Inject PR into Your Company – Even Without a PR Department!
Posted by [email protected] on Mar. 6, 2023 / Subscribe 0
Inject PR into Your Company – Even Without a PR Department!
By Liam O’Mahony, MBA, APR
The value of having a public relations department (or even just one employee handling those duties) for smaller and mid-sized companies can be debated on several levels:
- How do we actually measure the impact of PR?
- Do we really need PR if we don’t want media coverage?
- Can we calculate the ROI of the output for that department’s salaries?
- Can the PR responsibilities really move the needle in complementing operational KPIs?
These are valid questions that owners and management have to consider when assessing how essential of a need is there to bring on PR staff. As a result of this ongoing dialogue about the significance of public relations to a company’s business strategy and revenue goals, PR leaders often find themselves in a defensive position to justify their worth, contributions and correlation to the bottom line.
The back-and-forth argument about the importance of public relations to the overall business is not easily resolved, but for the purposes of this blog, let’s examines how public relations strategies and tactics can be embedded into your company’s regular agenda even if you officially have zero FTEs devoted to this function.
Perhaps a combination of marketing, sales, human resources or administration staff could collaborate to produce starter public relations tools to set the foundation. It is a reasonable avenue to embrace, maybe gradually at first, to take control of your brand, enhance awareness and generate community goodwill by being proactive and organized in your information distribution.
Additionally, content marketing and social media duties have expanded the job descriptions of public relations positions over the last decade. These truly are cross-disciplinary activities that can be performed by other employees on an interim, periodic or as-needed basis to fill in the gaps until PR support is added.
This option is not meant to devalue the skills and experiences of PR practitioners, but rather it is intended to illustrate a potential “makeshift” or transitional option. Could existing staff with versatile abilities and a little extra bandwidth from their core responsibilities also contribute to completing any number of basic PR projects? These efforts would be a great benefit in creating vital communications assets for the company as it matures toward creating a bona fide PR department or contracting with an outside agency.
While there might be some resistance due to normal workload or reluctance from lacking experience in this area, there is still merit in the exercise of vetting which communications collateral are priorities and how a team can come together to deliver the goods to develop a “PR library” for the company.
- A traditional press kit should be created or updated to be at the ready for any media queries in print and electronic formats. The more high-level information you can provide quickly, the easier it is to engage with media members and build a rapport for future coverage with a prompt response and organization presentation. This can include a variety of materials, but generally it is helpful to have the following pieces:
- Management biographies with head shots - brevity is key – keep them under 250 words)
- Company history – one to two pages should suffice with a brief overview and chronology of significant milestones and achievements
- FAQ – Approximately 10 common or expected questions and answers about the company’s mission, operations, products, services and policies
- Logo and photos of facilities, products and employee culture
- Creating an online newsroom can be a great living, evolving resource for not just media looking to learn more about your company, but also for potential new customers, partners and vendors. If you have a newsroom, aim to have new entries several times a year, if not monthly. If your business doesn’t generate media coverage and you can’t compile news postings from staff, then it may not be worth maintaining the page.
- If an online newsroom isn’t practical, then creating a blog could be much more attainable and rewarding over the long-term. Having different voices from multiple departments can really showcase your own news, developments, best practices and thought leadership while portraying company culture.
- If you have an online newsroom or blog, then you want to drive people there whenever you publish news and content. Thus, choosing the right social media channels for your business to connect with your target audiences is all you need to be concerned with. If it’s three, two or just one social media platform, then that’s the right answer to meet your needs and priorities with the internal resources to monitor and manage them effectively.
- Social media marketing is a great equalizer across professional disciplines through its user-friendly templates and the tutorials and troubleshooting answers that are available through any simple search. Anyone can become familiar and comfortable with managing profiles with a bit of experimentation and trial and error to get the pages looking how you want it to reflect your brand, visual identity and voice.
- Don’t feel the peer pressure to tackle too many channels just for the sake of being there. It’s better to assess which one or two channels are the best place where you will find your customers and commit to your voice, style and frequency. Just like the online pressroom, if you find it is not sustainable to keep the channel in a high-quality state, then maybe social media involvement is not a productive fit at the time.
- Video is another important component to enhance your brand for customers and articulate your culture for prospective employees. Producing professional, polished videos generally falls into the purview of PR, but other departments can seize the task through easy-to-build channels on YouTube and Vimeo. Tech savvy staff may have some video editing experience or engage with an agency or vendor to provide the finished files. If you forgo the online pressroom, blog and social media channels altogether, adding a few compelling videos to your website about your company history, areas of expertise and employee culture will go a long way toward articulating your brand and speaking to your existing and prospective customers.
- A speaker’s bureau may seem like an archaic initiative, but the pandemic brought a new twist with the array of videoconferencing software providers that made external presentations more efficient by reducing travel time. This is an area that can be done in a periodic, ad hoc fashion where speaking and panel opportunities at conferences, business events and local associations can be researched for fit to submit proposals for company leaders.
- A community relations program is another meaningful, traditional way to grow your brand through employee volunteering, philanthropic giving and event sponsorships. Similar to the speaker’s bureau, this research and outreach doesn’t have to be very laborious; at the start of the year or quarter, look to identify key synergies with agencies that fit your company’s mission, community interests and compatibility.
If your company needs more PR attention and you can’t hire a dedicated PR director or an agency, then undertaking a few of these “pillar projects” can provide supplemental boosts to your brand and overall business goals, even as compiling definitive measurements of the efforts that go into producing these outcomes remains challenging. It’s a worthwhile endeavor to complete these types of assets as time and resources allow so your public image and media awareness isn’t neglected to a point where you have to essentially start over or re-invent your brand on some level.
Liam O’Mahony is a communications and marketing director with experience in professional sports, agency, local government, corporate, higher education and nonprofit. After working in New Hampshire, Chicago, Seattle and Phoenix, he returned to his native Western New York in 2012. Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/LiamTOMahony
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