How PR propels your sales and marketing

Imagine you have a fantastic product. And you have a limited marketing budget that would impede your foray or penetration into a competitive market. Your competitors are advertising aggressively in offline and online channels in different regions and markets. Additionally, competitors are receiving media mentions across broadcast, print, and online platforms. How do you compete and succeed?

The answer is simple: through public relations (PR).

Why PR powers your sales and marketing programs

1. PR builds brand awareness
   PR builds your stories and amplifies them, making your brand and products more visible and more credible. This makes your job of getting prospects and sales easier. Think “pull” (attractiveness), rather than “push” (hard-sell).
2. PR helps lead generation
   Media coverage from mainstream and top-tier outlets, including broadcast (TV and radio), print, and online media, along with thought leadership commentaries and influencer mentions, can enhance the attractiveness of your brand and products to both prospects and customers.
3. PR establishes credibility
   When unbiased editors and journalists mention your brand and products through news stories, they are more credible than when you mention your own through advertising and digital marketing campaigns. Don’t blow your own trumpet – let others do it.
4. PR drives website traffic
   When the media, which includes many high Domain Authority (DA) websites, mention your brand online, they create high-quality backlinks that can improve your website’s SEO (search engine optimization), thereby helping to increase your organic web traffic and sales, as well as indirectly benefiting your social media channels. And, in the AI era, you need to beef up your owned media (e.g., website) and earned media (e.g., media coverage) with useful content.
5. PR supports marketing campaigns
   PR efforts often offer observations about geographic, political, economic, and local markets, and these can help focus your advertising and marketing campaigns to make them more effective.

So, how should you use PR to maximize your efforts in gaining customers, sales, and profits?

Strategies to align your PR, sales and marketing programs

1. Integrate PR with marketing funnels
   PR data and insights are powerful, especially with unbiased media coverage, and they can lend impactful information to power your marketing campaigns with specific audiences. Embed links for measurement when possible, and integrate media coverage with sales and marketing teams’ dashboards.
2. Integrate events with PR
   Seminars, conferences, trade events, product launches, pop-up stores, and fireside chats with C-suite are all great tools for PR to generate exciting news stories to place in the media and help spur even more sales.
3. Align PR and marketing with branding
   For more consistent campaigns and programs, converge brand and messaging between PR and marketing efforts, including the turning of USPs (unique selling points) into palatable public news stories.
4. Work with industry influencers
   Depending on your industry, there may be relevant influencers or thought leaders your PR agency can recommend. B2C influencers are very different from B2B influencers, and how they evangelize your products and brand will be distinct.

Key takeaways

What are the key takeaways with PR powering your sales and marketing programs?

1. Sales and marketing teams GAIN from PR because PR makes your brand more credible, more trustworthy, better for SEO, and easier to sell to prospects and customers.
2. Integrating PR into your sales and marketing programs is smart and critical for greater insights, increasing ROI, and business growth.

And one more thing. Every business faces crises along its lifespan, ranging from cybersecurity incidents, workplace and industrial incidents, product lapses, customer service failures, and so on. Retained PR is your strategic insurance for reducing your risk and growing steadily forward.

If you are a business that recognizes the vast business opportunities the Asia Pacific provides and wants to expand into this region with a retained communications and marketing program, the wise way is to work with a team that is deeply entrenched in this region, with decades of field-proven business, industry, and media experience. Talk to us today.

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editor

Dr Seamus Phan – Global C-suite Publicist & Strategist (Biochemist, Cybersecurity & Webdev pioneer, Author, Journalist) with 37 years of professional field experience.