The Case For PR As Part Of Your Blended Promotional Marketing Mix

What is PR

 Public Relations (PR) or publicity as it is sometime called is one of the key pillars of Promotion and for many businesses especially small and medium sized enterprises, remains very much the missing piece for a complete promotional package.

Public Relations is complementary to but different from advertising, direct selling, sales promotion, digital media and all other forms of promotion based marketing. Specifically PR has been defined on Wikipedia as:
 
The practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organization and the public by using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment.

http://bit.ly/1ru6OVa

The Aim of PR

The aim of public relations is to positively influence or persuade the public, prospective customers, investors, the media, strategic partners, staff and any or all other stakeholders to gain, remove or maintain a certain point of view about it, its management, products and services, associations or political leanings. 

Typical PR Activities

Common activities include but are not limited to: Working directly with media outlets and providing direct content for stories or being interviewed  to provide in part or whole the basis for a journalistic  piece for that publication, written content for news and feature articles together with arranging interviews with expert spokespeople, speaking at conferences, winning industry awards, sending press releases to prominent news distribution services like AAP, who drive press release distribution

via Australia’s leading press release distribution network.

Benefits

The  key benefits for using Public Relations as part of your promotional strategy revolves around two key advantages. Namely:
1. There are no direct costs for publicity so for example if a food reviewer comes to your restaurant to review the quality of the food, it will cost you nothing.
2. Such publicity is seen generally as being independent and therefore much more reliable than say internally generated and run  content for advertising purposes.

Disadvantages

The biggest single drawback to having any form of publicity is simply that for the most part you simply have no control of it. In the example above of the restaurant reviewer you don't know if you will receive a favorable review or a poor one, with the case of AAP you send your press release out to hundreds and in some case thousands of news outlets but again you have no control as to who will and wont pick up the piece, which often amounts to a large amount of wastage in time and related costs such as content writing fees and  sending fees for news services.

What Makes A Story Attractive For PR

 News items tend to get taken up when they are newsworthy. By this I mean interesting, funny, topical, educational and generally of meaning or significance to a particular audience or group.
If your story or content meets one or more of these criteria it will have a genuine chance of being picked up and published in some of the new services you're targeting. On the other hand if it doesn't meet any of these criteria it probably wont so you will need to rewrite the PR release to make it more news worthy. For a free copy of the AAP Press Release Template you can go to:  http://bit.ly/1viehIi

So if you'd like to learn more about PR or any other form of marketing or social media marketing  just sign up for a free workshop through the Digital Enterprise and there you will qualify to earn a free four hour one on one workshop. Just book by clicking on:

www.vecci.org.au/business-solutions/digital-enterprise-program

 So until next good, good luck and good marketing.

Regards
Daniele