When it comes to making decisions to invest time, effort, and money into onboarding a public relations (PR) agency, companies want to know exactly what bang they’re going to get for their buck and how any return on investment (ROI) can be measured.
This is particularly true for start-ups, scale-ups, and SMEs, where budgets may be tight and PR is too foreign, leaving them feeling a bit on foreign ground.
Trust the experts
The major value PR agencies bring is their sheer experience and know-how. PR executives will have worked with many clients in your industry and know the formulas that work best for success.
You may know your company’s unique selling point (USP), but in this highly competitive market where new companies are coming up every day, an agency can advise on the best, most powerful story to tell about your brand to stand out – and the top agencies are truly master storytellers.
By working with an agency, you’ll also get unbiased expert advice on how to reach your preferred audience in the most targeted manner, which can then link directly to revenue and sales.
An experienced, full-service agency will combine PR with events, innovative ideas, activations, and campaigns to create a holistic, powerful strategy. This integrated approach ensures a brand not only communicates effectively but also engages its audience in memorable ways.
Moreover, PR is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The PR strategy for an e-commerce brand differs from that of a real estate or hospitality business. Put simply, different businesses have different goals. For example, brands that want to focus on selling online, ranking at the top of a Google search and having great SEO are the highest priorities, and agencies can support this by getting backlinks from reputed news publications.
This multi-faceted approach maximises impact and reach, delivering far greater results than any one PR person could possibly achieve by themselves.
Clearly outline objectives
To get things off on the right foot, the agency and client must have an unfiltered conversation about objectives so that a genuinely customised approach can be agreed upon.
What does the company want to achieve through these campaigns? Is it brand awareness, lead generation, or reputation management? Is it a mix of all three?
It’s crucial to define the target audience; there is no point in gaining coverage if it isn’t reaching the right people.
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Next, an agency needs to establish the deliverables, and this is where things have changed quite a bit in recent years. In the past, PR relied on metrics like Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE), which assigns a monetary value to media coverage based on advertising rates, which is fair enough.
However, it doesn’t consider the context, tone, or impact of the coverage, and in the digital age, AVE doesn’t account for online mentions, clicks, or social media, so it’s becoming a little outdated.
Nowadays, a better way of seeing how well campaigns are doing is with key performance indicators (KPIs). These metrics should be tailored to a client’s unique goals, whether it’s increasing media coverage, driving website traffic, or building thought leadership through blog posts and opinion pieces.
PR agencies guarantees exposure
In 2024, the primary objective of PR should be to enhance brand awareness and build market trust. This straightforward concept hinges on the fact that consumers are more inclined to purchase from brands they recognise and believe in the quality of their offerings. Often, this confidence translates into a willingness to pay a premium, reflecting the value placed on trusted brands in purchasing decisions.
Make no mistake, if all this is done right, the impact on a business’ bottom line can be huge, as we saw with a fitness apparel e-commerce brand we worked with.
By strategically securing a thought leadership article in a major UAE publication and disseminating a press release (in English and Arabic) across an extensive network of media platforms, this brand’s story was featured by over 100 influential media entities.
We focused on using backlinks from Tier 1 publications to help them improve their SEO, resulting in a spike in website traffic and sales conversions.
Recently, we helped a new property developer launch onto the market and took a truly 360-degree approach—in such a fiercely competitive space, nothing less would suffice.
In this case, the brand wanted to focus on sales since day 1 and the PR campaign was coupled with an event that welcomed not just media and VIPs but also prospects from the sales team. Having prospects attend the event might seem like a bold move, but it allowed the company owners to appear confident and transparent by being so ‘visible’ to everyone, including journalists.
Moreover, with the momentum generated in the media by the launch of the developer and the interviews of the chairman in Tier-1 business publications, many investors reached out to the sales team, generating amazing ROI.
But let’s be real: there is no single, foolproof solution for building a brand and generating commercial impact; it requires consistent, dedicated effort. Businesses that understand the powerful synergy between brand marketing and performance marketing are best positioned to harness the full potential of PR.
By Kushal Desai, COO & Co-Founder, Publsh
