When you’re promoting a brand, leveraging tried and tested public relations strategies can boost your efforts dramatically. While it’s helpful to experiment and find out what works for your brand, trial and error can be time-consuming when you’ve not developed a focused approach. Blindly throwing things at a wall and waiting to see what’ll stick will not only waste your time but also waste valuable funds and resources.
On the other hand, once you’ve identified strategies that have worked for other brands, you can do trial and error from a more informed perspective. An approach that begins with the recognition that “this is what has worked in the industry” and branches into a strategy of “let’s see how we can adapt this to make it work for us” is more likely to be successful.
The idea isn’t to use the same cookie-cutter approach that hundreds of brands in your industry have adopted. Rather, you need to identify strategies with proven success and apply them in a way that makes sense for your brand. In order to help you with this, we’ve put together valuable advice from 10 seasoned PR experts across different industries.
1) Matt Schmidt, Diabetes Life Solutions
Advice from Matt Schmidt:
Our favorite trend is one that many marketers have given up on. Influencer marketing is still going very strong, and it’s still extremely effective. Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok are consuming consumers’ time, and offer a great avenue to reach targeted audiences. In order to do influencer marketing effectively on these platforms, you can’t just choose any influencer – you need to do your research. Make sure the influencers that you partner with will connect with your target market and, most importantly, that they will get consumers to view your website.
It’s usually more effective to have whoever is running your social media platforms research various influencers ahead of time. They can easily get a feel for who they are reaching by studying the comments on Facebook, Instagram, etc. This is something that will take days, rather than months, to research.
2) Justin Herring, YEAH! Local
Advice from Justin Herring:
Public Relations with Influencers is Effective
Social networking is a powerful marketing tool that is here to stay. According to Statista, more than half of the world’s population utilizes some of the most widely used social networking networks.
Influencer PR is growing in popularity and this is getting more and more obvious across different industries. It isn’t simply the most popular influencers with millions of followers who are effective. Micro-influencers also have a lot of power, especially in niche areas with limited audiences.
Their primary goal is to engage people, and this is something they accomplish admirably. In so doing, they often even outperform mega-stars. As a result, they’ve demonstrated that when it comes to social media ROI, quality always triumphs over quantity.
Influencers are everywhere, and they’re not going away anytime soon. Since they are genuine and relevant, they can help to improve the recognition of your brand among your target audience.
Adopt a Unique and Personal Approach for All Your Outreach
Humans are very different, yet they all have one thing in common: they want to feel special. As a result, customization will be critical in developing a bulletproof PR strategy for 2023. Everything should have a personal touch, whether you’re giving pitches, sending press releases, or hosting events.
When creating content, marketing, and communication on social media sites, make sure to include that crucial component.
The same may be said about public relations. Cut through the clutter with a personalized email instead of sending out boilerplate email pitches and content.
3) Vinitha Agarwal, Diabetes 365
Advice from Vinitha Agarwal:
There are several great PR strategies that companies can utilize to their benefit. One strategy that we love is partnering with other businesses and charities relevant to our business. Most charities do some type of fundraising to help their bottom line. Why not donate and volunteer to help out?
When you do this, your company will get mentioned on a website, email, program, radio, or television. This lets others know about you and your business. Most importantly, you’ll develop relationships over time, and you’ll most likely generate business from being plugged into your market.
4) Andreea Tucan, TutorCruncher
Advice from Andreea Tucan:
One of our best public relations strategies here at TutorCruncher is to use data at the core of our efforts. Regardless of if we focus on outreach, reverse outreach, or SEO, we always look at the number side of things and make calculated decisions – no pun intended.
Data is a powerful tool to use in 20223 and the more we base our approach on it, the more results we get. It helps us conduct research, run tests, and generate website traffic, as well as maximize communication effectiveness and create strong relationships across the web.
As a SaaS provider, we rely on and use data on a daily basis and this is no different when doing PR. I definitely think that is one of our best approaches when thinking about the growth and innovation of our brand.
5) Shawn Milbo, Service Club Delivery
Advice from Shawn Milbo:
As the world of marketing and public relations evolves, so too do strategies for success. With more and more brands competing for attention, some key approaches we, at Service Club, are adopting for staying ahead of the curve in 2023 are consistency, reliability, and transparency.
It is important, now more than ever, to have a well-defined message that cuts through the noise and resonates with your target audience. PR is all about creating awareness and buzz around your company or product. Ultimately, the quality of your PR output is a key factor for success.
Consistent and reliable output is more likely to increase brand awareness and demonstrate value to your target audience. Reviewing brand values and ensuring they are clearly and concisely displayed throughout all of your PR content will establish sincere and transparent relationships with your customers. Over time, this builds a solid brand reputation and earns you public trust.
