Effective Small Business Public Relations (PR) and Traditional Marketing Methods

No doubt Public Relations (PR) still has a huge role to play in modern small business marketing even though it has been around for quite a while. Marketers still have confidence in it to get their marketing messages out here. This is in addition to the fact that consumers trust earned media more than brands, social media posts, or even influencers. If PR is handled by trained professionals, it manages to help build consumer trust fairly quickly. Below are the commonest methods these professionals use to get the best results.

Tested Public Relations (PR) Marketing Methods

What gets the best results is what marketers need in their marketing strategy. If you want to score your business with some positive earned media coverage, get cracking with:
 
PR Stunts

If you are a marketer, and you have no publicity budget restrictions, you can always pull off a PR stunt. It is one great way to organize a spectacular fun fare that attracts a lot of people from the local communities. If the event is well staged and massively attended, it helps to build brand awareness by generating free press.

Press Releases

Well timed press releases are also great marketing methods. The essence of press releases is to get a good story/message out through an appropriate medium to get wide readership. You can get messages out from your social media handles or by giving a good story to a journalist who can quickly and easily turn it into a career-building piece of content for both of you. You can always get good press releases if you focus on pitching only the most important stories that will attract good readership. If you do this consistently, you can build a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship with your readers and even news outlets.

Community and Industry Events

It is fantastic PR marketing if you can get your business involved in events in your local community. Same goes for your niche industry. You can consider sponsoring local a derby involving Soccer or basketball or baseball games. Sponsoring other sports meets particularly for children and young adults is also a great idea. Contributing employees’ hours to volunteer work in sanitation and cleaning, health and fitness walk in your community are great PR for your business. These volunteer service and sponsorship events do not only make your community a better place to live in, they also help to build your brand and expose your business to new customers.

Tested Traditional Marketing Methods

Traditional marketing may sound old school when compared to digital marketing, but it is still a very effective marketing strategy particularly in certain industries and geographical locations. Marketers do get appreciable returns in traditional marketing even though it is quite difficult to really track the ROI accurately. That is not to say it is ineffective though.

Below are marketers’ favorite traditional marketing methods that can be of use to you in your small business marketing.

Direct Mail

If you are a smart marketer, you can use direct mail to stand out even in this digital age. You can mail brochures, promos, how-to messages and other forms of messages through direct mail to consumers in their homes. If your messages are great and well timed, you can be lucky to break through the clutter and catch the attention of the consumers.

Billboard Ads

Yeah, everyone still finds billboards on the highways as they drive along. The attention catching giant constructions work to catch the attention of everyone passing by. Billboards may be quite expensive to erect over a wide area but you can cut your budget and concentrate on the ones you can afford only in a selected local community, making sure you have the right permits though. For effectiveness, you need to be very strategic in erecting billboards. It is hugely impactful if you erect a billboard at the main entrance to your business premises particularly if you are into factory work or manufacturing.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing can be a very effective marketing strategy if done right. Getting the correct telephone numbers and knowing when to make that all important call is crucial if you don’t want to suffer excessive rejections. If not done right, telemarking can make you to waste time and money making annoying calls and even to unlikely buyers. If done right, it can be quite effective to turn many prospective buyers into customers.

SMS Marketing

SMS marketing can be quite effective to get new customers. Unlike telemarketing, SMS marketing does not rudely intrude into the privacy of prospective buyers. Recipients can always open their SMS messages at their own convenience. This is why SMS messages have open rates as high as 98%.

Radio and TV Ads

Radio and TV are still effective marketing channels for ads. For most marketers, the problem is not that of effectiveness but excessive costs to advertise on Radio and TV. Many homesteads do afford to have Radios and TVs and people habitually rely on them for their main sources of information. Depending on the products you are marketing and your target market, Radio and TV can easily and quickly get your message out if you can afford the cost. You can however cut down on costs and still get good results if you purchase ads on other audio platforms, such as podcasts or Spotify.

Newspaper Ads

Newspaper ads are an effective marketing strategy particularly in a society with high literacy rate. That is where you have the type of audience that regularly picks up a physical newspaper. Inside newspapers, an insert, digital ad, or classified ad are great ways to send out a marketing message that gets results. However, you must always endeavor to choose your outlets carefully, negotiate rates, and spend time creating engaging content if you want the best results. Settling for mediocre visual design or lackluster copy won’t get you impressive results in newspaper advertising.

How to Promote Your Products Online on Low-Cost Budget

Online marketers always face huge challenges about tight marketing budgets. But, they must market all the same. The reason they look for the most cost-effective ways to get on with their marketing activities. Embracing digital marketing is one great way around these marketing challenges. Marketers can promote their products effectively by using low-cost digital marketing tools. Digital marketing is a fast and often low-cost way to market products to a global audience and to create brand awareness with quick results. The icing on the cake is that with online tools, you can easily track and measure results from your digital marketing activities. That provides the all-important insights to deploy your scarce resources in a cost-effective way. If you are low on your products promotion budget, here are tested low-cost ways to promote your products online.

Reach Out to Digital Media

If you can up your game as a great PR person, you can at times promote your products for free. Because of budget constraints, you cannot afford to place too much premium on traditional press coverage to promote your products. Reaching out and embracing digital media is the way to go. Collaborating and working with bloggers and content marketers is one great way to promote products on low budget. Marketers like to help one another for mutual benefits and they easily do it with blogs and content marketing. You can write great press releases and distribute to your multiple media contacts. Guest blogging also helps out as well to promote products at near zero costs.
 
