How Can Public Relations Help My Company?

by

chris tyril

At some point in every business manager, and owners career, it’s inevitable that they will ask themselves the same question. How can public relations help my company? The problem they encounter though is that there are in fact many answers, depending on the business genre of the firm.

In general terms though, it’s just very difficult to imagine any company that can’t benefit from public relations because no matter how bright the picture is now, things can always get better. So then what are public relations today, and how does it differ from the type of PR that a firm might have engaged in, say a couple of decades back?

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The answer to that question is of course there are several differences, but perhaps the most noteworthy is the role that the Internet plays in so much of a more savvy business operators PR. You see the Internet just offers far more avenues for accessing not just the public, but in the case of larger firms, their employees and affiliates as well.

Also the big catch phrase today in the world of today’s PR is search engine optimization, or what is more commonly referred to as SEO. It’s the means by which a business owner or manager can see whatever it is that they are trying to get before the public’s eyes, and ears positioned as close as possible to page #1 in the search engines.

Sound easy? Well it’s not, and the first indicator that can clue a person in as to how difficult effective SEO can be, is the actual number of factors that Google considers when determining where to place a website, or information product. Would you believe that there are over 100 separate factors that they examine both on and off site?

Still yet, another thing to consider is that some elements of PR SEO can in fact work against a company, if they are applied improperly. What this means is that if a person manages to learn a few basic SEO techniques, and doesn’t understand how they may be interconnected in some way to other as of yet learned SEO techniques, they can and often do in fact cause damage.

So yes the Internet does offer amazing opportunities to access potentially millions of new customers, or clients through effective PR, but at the same time it does mean that there are now hundreds of thousands if not millions of new competitors. Also the way that the search engines are set up and marketing statistics pan out, if you are stuck even as few as 15 to 20 pages back you can expect no more than crumbs.

The good news though, is that the lagging global economy has left the door wide open to more savvy entrepreneurs who know how to recognize an opportunity when they see one. You see, most firms are in fact cutting back on their online public relations funding now, which means less competition for those that do fund it, and remember that the benefits of online PR last for years.

Chris Tyrrell writes for the Message Merchants a public relations agency based in the Midlands UK.

Public Relations Nottingham

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