Rules which help Startups in taking PR Services

Once you are ready with the product and you are all set to announce your brand's name in the market then you are left with two options either do it all on your own or work with a PR agency, because you are the one who is responsible to decide the best way to get the maximum value.

Observations have discovered that every 91 out of 100 startups fail to foster a strong public and media relation which eventually leads to the early downfall. Many startups rely on digital advertising and marketing campaign because they don’t really understand the importance of public relations. PR can have a significant impact on building image, awareness, and understanding of a company or a brand.

Al Reis, author of ‘The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding’, talks about the anomalous position in marketing that Public Relations hold for building a quintessential brand.  He believes that earned publicity creates an honest brand image than advertising. What general public states about your brand and business is a big matter of concern than what you state about yourself through advertising.

Subsequently, what companies truly require now could be a solid brand presence along with the sale deals. For this, a lot of startups club, public relations and other marketing techniques altogether assist to earn status and generate great revenue.

You may opt for professional PR services or can take up the charge to manage public relations on your own. In the latter case, following tips will surely assist you for a great deal:

•    Prepare content for coverage

Be it a press release, article or a startup story, it should convey the details and justify the purpose of business’s existence and the passion of its workforce.  It is important to understand the pain of your customers and decipher how your products are going to help them. Write it all with passion, can also write content on the social media topics that they care about. And then, you may proceed to pitch the journalists for covering your story. Use tools and software to connect to the right journalists.

•    Create a media list

When you are done with the content for release, it’s time to look for the right media influencers and journalists for earning the coverage. Get the contact details of the journalists, read their writing, identify their interest areas and proficiency and organize them comprehensively in a list. On the basis of the context, you can approach a journalist for coverage with a creative and appealing pitch.

•    Pitch the right way

It is important to know who you are pitching. You need to put effort, but unfortunately, most pitches are done blindly, with zero research. So, read cautiously what your target recently wrote and make sure to include a little detail relating to that, as it helps to build a relationship immediately. It takes just a few minutes to get acquainted with your target’s earlier work, and it significantly increases the chance of them not only reading your pitch but also actually responding. 

•    Foster relations with public

It is crucial to start engaging and interacting with Media a little early and understand journalists’ needs, what they write about and should respect the deadlines but don’t waste their time. Don’t approach them suddenly saying, “I have a fresh story which will intrigue your audience or can you please cover my launch event because it was amazing?” Such poor approach will leave journalist with a not-so-good impression. Therefore, it’s important that you maintain rapport and not just be coverage-centric.

To get exposure and coverage, make sure that you work hard on all of the above strategies.

Role of Social Media in new PR outlook

Social media, once a newbie in the PR world has now overtaken the overall industry by storm. And similar to any hyperactive teenager, social media is moving ahead with pace, continually picking up skills and even skinning off its knees occasionally with some trouble technologies. But PR agencies must be vigilant and look out for the new opportunities to explore and the dangers to avoid with the continually transforming social media universe.

As per the statistics, 49 percent of today’s customers are depending upon the influencers’ recommendation to make their next purchase. This attitude of the consumers clearly explains why social media and influencer marketing program which were earlier considered an add-on feature have now become one of the most important tool of the PR Agencies.  It’s power to be a part of the PR mix stems out from its tendency of spreading amongst the audience. Messages spread through social media as quick as the meteors flying through the space.  There is nothing to stop them; they reach hue masses, often new and unintended audiences with an immediate effect.

Like said earlier, it has all grown up with time, the social media portals which earlier served like a place for friends to gather and share things of their interest is now an immense marketplace where businesses interact with customers, market their products and promote their brands.  CRM, advertising, growing databases and word of mouth or third-party endorsement are some of the exquisite features offered by social media. But while spreading the word through social media channels make it a point to align them with the PR pitches and other marketing efforts to ensure no conflicting information reaches the targeted audience.

