3 Small Business Public Relations Tips to Supercharge Sales

Public relations remains an effective strategy to controlling the content of your brand from customers and the media. Using public relations effectively can help your business sustain a positive image to the public and help with brand recognition. However, if you are a small business, you might think investing in public relations strategies would take too much time or capital. Thankfully, in today's market with technology and computer communications, like social media, small businesses can utilize new mediums to increase their public relations message. Here are 3 ways small businesses can use public relations to supercharge their sales. 

1. Publicity With Your Niche

A tried and true method of public relations has always been to get published in a newspaper. Whether the story is about your business itself or someone from your business commenting on a trend, such mentions are thought to reflect good public relations. Nowadays, more people surf the net than read the paper, but its important that your niche sector has commentary related to your business. For example, if you are a private accountant. Being mentioned on online or published regional trade publications (like Greater Buffalo, New York Business Journal) or accounting blogs are an excellent way to get the word out of your brand in today's digital media. Also, thanks to social media, you or others can post and share the story that you and your brand is mentioned in, helping the story to become viral. A great thing about working in your niche is you can help promote your brand through the practice of mindshare. Mindshare is when publicity has worked well enough to lead your brand within the top thought of brands on a consumer's mind. The more you work to network your brand in its niche, the higher likelihood it will be mindshared. This increase can most likely increase the amount of interested customers in your brand. 

2. Participate

Brand awareness becomes more recognized the more you and your brand are out front in the issues or in the news. For example, blogging about expert accounting advice or about account trends can help lend a voice of authoritativeness to your brand. Speaking at seminars or holding public events can also lead to more community involvement and interaction with your brand. Social media is another form of participation which provides a face to your brand. When a company uses Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, or other forms of social media and they interact with commenters, followers, or replies, your brand will be given a humanizing quality. In addition, social media is a great way to analyze voice of the customer. Voice of the customer is where the brand is able to get first-hand opinions about the good and services of the brand. With social media, you can get unbiased and unfiltered opinions about your brand and reflect, analyze, and incorporate those ideas. These interactions will increase the amount of people talking about you and help create more interested consumers in your brand. 

3. The Contemporary Press Release

The press release is a staple of all public relations. The press release is a letter that is released to the public to discuss a newsworthy event or occurrence with the brand. Press releases used to make rounds to newspapers or news outlets, but with the internet, press releases are often released through email (email newsletters). Email has helped lower the price of distributing news releases, however, some consumers may simply delete frequent emails that are in their inbox. To entice more potential leads to take the press release seriously, one needs to answer consumer demands or questions. Like participation ideas where you and your brand act as an authority on a subject, the press release should try to tell the potential lead or recurring customer something.