When and how to use public relations

Public relations is such a flexible communications tool that it can be used as part of almost any marketing strategy. However, it is a discipline that relies on having an interesting story to tell about your product or service. The more interesting it is, the more you can expect journalists to write about it, key opinion leaders to want to have an opinion about it, and consumers to want to know about it.

If your product or service isn't inherently interesting (plenty of good products aren't), then you'll need to spend more on your public relations to make it so. If you don't, your PR efforts will fail. It really is as simple as that.

A couple of examples to illustrate the point. Let's say your company has just launched a brand new product. It's the first of a kind. It could be used by millions. It'll save people lots of time and money. That's a story. In this case, a well-crafted press release might be all you need to generate media coverage worth hundreds of thousands.

But most of us don't have the luxury of such a big story to tell. Most of us are marketing something which has either existed for a long time, or isn't hugely different from something else which has existed for a long time. Take condoms for example. Been around since 1564. There are lots of different brands. They all do the essentially the same thing, and have been for over 400 years. Now, say you're a condom manufacturer and you want to increase sales with PR. The question is how? It's very unlikely that a press release explaining the merits of your condoms will have any take up at all. What you need is a story.

Here, Trojan condoms have been kind enough to give us an excellent case study (see the consulttheguru.com marketing blog). They hired a good PR agency and gave 60,000 free condoms to Sussex's taxi drivers, so that they in turn could offer them to people returning home late at night. Now there's a story. Nobody's done it before. It raises all sorts of discussion points. In short, it's news. As a bonus, it's also an example of public relations serving two purposes: increasing sales and doing some social good.

There's another important point to make about PR. Most people think of it as a tool primarily for generating offline media coverage. In that sense, it's sometimes seen as an alternative to traditional advertising (and advertising offers guaranteed space in a publication, where there's never any guarantee of that with PR).

Online, however, it's a very different story. Online, advertisers have essentially just one choice: banner advertising. There are two problems with banner advertising. Firstly, they are by definition limited in size and 'presence'. You just can't create the same impact with a banner as you could with a page in a tabloid newspaper. Secondly, there is growing evidence that the more time we spend on the Internet (and we all are), the more we condition our brains to ignore banner ads, and indeed any other extraneous information that we aren't looking for. PR, on the other hand, integrates your message right where it needs to be: within the actual text of the information the reader is looking for.

With that in mind, here are a few examples of when and how to use public relations. This list is by no means exhaustive:

To launch and establish sales of a new product or service.
To maintain awareness about and drive sales of an established product or service.
To directly increase traffic to a website and drive online sales.
To increase a website's search engine rankings.
To get key opinion leaders to influence others about your product.
To get distributors or retailers to influence others about your product.
To secure more favourable terms from your suppliers.
To minimise the impact of a crisis relating to your product or service.

By generating editorial coverage in the traditional trade or consumer media.
By generating coverage in the online trade or consumer media.
By placing advertorials (paid for editorial), in the trade or consumer media.
By hosting or sponsoring an event.
By carrying out a public stunt or guerrilla marketing.
By sending a direct mail piece.
By contributing to online discussion e-mail groups.
By triggering word of mouth discussion, on or offline.

Those are just a few of the ways that you can communicate your message using PR. There are many others. And by necessity, we can only describe the 'hows' we've listed in very broad terms. The million dollar questions are: "What initiative will generate media coverage for my product, on my budget?", "What event can my company host or sponsor on our budget?", "What can we do to trigger word of mouth discussion?", and "What mailshot can we send that people will open and respond to?".

These are questions that are so specific to your product or service that they can only be answered individually. And the quickest and most cost-effective way to do that is to ask consulttheguru.com.

Last updated: February 2007

Related public relations idea guides and resources:

• What is public relations?
• Choosing a PR agency
• Writing a press release
• Targeting press releases
• Sending press releases
• Ringing journalists
• Measuring and evaluating PR
• Consultheguru for a PR idea for your business