6) Mike Van Der Heijden, Portal Ventures
Advice from Mike Van Der Heijden:
Public relations strategies that are having an impact in terms of link acquisition (SEO), brand recognition, and referral traffic are focused on producing insightful research, statistical content, and survey results in the industry your business operates in.
The reason for this is that journalists are always looking for new topics to write about and they need sources to be cited when they’re producing these articles. Now, if you’re the business in your industry that is regularly producing this type of research, you have a really good opportunity to reach out and build an ongoing relationship with these publications and the journalists – to the point where you’ll become their go-to person when they need quotes, input or opinions on articles they’re writing.
7) Carlos Obregon, Bloom Digital Marketing
Advice from Carlos Obregon:
We have found that a wonderful public relations strategy is to do pro-bono work for local non-profits. Everybody wins with this one – your company gets recognition and goodwill from the local community and the non-profit benefits from the work we do for them. We have found that pretty much every charitable organization we have offered this to has been very grateful and eager to take advantage of the opportunity.
Another great public relations strategy is to build relationships with local newspapers and journalists. This is also a win-win as you can help them get relevant, high-quality content and your company benefits from the local exposure. One way to get started is to read and comment on local articles. If you provide well-thought-out comments, the writer will eventually notice and this can help you make the connection.
8) Nathan Gotch, Gotch SEO
Advice from Nathan Gotch:
Here are two techniques every brand should deploy right now to get more exposure:
Go on a podcast tour
Every time I land a podcast interview, we get an influx of high-quality leads. The key is to A) focus on relevant podcasts and B) focus on a topic that attracts your ideal client.
The best way to find these interview opportunities is to reverse engineer a well-known name in your market.
For example: Go to Google and search “gary vee + interview” to quickly find opportunities.
Contribute to expert roundups
What I’m doing right now is exactly that. This post you’re reading is an exchange of value. I’m adding value based on my 10 + years of experience in digital marketing. In return, I get exposure for my brand. It’s a win-win.
There are two ways to get on these roundups:
First, you can use a service like Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Contribute to relevant queries where your domain expertise will shine.
Second, you can reverse-engineer other roundups.
Go to Google and search “NICHE + expert roundup” to find opportunities.
9) Sandeep Mallya, 99signals
Advice from Sandeep Mallya:
Press releases are one way to control the narrative around your brand. It’s important to have your press release align with your overall PR strategy. Unfortunately, most press releases are boring and have zero chance of generating consumer interest.
One way to differentiate your startup’s press release from a run-of-the-mill press release is to use the inverted pyramid technique. The inverted pyramid is a journalistic practice where you give people the “need to know” information before the “nice to know” information. Whether it’s a new product launch or an event or a milestone, find the core of your message and communicate it first before you get to the other aspects of your story.
By following this simple technique, you can increase the effectiveness of your press release and help it stand out in today’s noisy digital landscape.
10) Kartik Ahuja, GrowthScribe
Advice from Kartik Ahuja:
No matter what industry you are in and what size your company is, public relations is an essential tool for literally every business.
Remember, you don’t need to be a big-name corporation or a big shot or a large company to benefit from PR.
Here’s one of my favorite strategies to keep our public relations game strong:
Step 1 – Find guest blogging opportunities
There’s a simple yet powerful hack for this — Just type “write for us + *industry*” on google.
For example, if you want to write blogs/articles related to the health industry, you just have to search “write for us + health”.
Similarly, for the parenting industry, search “write for us + parenting”
Step 2 – Scan through the search results
The search results will show you all the sites that give guest blogging opportunities.
Scan and shortlist the sites that are well-aligned with your goals and expertise.
Step 3 – Reach out to them
Now, reach out to them and pitch why you should write a guest post for them.
Give them a strong reason and show how you can provide value to them and their audience
Step 4 – Repeat!
In any industry, advice from industry experts can provide a goldmine of information. If you’re looking for creative ways to give your brand that much-needed boost, the advice from the above experts should help. Beyond this article, you can find lots of advice from PR professionals who have been in the game for years. For example, the PR experts at Pressfarm can draw on their years of experience working with brands across different industries to offer you industry-specific advice. Moreover, they can go one step further to create the quality content that you need to implement your PR strategy.
By equipping you with an engaging press release, some compelling guest posts, and a branded media kit, the team at Pressfarm can help you make a memorable statement with your brand. If you’d prefer to do your own media outreach, you can use the custom media lists created by Pressfarm’s account executive as well as the media database of over 1 million contacts to connect with journalists. Sign up and start generating publicity for your brand today.