Two Strategies for Mixing Marketing and Public Relations

Public relations(PR) is an area often overlooked in marketing. Not having a public relations section in your marketing program can hinder growth. Many CEOs don’t understand nor care about PR until they are responding to a crisis. Don’t be the company that learns about PR until it’s too late. Stay proactive, learning, and growing your marketing section to avoid a crisis. 

Here are a few helpful tips to help add public relations to your marketing team. 

Focus On Brand Awareness

Rebecka Jallad writes in an article for Forbes, “a strong identity and presence can help put any brand at the top of consumers’ minds. According to research, digital interaction influences 70% of purchases.” If you focus on brand awareness by monitoring your reputation online, when new comments or complaints are posted, you can then respond, creating those digital interactions influencing conversions.

She goes on to say, “by definition, brand familiarity is the process of creating brand presence by providing awareness, emotional connection, value, accessibility and relevant differentiation for your audience. Building strong brand familiarity is one of the most significant hurdles companies face.”

Organize An Event For Media Coverage

Creating these events can be essential to gaining good media coverage. It’s important to create events for the right reasons. Here are two reasons you don’t want to have an event according to victoria at eventtia.com. 

• To increase the attendance rate

victoria goes on to say that it’s not about increasing your attendance rate just for the sake of it. Many media out are trying to sell their own products, so focus on creating great news that supports your events. Apple product release events are a great example of this, they focus on the news that supports the events are a caveat to the product. 

• To become more popular

Trying to gain popularity is not the best reason to have an event, that’s because it seems to come off as desperate. Plan and discuss the goals for the event and how the news makes the event better not how you can get more people to see the brand.

Now that I’ve told you about the don’ts, what should you do?

You should start with smaller media outlets, this is because the large media outlets won’t take your company or brand seriously if the smaller outlets don’t pick up your story first. You need to prove yourself.

Create news that is important to your brand and that can complement your brand and product. If you have a bread company you should no have a wine tasting news event, you have something that compliments your product, like bread and cheese. 

Monitoring your online presence is key to brand awareness, and knowing what people are saying good or bad, then your response to that feedback is how you can affect brand awareness.

References:

Jallad, R. (2019, October 22). To Convert More Customers, Focus On Brand Awareness. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2019/10/22/to-convert-more-customers-focus-on-brand-awareness/#2b840fd32075.

Victoria. (n.d.). How to Get Media Coverage for Your Event. Retrieved October 23, 2019, from https://www.eventtia.com/blog/event-marketing/how-to-get-media-coverage-for-your-event.