A good PR team is worth its weight in gold. By having an iron-clad PR strategy for any situation, your business will be able to overcome any adversity and come out of any situation with your reputation intact. There are many ways to improve your PR team, but the following tips are some of the sure-fire ways to ensure that your team is strong and ready for anything.
1. Define your strategy
This tip may seem like it goes without saying, but you’d be surprised at how many PR teams there are out there with no real idea of what their exact strategy is for any given situation. If you’re constantly putting out messages that aren’t focused, you may end up with conflicting ideas about your company drifting around, creating misconceptions.
For instance, misinformation led to the concept of the infinite banking scam, painting companies that use the infinite banking concept in a bad light and damaging their credibility, while in reality the concept is not a scam at all. Allowing false ideas about your company to be perpetuated can damage your credibility in the long run, so it’s best at the outset to have a crystal-clear strategy for your PR team.
2. Allow creative freedom
After the last tip, this concept may seem counter intuitive, but by giving your team more creative freedom, they’ll be strengthened far better than if you ruled with an iron fist over each and every decision they make. Being micromanaged will only stunt your team’s ability to come up with creative solutions to your problems, and may end up creating a lot of resentment down the road. Giving your PR team freedom will help to build trust down the road, and cultivating a good relationship with the team will help them get to know you better and give you much better results.
3. Build on positive results
Once a PR campaign has done its job well, it’s tempting to just sit back and let the results speak for themselves. But it’s vital to share these positive results internally, so that the next PR campaign can get the funds it needs to do even better work. Use these results to market yourself to customers, possible business partners, and anyone within your company that will be interested in the good press. Update your website to include the success, and consider sending out a newsletter to show everyone the good press and positive analytics that resulted from the campaign. Don’t let good PR go to waste!
4. Stay on trend
There are trends within the world of PR that are important to be aware of and to ensure that your own PR team is using, such as the use of visual aids to create a more compelling story. In a world that is increasingly moving online, it’s possible to save your company quite a bit of PR budgeting by making use of online platforms for a PR campaign, making it less necessary to use print media and easily automating a large part of the process.
5. Know your roles
In order for your PR team to be truly focused, it’s important that you first understand what your company’s brand is. This will make it easier to come up with a strategy for each aspect of your business, and assign each member of your PR team to a specific aspect. You may or may not need multiple people on each aspect, and knowing this will help you to decide how large your PR team needs to be. You may require copywriters or you may want to hire someone specifically for running social media, and you’ll only know what you need when you understand the roles required to successfully market your company.
By using these tips, you’ll already be on your way to creating a great PR team, or strengthening your existing one. PR is an incredibly important aspect of running a business, and by actively strengthening yours, you’ll be creating a stronger and better company as a whole.
