Incredible ways to raise the bar on your PR: top hacks from 3 experts
PR can often be mystifying to businesses. Do you ever struggle to know how to make it work?
Everyone wants good PR. It’s such a good way to raise your visibility and get in front of a bigger audience.
When some clients I’ve spoken to are scaling, they sometimes say they’re stuck and can’t get any bigger. It’s usually because they haven’t previously done the brand awareness and top of funnel marketing activity.
It’s so critical that we focus on more than one marketing channel e.g. not just doing Facebook ads and putting all our eggs in one basket.
There are so many channels and did you know PR is at the TOP of the funnel.
What is the role of PR?
- PR gets people in: I love Laura’s analogy here: “PR is like sprinkling the magic dust right at the top of your sales funnel” then your marketing machine kicks in.
- Drive eyeballs: PR is all about driving eyeballs to where you want them to go such as your website or social media. However, it’s super important to have the marketing machine working behind this and to ensure it’s well oiled!
- Seamless process to buy: If you do that well when a customer comes through the funnel process from PR, the process is seamless.
- Capture and nurture them: Once you get them onto your website – you capture them, keep them there for longer. They see your lead magnets or data capture and offer captivating content, you do the nurturing and provide strong calls to action so they don’t leave your site.
Otherwise, you’re just doing PR for vanity sake to get people to follow you.
If you haven’t got a sales funnel in place your PR is wasted.
As Laura pointed out “You might as well set fire to money!” Yes, we laugh, but it’s 100% true.
Laura mentioned that we want PR to do that heavy lifting so that when the customer goes through the marketing machine and they come out at the end as an engaged customer.
When you’re a service-based business, decision-based buying takes longer than a product-based business. [this is where PR comes in] as the decision making process from the customer is very different.
It might take longer with a service-based business as there are so many touchpoints that you need to interact with a brand before you buy from them.
It’s all part of the customer journey, (see my blog post about the customer journey) which helps with the Know, Like and Trust Factor.
Anyone that knows me knows I’m a huge fan of the customer journey!!
Debbie mentioned the trust element is key. For example, if you see a brand’s name in a publication that you trust, you’ll also like that brand even more because of the association.
One of Debbies’ clients had lots of traffic to their website but all the products were sold out and there were no lead magnets in place. So it shows that PR gets customers in through the door – but you have to have everything else in place to keep them there so it’s not a missed opportunity.
If the PR is super successful and explodes with the system in place – it’s working effortlessly, yay!
7 Ways to Nurture Clients
- You need to know who your customers are in the first place. Who are you targeting or talking to?
- Marketing meets them where they are (what platforms are they on e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram) to help them with their pain points or suffering
- You can’t do all aspects of marketing well if you’re running a small team. Have a few key areas, set some goals, some intentions, have a strategy behind it.
- Be specific about ages, lifestyles, demographics, problems we are solving. Remember, we are not talking to everyone here.
- People outside that audience can still buy/listen/interact with your brand/service offering. When you get specific about who you’re selling to and if you can get tight with your messaging it doesn’t mean you’re narrowing your audience.
- Some clients get fearful as narrowing feels small and reductive. But when you get tight you have an opportunity to create so much more empathy and emotional attachments with where your customers are. They suddenly feel like “Oh yeah I need this!” Also if they like you, don’t worry – they’ll come and find you.
- Language is really important so that customers understand it and it resonates.
Final thoughts
PR is the top of the funnel, get your marketing system in place so that your PR is operating seamlessly.
Ensure you’re talking to the right customers in their language and meet them on their platforms.
Having content localisation is so important to talk to people in different ways. This is a question that also came up on Clubhouse this morning. When you’re branching out into different markets rather than trying to understand everything about that market, bring in experts from that market or industry to share their knowledge.
They’ll know that world better than you do in terms of behavioural patterns, languages, nuances, and it’ll help that market to buy when you’re scaling globally.
People need to know you’re talking to them in the right way – a simple language that they know and feel comfortable with and that resonates is key. Leave the industry jargon out like the term ‘customer acquisition costs for example.
Raise your visibility with PR, bring your customers into your marketing or sales funnel and nurture them across your customer journey.
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