PR can help your and your business in many ways and in this article, we’ll focus on one of these advantages: brand visibility. In the realm of creating a convincing brand story for your business, terms like visibility, credibility, and awareness are thrown around and often used synonymously. For starters, let’s briefly look at the differences and connections between those.
▷Visibility, Credibility, Awareness 💬
If you start out with a brand narrative, it’s about your story, your background, just as much as your passion, values, personal interests and reasons for what you’re doing. All of this adds to the products and services you’re providing. Credibility comes into play, when you’re featured, when you receive testimonials, when you have publications and certificates and other credentials, which add a foundation to the claims you’re making. Now, how does visibility or awareness come into it? Visibility is essentially about exposure. We’ve established that being featured in the media can help you to be credible -- at the same time, it's putting you out there. You appear in articles, or radio, or TV, or any medium: you become visible. 👀
This visibility can then lead to brand awareness: if your story is convincing, in line, and coherent, people will recognise your brand; they become aware not only of your name, service or product, but of your values and backstory. In an article on how to gain brand awareness, Rebrandly specifically mentions consistent branding as one of the backbones.
Scott Levy argues in an Entrepreneur article that to achieve consistency, “you'll want to write down your brand objectives and consider your reasons behind building a brand” as well as “review the benefits and highlights of the products and/or services you offer, review what makes your business unique . . ., and think about your motives for being in business.” 👩💻
On a very basic level, just keep in mind how these phenomena are interconnected and how the effects and causes bounce off of each other. The subtext here is that successful PR work will involve a great deal of your personal brand and then work with, on top of, around, and in conjunction to your brand.
In general, you can check out here how PR can help boost your business. Through the multifaceted tools PR works with, it can specifically help you to increase visibility. This, however, only works if you have established your story and brand.
PR will not help you pull the strings out of the blue, it has to come from you, but what PR people can do is engage you and help you discover it. ✨✨✨
▷ Traditional PR and Digital PR 💬
In lines of what’s often called ‘traditional PR’, what PR will help you with is write product and press releases, assist you in pitching, producing content, and delivering this across different media, liaising with journalists and building connections. All of this, will give you exposure, and thus visibility.
More importantly, digital PR has taken a leap: the different media and channels involved offer new possibilities. It might sound obvious what digital PR is or does, but if you want to brush up on the basics, check out Digital Marketing Institute’s article on what digital PR involves. 📲
There is an abundance of new forms to distribute content that will show off your brand. From your social media channels to websites to video marketing. PR can help you boost your content, equip you with backlinks, and convey your business streamlined to your consistent brand. Three Girls Media also lists blogging and videos as a way to increase visibility here, and since what you’re reading right now, is a blog, I can vouch for this!
▷ Content Marketing 💬
Writing a blog or filming videos are also forms of content marketing that help you show off your expertise, rather than being overly promotional. Read more here on how content marketing can help you build your brand identity. This again, showcases the interconnectedness of these goals and phenomena we have to keep in mind. 🧠
As I said, social media is a big part of your brand, and if there’s one thing in the past years, that has become increasingly visible (pun intended) it’s that there’s no way around it. It has to be incorporated into your business if you’re planning on delivering a convincing online presence. For more detailed tips, go check out our blog here for ways social media can organically work together with your tech startup visibility. The brilliant thing is that these tips, obviously, are transferable to most other fields of business, too!
▷ Tweak the Angles 💬
On a more general level, the tasks this Council Post feature on Forbes lists as essential for increasing brand visibility are all part of what a PR team will assist you with: from considering, figuring out, and evaluating your target audience to conducting research. The article also exclaims: “Be bold”, “Make it Playful”, and if you’re running a business and your day, like the days of most people, has only 24 hours, you don’t want to spend countless nights figuring out how to frame your story or tweak your angles to make your brand more bold or playful. PR, in turn, can easily assist you with this. 📝
In summary, let’s borrow the words from Talent Edge here: “Align PR strategy with the brand strategy to gain the maximum traction.” This is, essentially, what we’re talking about. The interconnectedness of the brand goals you are trying to achieve - visibility, credibility, awareness - all meet in the nexus of possibilities PR can assist you with. 🎆🎆🎆
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About the Author
Sarah is a PR assistant at GuidedPR. She holds a BA hons in English and Comparative Literature and has just moved to London to start her MA in Modern Literature and Culture at King's College London. She's usually busy writing and consuming caffeine. ☕☕☕
Find her on Linkedin here.
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