Traditionally, PR hasn’t been thought of as a primary lead generation tool. It’s long been about building relationships and influencing audiences to take action. However, it’s exactly that that can make PR a great tool to support your business’ lead generation efforts. It builds credibility and, ultimately, trust.
Lead generation isn’t the only thing PR has to offer – remember, it’s about long-term reputation management – but, when combined with your wider marketing strategy, it can be a key benefit.
How can PR help to generate leads?
PR has a range of benefits for brands looking to grow – no matter what size they are right now. We’ve listed the main benefits from a lead generation perspective below:
1. Brand awareness
Firstly – and arguably most importantly – PR generates wider brand awareness. It puts your business in front of a whole new audience, which is specifically targeted based on the product or service you offer and the problem it solves.
Although not explicitly a lead generation tool, brand awareness puts your business ‘on the radar’ of more people – and the more people that know you, the more that will like you and the more that will trust you. It’s that final emotion that influences purchasing decisions.
2. Building brand personality
Ultimately, people buy from people. The more personality your brand projects, the more people will connect with you on an emotional level – and social media can be an excellent tool for this.
By sharing photos from team awaydays, employee anniversaries and achievements or your office on Christmas Jumper day, you can begin to build a ‘real’ picture of your business ‘behind the scenes’. This showcases the people behind your brand – the people who will be interacting with your customers and ultimately shaping their experience with you.
Over time, that social proof can begin to build trust – as well as personality – as people begin to buy into the brand they’re following.
3. Be visual
At Kinetic, we appreciate a well-crafted sentence and never minimise the value of innovative content. The importance of social content’s visual design, however, cannot be understated.
Your brand’s aesthetic presence is crucial in everything from captivating photos and educational infographics to engaging video, a medium that is only expanding in the wake of TikTok’s success.
4. Making your content work harder
PR should be an integrated effort – across your owned, earned and paid media. When done properly, PR maximises every piece of your content, repurposing it for different media channels and audiences.
Consider the time you invest in creating a piece of content. Why limit the potential results that it can bring? PR stretches your content to get the most from every piece. That means there’s more opportunity for your audience to see and engage with this, increasing the opportunity for building trust and, eventually, leads.
5. Compelling content with strong call to actions (CTAs)
A lot of PR is about content. That content should be supported with appropriate call to actions (CTAs) – to drive audience action. Whether that’s about booking onto a webinar, signing up to a newsletter or getting in touch, for example, CTAs are mostly orientated around getting more information about your audience.
The more you know about them and what they’re interested in, the more you can tailor your content to better engage them.
It’s important to remember that PR isn’t a lead generation ‘tap’. It’s not about ‘switching it on and off’ to control lead flow into your business. PR is a long-term strategy to building business reputation and trust. It’s that reputation and trust that draws people towards your business.
It’s not about being pushy or product focused. It’s about building authority and credibility. That can take time.
For more information, or to understand how PR can influence lead generation in your business, get in touch by filling out the form below.
