How to use PR effectively as a launch strategy

PR can be a magic wand if it is used well and for its original purpose: to introduce, educate, showcase and to tell the story of what you have to offer. 

This can also include showcasing why it is especially important to your target market. 

We all know that when an expert is featured in top media, we simply feel more inclined to trust them; and if others are being helped and seeing the results, surely buying from you is a no brainer, right?

PR supports your sales offering through media articles that you can share across your digital platforms, as well as providing organic search benefits.

Additionally, you can send these articles to potential customer databases and include them into some of your marketing tactics. These could be landing pages, e-mailing and social media campaigns.

In today's financially strained marketplace, businesses and brands cannot compete on price only. This is why PR elevates your brand and what it offers, connecting you with the ideal customers who are happy to buy from you for your value, quality or even lifestyle at the price it costs.

These customers can be brand loyal, but they should also become completely brand insistent, so distracting them with price wars is not the way to create loyalty.

A large percentage of successful global brands, experts and businesses that consistently use PR in their strategy and activity, have great success. This is because you know about them.

They invest in PR and communications strategies and they see great benefits in using it as a tool to support the emotional brand relationship with their target market and all stakeholders. They see the larger impact of brand value also on the equity value of their business.

A great PR campaign aligns your communication objectives to your business objectives. It is important to have a media pack that holds the information media need to publish content about you.

Spokespeople need a media biography and high-quality media-friendly profile images in the correct format for media to use; this is a bare minimum. You also need a brand story that connects the target audiences with why you do what you do and why the market will need you.

Good brand imagery and an image bank of the business, services and products are also required to support written content. Numbers captured through infographics and product shots also help media visually communicate your message to your audiences in a way that is easy to understand, memorable and more importantly that connects with them emotionally.

Hearn concludes that when it comes down to market share, growth and sustaining business, PR is the strategy to positively impact these crucial business objectives.

For more information, visit www.get-published.co.za.