Good day. Welcome back to another episode of becoming your own PR machine. My name is Trevor Young, aka the PR Warrior, and it's great to have at your company for this episode. This episode number 6 is why business owners need to understand PR. Now I think PR has got, you know, is so important for your business.

So so so very important. And you're probably doing a lot of good stuff in a PR sense anyway. But given that this podcast is a lot about busting myths of PR and and trying to extend and broaden our thinking as to what public relations is and how it can help us, our personal brand, our business brand, or our nonprofit brand, if that is the, the area in which the sandpit in which we play. So why is PR more important than ever before? Well, I think you've got to work.

We're living in an information overloaded period of time. It's hard to cut through. And, that is a big challenge for for any business, large or small, but particularly small. You know, you don't have deep pockets necessarily to advertise and nor do you want people want to hear your ads, see your ads. We're shunning advertising and promotional chest beating, more than ever before.

You know, so many people are even on their phones, making sure that they don't get ads. They've got ad blockers, and we're getting very good at subscribing to, you know, to newsletters and to podcasts and media outlets where we're not bombarded necessarily by advertising. So we do go out of our way to avoid it. But we've but then how do we, as business owners, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, get word out about our business? How do we communicate with, our prospective clients, our current clients, and anyone else who's important, to the success of our business, well, that's where public relations steps in.

It's not a campaign. It's a 365 days of the year. It's a programme that just keeps on running. It's part of, that should be part of your DNA of your business when done well. Also, people value people.

You know, we've we're we're living now. We're in a in an era where AI is becoming so advanced. We've got deep fakes. We've got robots doing everything, even, you know, customer service. People don't know if they're talking to a robot.

They probably are half the time and maybe not even know it. So, you know, we we are going to start valuing people more than ever before. And when you look at your own people as well, if you're employing people or you've got, you know, people working for you and their frontline staff, they're the ones dealing with, your customers, your clients, the public, and people are your true advantage. Even people in the back room that your clients or customers don't see, They're your true advantage in the marketplace. They are what make you unique.

You know, you can you can do all you like with your your branding and your logos and we're different and blah blah blah. But at the end of the day is a lot of businesses, are quite commodified. Sure, the the way you do it might be different than the next than the next company, but it but from a client's perspective, maybe not necessarily. There might not be much difference between, you know, your business and your competitors, save for they just get a better feeling for you. They like you.

They they, you know, know your people. They get a better feeling. There's an emotional connection. And so, again, these are all things that PR can do. So remember and, you know, this is I'm banging on about this again and again and again and again.

PR is not just about getting ink, generating editorial exposure for you, your personal brand, your business brand. It might become important at some times. At some point, I think it really will. But it's only just one part of the PR and communications mix. It's not the whole enchilada.

Let's say it's the cheese. It's the salsa, but it's not the entire enchilada meal. So with this in mind, what can PR do for your business? Because, you know, as a business owner, you wanna know what can PR do for my business before you start investing too much time in understanding it, from, you know, becoming au fait with PR, what it does, and starting to learn the ropes, of it. And, again, you are probably doing some really good PR stuff anyway, but probably just not necessarily strategically.

And are you doing the right things, that are going to work for your biz business? So, PR for me, my definition is public relations is all about deepening the level of connection with the people who matter the most to the success of your business, your cause, or your issue if you're going down that path. Now this could be your clients and customers. It could be the people who influence them. Yes.

It could be the media. It could be, you know, your local government council. It could be your your people, your biz your partners. If you're in the finance game, a public company, it's definitely gonna be, the finance community. So, you know, that's all about audience mapping, and we'll we'll spend probably a whole episode on that, I think, because it's important to to dig down into those audiences.

So let's look at the sorts of things that PR when done with, I like to say, passion with purpose and strategic intent. What can it do to help your business, to help grow your business and build your brand? Well, at the the very least at the very least, and this is probably the most critical, It's about getting more people to know you, like you, trust you. We hear know, like, and trust ad nauseam. I'll add respect in there.

So to get people to know you, like you, trust you, respect you, front of mind, you know, it's I said at the outset, it's it's a noisy information overloaded world. People, haven't got time to, you know, sit down and and wade through all all the material and the content that's out there. So how do you stay top of mind? How do you stay front of mind? They might already know you.

They know and it's not just about knowing you from a brand awareness point of view. It's knowing and recognizing you for who you are, what you do, what you stand for. So knowing you with more depth, because of that, they like you because the way you do business and how you've demonstrated publicly, how you go about doing things. Trust is, you know, fronting up and do doing what you say you're gonna do is is the, the trust equation, and trust is our social currency. And it permeates everything we do online, but particularly everything we do in a PR sense helps to build trust.

Front of mind, though, top of mind, you know, because someone might know your brand. They may have seen you, heard of you, but just you're not top of mind when they need whatever it is that you offer your product or service. So front of mind, and I think being talked about in a positive way in the marketplace is very important. That's social currency. Now on on the media relations side, that could be talked about by, you know, you might be on the local radio or on a community TV station or in someone's newsletter, or people are talking about you on social media, or, you know, you you, you you give a talk at a meetup or an event, and people are talking about how great that was.

It's all about people talking about you, for all the right reasons, not necessarily the wrong reasons. And, of course, these are getting more people to know, like, trust, respect. A friend of mine talked about these are all forerunners to, a commercial transaction. These are things that, you know, it's part of the the the customer buying or the client, purchasing journey. So what PR really is good at doing is massaging the market.