Let’s talk about some prominent social media portals of today’s business that can help in your business’s digital PR campaign extensively:

Facebook is the most popular player in the game with strength of around two billion users. It can deliver extraordinary results with the exciting features of short video content, going live, or post personable videos and images. As a whole it works as a great advertising platform to reach highly targeted individuals both on its site and on other sites as well as part of its audience network.

For an eye-catching or visually captivating product, Instagram is the right choice. Unlike Facebook, the users get attracted more with the catchy images than from the catchy copies as here it is the image that they see first and text later on. Use it to create visual stories and showcase live events.

Twitter is another significant medium for driving traffic to your website.  As per the global figures, 47 percent of people visiting a Twitter profile also have a look at the website linked to it. Other than connecting with the prospective online communities, Twitter also works well for customer service opportunities and event engagements.

Another in the crowd of Social media businesses’ is Snapchat. But unlike its other counterparts, Snapchat connects well with the Gen-X. While small businesses might find it difficult to make it big with this tool, but the larger brands can leverage their advertising strategies and reach out to the younger demographics with much ease.

In the coming years, social media will witness consumer demanding the higher level of customer service along with a quick response. The number of phone users will also boost and surpass the five billion mark by 2019. Keeping both the predictions in mind PR service providers along Delhi & NCR need to transform their strategies and be ready to create more engaging and relatable content for the audience.

How to get organic reach on social media—Tips from Social Media Companies in Delhi

The content has zero shares, zero likes, and zero comments—the story of every social media marketer! No matter how engaging and spectacular content you post; there is only 0.1 percent chance of it being shared over 100 times. And, the ever-changing policies of social media platforms leave you no more prospects of getting organic reach for any of your posts, especially on commercial searches. In the opinion of the majority of social media companies in Delhi, attracting users becomes easier with paid campaigns, but equally tough with basic posts. And, even if you attract users, encouraging them to take actions such as like, share, and comment is no less than a Herculean task.

It might be Herculean, but not an impossible task you would say! Well, social media experts in Delhi are paid heavy compensation for some real reason. Here we’ve jotted down top 10 tips following which you can obtain maximum organic reach. Let’s dive straight in:

1.    Produce fresh content every day and skillfully share it on social media. That means you should map out the right time to post, relevant hashtags, and a right way to boost the post.

2.    Optimize all your social media accounts every day as a ritual. Every SMO agency in Delhi regularly does networking, create posts, and add new connections for their clients. That’s the key to their success.

3.    Tag your visitors through cookies to build a large base of remarketing audience. Try it once and remarketing would never disappoint you.

4.    Choose your audience wisely. Before even setting your social media accounts, you should clearly identify who should be your target audience and how you will be reaching them. If they are students, then what should be the ideal age group, where should they belong, which courses would they pursue, what sort of posts interest them, etc. When you know this well, you must start building a focused audience.

5.    The firms which offer social media services in Delhi have graphic designers and video animators right by their side. This is so because people are bored with same ordinary text posts and monotonous graphics. To spice up the content, agencies prepare compelling creatives and engaging videos to attract the users.

6.    Social media services are seldom limited to social media giants. You are not required to post only on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Instead, the platforms like Reddit, Medium, Digg etc., are also useful in driving more traffic to your social media account and website.

6 Ways to Prevent and Control PR Crisis

Every brand wants to have a decent image in the market and does not want to deal with bad press, but we cannot stop the negative feedback from coming. It might be a disappointed customer grumbling about social media or a review website, or an argumentative worker accusing the company of a perceived injustice. These problems can easily burst out into a full-blown public relations crisis.

Each crisis might come as a surprise, but it is important for you to be ever ready. Every organization has a crisis management plan in place that involves every aspect of the organization—including HR, legal and technical. That strategy should also include media training for executives, pre-approved responses for public relations and social media.

Follow these 6 Guidelines if you want to stop a massive PR crisis before it happens.