Generously Share Your Products on Social Media

Smart marketers like to refer to marketing on social media as cheap publicity. The reason is simple. Unless you can afford to pay, every social media platform allows some form of free products promotion on their platforms. The magnitude of this allowance varies from platform to platform. That calls for a social media marketing strategy which you must have in place. Part of that strategy is to subtly promote your products on a few specially selected platforms to enable you target your ideal audience better. These chosen platforms must be the ideal places your target audience spends most of their time. Many social media platforms have in-house analytics that marketers can take advantage of to get free insights into their marketing activities. They can rely on these analytics to determine the best days and times to post quality content, and create a manageable schedule that they can commit to in their daily, weekly and monthly marketing schedules. That helps to create some order and save costs.

Nurture Your SEO

You must go back to the basics to address SEO concerns if you want to promote your products organically. It starts from the design of your website or e-commerce shop. Specially selected keywords related to the products you are promoting help search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. When searchers use those keywords to search for products, search engines send them to your website along with others. That’s free organic traffic. You can use Google Keyword Planner tool to find popular and relevant key terms to your products. It is advisable to settle for keywords which have a high search rate and low competition. You can tactically weave these keywords into your website and content to make them look natural on them. That helps search engines to understand what your website is about and to rank it appropriately. Good meta descriptions and image descriptions also help this SEO process. If properly done, search engines will reward your website with good organic traffic from these efforts. That is tantamount to promoting your products for free.

Don't Ignore Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies for promoting products online. Once you have a credible email list in place, you can further segment it for marketing effectiveness. Promoting products through such lists usually gets good results at little or no costs at all. Even if you choose to make some investments on email marketing, the ROI is usually great. What is really fantastic about email marketing is that you can deliberately tailor products promotion messages to certain segments of your audience and you get to engage directly with them. Results from such efforts are usually very good. Besides, you can automate your emails using email marketing platforms like MailChimp to cut costs as well. But, you must remember to always write emails with catchy subject lines, short to-the-point messages and a great CTA. That is what helps to improve the chances of your mails being read at all by your recipients.

Public Relations Tips to Grow Your Business Online

Any brand that wants to grow and establish online authority needs good public relations, PR strategy. PR strategy is distinct from normal business promos and it should be used with utmost sense of responsibility otherwise it can backfire real time. Even at that, if well used, it is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase your brand awareness and ultimately increase sales to grow your business. A good PR strategy helps to get out there, mostly the positive aspects of your brand as distinct from products promotion. The more consumers hear positive things about your brand, the more they become aware of the brand. That way, they subconsciously start to build trust in the brand. That is good for business.

Every business owner can use some PR strategies to grow their business. Here are some tips from marketing experts and PR gurus.

Always Create Good Content

In PR, experts say content is of extreme importance. It can make or mar any brand if not properly handled. What influences most consumers is how your content helps to position your brand as a subject matter expert in its industry or niche. If you habitually craft high quality and fact-based press releases with succinct solutions, that helps to position your brand as an expert on your subject matter. In the eyes and minds of consumers, that helps to position your brand as a trusted and trustworthy source. As a consequence, you can attract more consumers, get more leads, more customers and consequently better sales despite competition.

Control Your Press Releases

Well, as they say in PR business, anything you say can be used against you. Even if it is not possible for you to control what other people are saying about your business, you can at least control what you are saying to the world.  The messaging you send out into the world is hugely important for the wellbeing of your brand. If you have a good PR strategy, you are in full control of what gets sent out. This is in addition to having the sole responsibility to decide how and through what channels the message gets out. That confers on you the real power to build trust as the rightful source of authentic and authoritative information about your brand. That is great for business no doubt.

Keep Up with Trends on Social Media

Yes indeed! Social media is now where nearly everyone around the world appears to be. Having a good PR social media strategy is therefore good for business. In addition to honest communication, keeping up with trends and having a strong presence on social media is now the in-thing for PR experts. Aside the huge exposure brands enjoy on social media, sending out PR info on social media is highly effective and usually spreads fast and wide. You can directly target audiences with your press releases and that enables you to expand your reach to a wider set of consumers and provide more timely updates. By maintaining a credible and consistent social media presence for your brand, the brand benefits tremendously.

Be Consistent

Yeah, consistency helps to build trust quickly. Even if implementing a good PR strategy may not lead to instant success, doing so consistently over the long-term will, provided you are consistent across multichannel and in published releases and updates as well. 

Be Honest

Remember that honesty is always the best policy. It is more so in PR strategies. Always make PR plans for the good times as well as the bad times. Bad times are very important because that is when you may be suddenly called upon to manage a crisis the brand is facing. If you think outside the box and you are honest, you can quickly restore trust and credibility to your brand no matter the magnitude of the crisis. So, having a comprehensive crisis communications plan is always part of a good PR strategy. As the Boys Scouts Motto says “Be Prepared.” If you are and the need for crises communications ever arise, you’ll be glad you planned and prepared for it. Trust matters a lot for any business. If your press releases keep consumers honestly informed, they don’t need to stretch or bend the truth to suit their expectations. Consumers appreciate transparency and that helps to build trust and grow your reputation. When consumers determine that your PR releases are honest, they tend to trust you better and they do better business with your brand as a result. PR gurus always advise practitioners to be straightforward with honest communications. This is because hiding the truth or playing down on it can only make matters worse for the brand if eventually the truth surfaces as it almost always does.