s) they suit best.
So you’re looking to take the next step in spreading awareness of your business.
You have all your marketing and sales processes in check: you have a smart website, landing pages and CTAs for lead captures, clear and accurate buyer personas, and automated workflows. Brilliant news.
Now you’re looking for an agency to deliver a PR campaign that elevates your business to the next level, increasing your share of voice in your industry, improving your reputation and getting you in front of the right audience.
But what agency PR services do you need to achieve this, and which ones would suit your business best and drive the highest results? For many businesses, this is perhaps the first stumbling block as they’re not sure what tactic is best for them and some agencies are quite happy to charge extra and push out whatever is thrown at them.
Obviously, taking this approach is not advised.
To help you understand some of the internal quarrels that you might be having, in this blog I’ll talk you through some of our key PR services and which business scenario(s) they suit best. After reading, you should – hopefully – be able to find the right PR service for your current situation. However, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds and talking to an expert is usually a great way to understand what you’re looking for (hint: we have expert consultants waiting to answer your questions, don’t be shy!)
PR services that suit your business scenario
I’m going to break down the services we offer into various scenarios your business could be in right now. Please bear in mind that these are just some of the key services we offer and that they are not obsolete outside of their given scenario. If your budget suffices, we’d highly recommend going for as many as possible. After all, the more PR you do, the better the results you will see.
So, first up for our list of business scenarios; you’ve got the news.
Media Management
The Media Management service provides you with a set bucket of hours per month and a team of dedicated press officers who will use these hours to engage with your target media on your terms. This service aims to drive positive PR coverage using the strategic media relations content and communications provided by your business. The press office is vital to any PR work and we would recommend this service is kept across all scenarios, but it’s particularly useful if you have a lot of news and content. The more hours we spend talking to the press about you, the more they’ll come back for more.
SEO PR
Surprisingly to many, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) plays a key role in the success of a PR campaign. Its importance has been drilled into marketers’ heads for years now and it’s no different in PR. Throughout your campaign, you should be aiming to build domain authority (as this will help your pages rank higher on Google and other search engines) through media coverage containing links back to your website.
We help you to choose relevant keywords and optimise your existing news and content around them before pushing them out into the world. Your business name is featured directly next to your target keyword, on high-authority websites. Through this strategy, you’ll slowly begin to see your business appear through searches and with the eventual aim of seeing your business ranking on page one of Google.
The second scenario we often see is when a company doesn’t really have any news or content that can be used for PR. Now, this is okay and a completely normal situation to be in; some businesses aren’t in high-activity industries or capable of churning out lots of news about their business. Regardless, there are services to help solve these issues and deliver a successful PR campaign.
Market Research
A key method in producing news for your business to use not only in a PR campaign but also for marketing efforts and business insights is a Market Research campaign. Conducting a Market Research campaign allows you to gain insight into how your brand is perceived, generate news headlines with original statistics and create unique content for your website in the form of eBooks, blogs, social media posts and reports that engage your target audience.
A piece of Market Research conducts a survey that produces statistics on key questions that your business is looking to address, enabling you to produce headlines that grab media attention, as well as form the backbone of a detailed report that can be used to promote your business and generate leads. Market Research often produces the highest return on coverage for clients as they begin to shape the news agenda around fresh, original data that is unique to them.
Now the third scenario actually blends in with the above and the subsequent requirement for content. While in the previous scenario, you have no news or content useful for PR, the other place you may find yourself in is that you have a lot of news, business or industry updates, but not a lot of substantial thought leadership content that would really position you as an authoritative voice in your space. This is where content creation expertise comes into play.
You can find examples of our client market research here:
- Invu: Perception vs reality – the real state of accounts payable and purchase order processing in UK business.
- Compleat: How tech is changing the role of finance
- Incopro: Is fake the new real? Living in a fake society
Content Creation
PR is no different from marketing in that it aims to generate leads and sales by getting people onto your website via content.
As you know, your website meets your prospects long before your sales team, so if your content doesn’t answer their questions, they’ll go elsewhere to find answers.
But a PR content creation service will enable you to create content that attracts people to your website and keeps them there – and the content produced can be used in multiple ways.
A PR agency will be able to create a variety of thought leadership content that positions your business as an important voice in the market and your executives as experts at the top of their field. This content could take the form of:
- blogs used for both the website and pitched to the media for coverage,
- thought leadership articles placed in high-profile target publications,
- media comment banks to be used for quick response media opportunities and so on.
Creating this kind of original content is vital to differentiate your business from your competitors and it increases the strength of your message and your brand’s visibility.
A quick summary
Hopefully, the three scenarios listed above give you a better idea of what PR services you should use to kick-start your PR campaign and how we can help. However, you may have noticed a trend across all of these services: they’re all digital.
These services encompass something we like to call Digital PR. Digital PR aims to increase online presence and website performance through consistent media coverage, high-quality website backlinks and increased referral traffic. All of the above services combine together to form the crux of Digital PR, an incredibly important variant on most people's understanding of traditional Public Relations.
Above all, a key element we insist is built into every service we offer is PR Measurement. Producing an accurate return on investment has always been a bugbear of the industry, but gone are the days of AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency). Seriously, if any agency proposes this as a way of reporting their success…run for the hills.
Instead, our measurement focuses on the true impact of the Digital PR strategies we employ.
Our approach allows you to gain visibility and insight into how your PR campaigns are actually performing, looking at backlinks, referral traffic, page performance, social media engagement and interactions. All of these metrics show you exactly how many people are visiting your site through our work and, with marketing systems in place, you should even be able to track the entire conversion path, from the moment someone becomes a contact to the moment they become a customer. Now that sounds like a measurable return on investment I’d like to see.
If any of this has caught your fancy and you’d like to speak about it in more detail with us, you can book some time to chat to one of our specialist PR consultants. They’ll talk to you to understand your goals, challenges and need for change before providing some advice. Simply select a time from the drop-down below. We look forward to speaking with you soon!
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