How can PR be used to position brands?

Transcript

– The power of PR is one of the most monumental aspects of business and many people overlook it: they’re looking at new, innovative digital techniques, but PR really does make a huge impact. So PR is a massively important channel; one of my favourites, because of all the different creative executions that you can take on with PR. PR is all about influencing opinion, influencing consumers’ thoughts, influencing the way that they see brands, the way that they see markets, being able to influence opinion. But it’s not necessarily the way that they see the market, it’s also the way that they see you within the market and what PR, particularly, B2B PR, often seeks to do is position people as experts within their sector, with their market, within their location. The reason that this is what we do with PR is because people like to buy from experts. When they’re making high involvement purchase decisions, what we find is that people want to buy from people that know what they’re doing. So what we do is we put great effort into positioning clients and positioning brands as the best at what they do in their market, and we do this through PR; we make a comment on the latest new stories on the latest industry developments, on the latest legislation changes, wherever it might be, we make sure that our clients are the ones that are making comment on it in the news, because when those people that that affects come to choose a new provider in that space, they’re going to be thinking, okay, well, who have I seen that looks like an expert in this field? Who have I seen that looks like they know what they’re doing? And if you’ve gone through 6, 12 months of positioning yourself as the go to person in that industry, the expert, the one that every news organisation wants to hear from every time something happens. Well, you’ve got a foot in the door already, you’re more likely to be chosen than people that haven’t been investing into that, so the power of PR is very much at the top of that buying funnel, at the beginning of the process, generating awareness, positioning your brand, or people within that brand as the experts in that field and people that want to buy from. Now I remember a story from about a year ago, Mike, our Head of PR, got an enquiry from an unnamed journalist, we knew nothing about it, and the question said, “Why would someone on Instagram change their images from landscape to portrait?” At the time it was probably about 6pm, so people in the office started to leave, but Tom, our Head of Ads, was still within the agency and he just kind of nipped over to Mike and said, look, the reason people would change from landscape to portrait, is to get more screen room on the phones and get a higher engagement rate. And we just kind of sent that sort of request off, and it turn out that it was because someone in the Royal Family had changed their posting metrics and it had gotten to somewhere like the “Daily Mail,” “The Daily Express,” or somewhere like that. Two days later, a journalist from another paper got in touch with Mike and said, can I speak to Tom Jacobs, your Head of Advertising, who was the Royal Family expert when it comes to social media. And the reality is, Tom was no expert when it came to Royal Family social media strategies, but all Tom had done is commented on one thing once. And the power of PR about getting your message, getting your brand in front of the right people is absolutely huge and it really only takes a few great opportunities to completely change your presence and completely put you on the map for whatever you want, it’s really that simple.