We all know that PR is a great tool to use, but it is even better when it is focused on a specific business need.
One of – if not the – most important business need is to generate leads and ultimately sales; and PR is a great tool to help you achieve that. We share some tips below on how to structure your PR activities to hit this goal.
Organise
Taking a moment to stop and determine what it is exactly you want to achieve and what the roadblocks might be is vital. As is focusing on who you want to reach and how they will react. This planning will help you to deliver the best possible PR campaign by understanding the news that you want to announce and the publications and markets that you want to reach.
However, you should also organise your time, your news, and your team. To break through with your target audience so that they not only recognise your brand and your benefits but are motivated enough to contact you, requires a consistent effort that needs to be organised in advance.
News
Any PR campaign should be driven by news – announcements telling your market of the great work you are doing.
However, the type of news you announce can have a strong impact on the audience that you will reach and how they will respond. To use PR to generate leads, you need to make sure that your news stories are focused on your industry-leading qualities.
By this, we mean news stories about exciting and game-changing new products, high-profile new clients and about the great results that clients have seen from working with you. Creating as many of these stories as possible during this period will support your goal of generating leads.
Leadership
As well as the news announcing what you are doing as a business, PR can also help you to tell the market what you are thinking as a business. How you see the industry developing and how you intend to drive those changes with your innovation and leadership is a great story to tell.
Bold, strong, possibly controversial statements and predictions – that you can evidence – work well in the media and demonstrate to potential customers that you are out in front in your sector.
Beyond PR
Even the best PR campaign needs support from additional marketing channels. And if you are trying to turn general interest and awareness into a lead, then you need to reach people at multiple times, with multiple different messages and through multiple different channels.
To support the PR activity, you may want to run some advertising in key publications or online sites, draft some case studies to act as sales collateral, or start a podcast project. You could (and possibly should) also run some Google Ads, consider a project to improve your SEO or think about running an ABM campaign.
Response
Finally, to generate leads – and ultimately sales – through a PR campaign you need to give people a reason to get in touch with you now (rather than in twelve months’ time) and make sure you can respond effectively when they do get in touch.
In PR you can’t be as obvious as to give people a direct call to action, but you can talk about a limited offer, a product selling out or maybe a seasonal reason to buy.
And once they do contact you, you need to make sure that your organisation can process the request, track them through the sales cycle and report the eventual sale to a PR win.
We all know that PR works, but sometimes you have to make sure it works for you and that you can track how it is working.
