Public Relations (PR) is an essential tool for businesses but why do SMEs need PR to compete with big brands?
No matter the industry, if you are a challenger brand looking to capture market share from household names; awareness, credibility and trust are key ingredients to driving your growth.
PR is a vital tool that can enable SMEs to compete against big brands and their equally sizeable marketing and advertising budgets.
Building awareness and trust:
If you are an SME operating in a category dominated by larger players, a lack of awareness is likely to be a key barrier to your growth. If your stakeholders don’t know who you are, they’re unlikely to trust you and therefore even more unlikely to do business with you. This trust obstacle is particularly pertinent for SMEs that are competing against big brands with long-established reputations.
Media publications have huge readerships so generating PR coverage is a highly effective tactic to getting your brand in front of a large audience, quickly. While national and mainstream media publications (both print and online) have the benefit of reaching a large audience, trade and regional publications shouldn’t be neglected. They can be useful channels to reach targeted audience groups and help you to deliver a more localised message to key areas.
As well as the awareness piece, generating ‘earned’ media coverage is also highly effective for building trust. Unlike an advertisement or a piece of content published on your ‘owned’ channels, the media choosing to write about your brand gives third-party validation which confers significant trust in your business. If you’re featured as an expert in a story or your product is reviewed in the press, audiences are much more likely to believe that you’re a credible alternative to the brands they know.
Developing a brand identity:
Developing your ‘brand’ as an SME is critical to building long-term relationships and connections with your audiences. Your brand is what potential customers, investors and partners buy in to and can set you apart from more recognisable competitors.
A well-constructed PR strategy will enable you to tell the story behind your business, educate audiences about what makes you different as well as helping you build credibility. This is critical when trying to capture market share from big brands that your audiences are already familiar with.
Complementing your wider marketing activity:
Investing in PR also has the potential to add value to your wider marketing mix. As an SME you are likely to be investing heavily in performance / digital marketing and trying to compete for non-branded keywords through channels such as SEO.
PR and SEO work hand-in-hand. Securing online media coverage means that your brand will dominate more of the ‘share-of-search’. Generating online media coverage can also improve the Domain Authority of your website and make it easier to rank for target keywords.
As PR builds your profile as a business, you are also likely to see an increase in ‘brand search’ a.k.a.: people visiting your website through directly searching for your brand. This heightened awareness can help reduce your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and make you less reliant upon paid channels.
A cost-effective form of marketing:
As an SME, you’re highly unlikely to have the same level of budgets available as your larger competitors. It’s vital to make every pound work. So, why would you invest in PR compared to other marketing channels?
One of the main benefits of PR for SMEs competing with big brands is its cost-effectiveness. Unlike traditional advertising that is becoming increasingly expensive (TV Ads can cost thousands of pounds), PR coverage is ‘earned’. This means that a PR team will use their skills and contacts to get journalists / influencers to write / post about your brand without money changing hands. Not only is this more trustworthy for your target audiences who see the final post / article, it’s also much more cost-effective for you.
A well-crafted PR story or campaign has the potential to feature across a range of different media publications. One campaign can go viral, and this can reach a huge audience organically. This coverage will often also remain online and is likely to appear when people search for your brand meaning that the benefit is longer-term rather than just a flash in the pan.
Conclusion:
PR is a highly effective tool for SMEs looking to compete with big brands. It enables you to build awareness at scale, generate trust from your key audiences and grow your business in a cost-effective way.
If you’d like to discuss how we could help your SME, why not get in touch today.