PR has always played a major role in the larger publicity strategy of a brand, and with time its role has become even more critical. PR is frequently used for developing brand awareness and gathering attention of the media, but with a comprehensive PR strategy, a lot more can be done.
Over the long term, positive media coverage can not only improve the image of a brand but make it more trustworthy in the eyes of the consumer. For doing that, however, PR professionals need to be at the top of their game and keep up with the dynamic world of PR.
In the past few years PR has changed quite dramatically, and to help PR professionals keep up with these changes we have come up with a list of PR tips that are relevant in 2019 – 20:
Develop an effective Brand Story
A brand is not just a product or a service which has a name & identity; it is a narrative (or story) of how a brand adds value to the lives of its customers. If you have a brand story, for example, how your brand helped a customer or How the brand came into existence, you can use many traditional & contemporary PR techniques to share such stories with your audience and connect with them in a more intimate manner.
Write industry related content
Write content that is related to your respective industry and make sure that it is informative and educational. Every now & then you can publish content that is related to your brand, but most of the content that you publish must enlighten or educate the reader in some way.
Write an effective Press release
If you want your press release to be picked up by a journalist, make sure that the writing is perfect.
While writing a press release for your brand you need to make sure that it does not come out looking like an advertisement. Rather, it needs to look like a piece of news that the audience ought to know.
If you write a press release that is unique, easy to read & has an awesome headline, there is a good chance of it being published.
Build a relationship with journalists
Journalists are often thought leaders and opinion-makers of whichever field they write about. If you are able to develop a relationship with an eminent journalist who is related to your industry, it could prove to be very valuable in the long term.
If such eminent journalists choose to write about your brand or mention it in one of his/her articles, it could enhance the goodwill of your brand.
Ride the trends
A new and effective way of carrying out a successful PR campaign is to leverage online trends. If there is a trending topic on the internet or social media that is related to your industry, you can quickly publish a news item or an article to engage your audience.
Twitter is arguably the best platform for leveraging online trends, and if your news item/ article is relevant there’s a chance that it might even go viral.
Get handy with Social Media PR
Apart from catching trends on twitter, there are other ways of doing PR through social media channels. One way is to reach out to journalists on social media platforms like twitter, facebook & Linkedin and engaging with them to share your content through their social media handles.
Helpful in observing social media tends and dealing with negative publicity, Social listening is also increasingly becoming a norm in PR
Hold Events
Another great way to engage your audience through PR is to hold events or participate in them as a sponsor. Large scale events generally get a lot of media attention and if your brand is making its presence felt in such events, it stands to gain quite a bit.
Prepare for PR challenges
The internet is a very unpredictable place, and there could be times when there is negative publicity related to your brand. PR plays a huge role in dealing with untoward situations on the internet, and over the long term, it can also be used for online reputation management (ORM).
Leverage SEO
A lot of content that is published online invariably ends up on the search engines also. SEO can be used to optimize content pieces like news, blogs, articles, stories, etc and made available to your target audience on the search engine.
Become a thought leader
By becoming a thought/opinion leader in your industry, you can pretty much become a PR channel yourself. But for becoming a thought leader you need to publish high- quality content on a regular basis that your audience finds relevant and valuable.
The way PR is done today may be very different from the way it was done traditionally, but its relevance has not diminished in any way. In-fact with the help of social media and digitization, the influence of PR has only increased.
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