PR weapons to build your brand

Years ago, standard strategies like trade shows, press releases and launch events drove the bulk of a company’s brand story. Now, rapid innovation and technology has changed the way stories are created, told and shared. Throughout it all, one constant remains: storytelling.

Here are three PR principles:

The story

PR practitioners need to be storytellers who understand every nuance of the business – the company’s vision, the product, how the lives of customers will be improved. Each of these issues must be addressed as a company works to builds its brand and its culture. Sitting down and writing the story will help to identify gaps and weaknesses.

The three crucial factors

There are now at least three major factors every company needs to consider when it comes to telling their story: traditional, syndicated and owned.

Traditional:

You still need to develop relationships with key press figures that follow your industry. Whether it is a national publication or a local newspaper, you need to cultivate and maintain press relationships to help them tell the stories and report the news to their readers.

Syndicated:

Syndication occurs when companies have relationships with online properties to produce specific content for their reader. Do you have data, surveys and customer insights which a media entity might find valuable?

Owned:

The future of PR will be owned content – assets you create, such as blog posts, podcasts or video content – that bring your story to life in a way which enables an emotional connection with your customers. This trend will continue as more companies aim for a direct conversation with their customers.

PR is a profit centre, not a cost centre

You rarely see instant results, so some companies tend to look at PR as an optional overhead expense, but when you consider all the places your story goes and the impact it has, you simply can’t afford not to invest in the discipline.

At the end of the day your story is your intellectual property and is not something in which you should under-invest, or put in external hands. As Bill Gates said: “If I only had two dollars left I would spend one dollar on PR”.

Have you budgeted enough PR spend to build your brand?

Adapted from an article by Craig Cincotta, entrepreneur.com