1. Implementation Procedures:

It is crucial to generating idea before implementation. As we know that planning is such an important part of public relation so, it is useful to understand the different requirement of an event or campaign before implementing and executing it. Rustling into execution without proper planning can lead to failure.

2. Use Your Social Media Channels Efficiently

“An immediate social media response is key,” says Chris Britton

Social media can be your ally, allowing you to quickly disseminate information and bridge the gap between you and your client. It is essential for an organization to dedicate resources in monitoring social media 24/7, as well as a team to handle, monitor, review and follow activity on social channels without waiting for approval from on high.

3. Anticipate Every Possible Crisis

You can't stop a Public Relations crisis, but you can stop it from accelerating there are ways to prevent the situation. It is again crucial to get your plans in order, during the pre-phase, you should anticipate every possible crisis that could possibly harm the company's status and always have this two-word question in the back of your head: "What if?"

4. Follow a Crisis Communications

An organization should ensure, via appropriate policies and training that only authorized spokespersons to speak for it. This is particularly important during a crisis. It’s critical for every crisis communications team to have pre-screened and trained, to be the lead and/or backup spokespersons for different channels of communications.

5. Create a Diverse Workforce

Treat everyone equally like a family and also be objective, unbiased and humble. Put in all your knowledge and effort to get the best result.

6. Stay Calm and Flexible When Things Go Wrong

Don’t panic and always be ready to face the challenges. Learn to fail means learn to understand your mistakes and in every mistake, there is a chance of progress. So, whenever there is a crisis situation you need to identify what actions should be taken and accordingly you should work.

How to Use PR in the Sales Process?

The foremost objective of any enterprise is to convert the sales lead into returns in the least possible time which is not only crucial but is making the enterprises growth sustainable as well. Sales and marketing team has a substantial influence on the profitability of the business, but it usually does not happen to sales and marketing teams to incorporate public relations activities into the sales process. PR can be considered as a constructive tool to speed up the probabilities of closing sales which is a rare scenario and does not occur.

So, here are a few guidelines that my PR agency employs to raise the sales success for our clients -- and ourselves.

Persistence is the key to efficiency.

It is important to track the number of contacts it takes (specifically and on average) to close a deal.  You are required to be calm and should have patience; you cannot expect a response from just one email, context plus knowledge-based interactions, along with traditional hard sales tools, works here rather than a hit and run practices.

Before putting up anything it is essential to identify the audience and their interests, level of understanding, attitudes, and beliefs. Taking customer-centered approach is important because they are the skeptic people and they analyze, compare and evaluate things before getting into it. It is significant to have skilled PR professionals.

The PR industry is one of advancement, where new ideas are embraced and creativity is commended. It generates strategies which promote your client requires original thinking and inventiveness. Hence, creativity skills are therefore an essential skill for any PR practitioner. Digital skills are becoming progressively more important. Having a basic knowledge of social media, SEO and digital content creation can make you stand out from the pack. As the scope of PR widens, the industry is beginning to use the tools of other communications fields. In order to smoothly transition into the future, practitioners must be able and willing to develop these new skills and understand the relevant lingo. Act as a proactive information resource to raise your organization’s stature in the industry.

Proactivity is fundamental

Changing perspective and becoming proactive in approach requires anticipation of the future. We don’t just sit back and wait for our target customers to beat a path to our doors. We share the news we examine the surroundings in order to understand the challenges that are ahead and in a best possible way to create the promotional tactics required to succeed. Proactive public relations means defining the objectives identify the target audience early and establish the most effective ways to reach them. A proactive approach gives an organization more control over their public relations planning and enables them to set the agenda. They decide how best to present the image of the company.

Action, action and more action, communicate through the channels you already selected, make sure you monitor the media on a regular basis, ask people from the community about their thoughts about the organization. Hence, we take full benefit of social media. In fact, this is why it’s essential to keep your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social networking sites current. Eventually, this not only turns those interested into followers but also drives traffic to your website and makes you a go-to resource for industry buzz.