5 ways small businesses can grow from good PR

Contrary to popular view, Public Relations (PR) is not about propaganda.

PR practice is about analysing trends, predicting their consequences, counselling organisation leaders, and implementing plans of action that will serve both the organisation’s and public’s interests.

For small businesses, PR offers plenty of opportunities to hit new growth levels. Here are five ways a small company can benefit from good PR.

1. Gets your business noticed

PR is a means through which a business interacts with existing and potential customers.

By employing good PR tactics, businesses can reap big rewards from the publicity they get through brand awareness and increased sales.

For a business looking to grow, ensuring you can keep in touch with your customers is critical. And when customers feel valued and well-treated, they’ll definitely tell others about you, thus helping your business achieve visibility at a lower cost when compared to using paid advertising.

2. Unlocks stakeholder support

By creating and maintaining favourable relations between a business and its stakeholders, an entrepreneur builds a community around the company.

This community of stakeholders, kept together through PR campaigns and projects, can contribute to the development of the business in many new ways by offering feedback, testing products and services, increasing referrals and so on.

This helps unlock their potential in contributing positively to business growth.

3. Helps with research and decision making

Successful businesses are anchored on strong and factual decision making. Through PR research, a business can analyse customer behaviour, and emerging trends and their consequences, and then use this information to make business-friendly decisions.

For instance, when you want to launch a new product, the different publics of the business are identified and the messaging tailored to suit their unique needs.

4. Maintains a motivated team

Within a business, PR has the function of keeping members of the team together and ensuring they’re motivated to deliver.

By coming up with initiatives that help build teamwork, leadership and responsibility, employees and directors can achieve work-life balance and collaborate more effectively in a way that enhances team spirit, job satisfaction and improves performance.

5. Achieves overall business strategy

Good PR is an enabler of many other aspects of running a business. From human resources, product development, sales and marketing to planning and administration, you can use PR to help you communicate and achieve the strategic goals of your business, regardless of its size.

PR helps to ensure stakeholders are engaged and kept abreast with the performance of the business; and that the company remains adaptable to changing trends.

Small business that have the intention to grow shouldn’t ignore the value of PR. It’ll help you understand your present business environment and help you plan for the future.

The writer is a PR and media practitioner.

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