I've used that phrase for about 30 years, massaging the market, particularly when you got a, you know, a new product coming up, you massage the market before you launch the product. And PR is very, very good at doing that. And what it does is it paves the way for for the marketing and sales, people to go and do their things. Basically, it makes your marketing promotions, you know, that harder edge promotional aspect to your business. It it it paves the way and makes marketing promotions work harder.

And particularly if you're gonna spend a lot of money to get in front of people to pitch them, to sell them, then you want those activities, that advertising and sales, marketing activity to work a lot harder for for the dollars that you got and the efforts you're gonna put into it. If your PR program is strong, if it's well run, it's strategic, it's ongoing, there might not be any need to pay for advertising. You know, this is not anti advertising. Advertising has a role, but I think advertising works much harder when PR has done the heavy lifting and helped pave the way. They work hand in hand with each other.

But, you know, there's a lot of small businesses who would who never would not necessarily wouldn't never, but never have to never have to, spend money on advertising and rent someone else's audience to to reach new people, because they don't need to because they've got enough business, because everything else they're doing in a in a PR and communication sense. With PR content, digital communications, it's all working really nicely for them. So, you know, if you do it well, you might not need to do advertising. But if you do do advertising, PR will make those ad dollars work harder. And, I like to say think credibility before conversion, You know, particularly if you're in a b to b or, in the b to b business to business arena or even business to consumer, And the path to purchase might be a little bit long and convoluted and and maybe it's, you know, it's not an impulse buy, but, you sell a product or service that might take a little bit of time before people get their head around it or might be reasonably expensive and people are going to do their homework, you know, they're going to do their homework, before they come to you, then the the great thing there is that, you know, you need credibility.

Trust and credibility is so important. And then that's needed demonstratively. Is that right? That needs to be demonstrated that credibility, and people need to trust you, before, you, convert them into a sale. What it really also does, though, this is continuing on the vein of what PR can do for your business.

It can help you build relationships with your, with your clients and customers. Now that's current clients, as well as prospective clients, plus the people who have, the power or the potential to influence them. So if you're really being strategic about it, when you're thinking about your audiences, these are my clients and customers. These are my current clients. These are my potential customers.

And who are the people who influence them? Because maybe you need to communicate with them as well. The other thing is to, you know, what we wanna be doing is deepening the level of connection you have with your team members, your staff, your, partners, any collaborators you've got, and also potential employees if you're going down the path of employing people. Now not everyone's going to be employing people. You might wanna be a solopreneur and run a very thriving one person business, one person practice, with a little bit of virtual help as you grow.

But, you know, I work with people who are employing and, always on the lookout for good staff. And, you know, we're currently I don't know if you hear this in 5 years' time whether it'll be the case, but currently, I do know, that there is a war for talent. And as we know, post COVID, people have been changing jobs and moving around and and, you know, ditching their current profession and moving into other areas, and starting their own businesses as well. So, you know, you want to become seen as an employer of choice and that will help you get and recruit and retain the right employees, which is very, very important. So let's just break things down a little bit more than that.

They're in broad sense what PR, a good public relations, program will do for you. But let's just probably go take it a cut cut or 2 deeper. So we've talked about, you know, getting people to know you know you for all the right reasons. So brand awareness and marketplace visibility is really, really important. But it's not just sticking a logo up on a wall and people are recognising that brand.

But as I said, recognising you as the as the leader and the owner of the business, knowing people within the business, just helping raise awareness of your business generally, but also your products and services and what you're good at doing. What you what are you a a genuine expert in your space? You know? So when we talk about marketplace visibility, it's visibility for the right reasons. It's, you know, you're visible as a thought leader.

You're visible as an expert in your space. You're you're visible because you have this great product that you've created, or service that no one else does, but people need to be educated on it. So brand awareness, marketplace visibility, but also understanding that people might not might not know too much about your product or service. So how can you help them understand that without beating them over the head about it? And this is, again, where the where the the smarts, the PR smarts come in.

How can you educate people? How can you get them to listen to you? And in in turn, they will learn your story. And and, you know, this becomes a vehicle for your for your messaging down the track or ongoing as it as it turns out. So, you know, if you're looking particularly if you're looking to start in a business from scratch, then this market place visibility is crucial.

If you've been around a while, if you have a physical presence, and, you know, you're in in a main street and you have a shop front of sorts and signage, well, that helps with some visibility. But I'm talking about people are often starting businesses. They're new in their business. How do they get word out about their business in a way that's respectful for the audience, but also does the job of educating, your, you know, your, potential clients and customers and also helps you, stand above others in your space if you have got, competitors in what it whatever it is you do. I did touch on credibility and trust.

I cannot overemphasise this, enough. You know, people want to do business with credible, trustworthy, genuine, authentic people. All of these things form starting to come into reputation. You know, what what what are the relationships you've got with people? Is your story and message resonating with people?

Are you relevant? You know, these are things that, you know, help go towards building a reputation over an extended period of time, a positive reputation. Now sometimes the media can help that, and sometimes it's people talking about you. It's other times, it's people hearing you speak at a conference. It's about reading, your blogs maybe or, watching you what what you do on social media.

It might be they listen to a podcast or look at your YouTube videos. All of these things, all of these touch points build credibility. And when they finally get you to meet you, they may have been watching your videos for a long time, then they finally get to meet you at an event or they pop into your office and say hello. And, what they see is what they've what they've got, what they've seen elsewhere. There's no disconnect between, the the you in content and the you face to face having a coffee with them.

So credibility and trust are a one critical, and we will be banging that drum again and again and again, different ways of how we can actually go about doing that in a strategic and smart sustainable way. The other thing is, you know, hand in hand hand in glove hand in hand with the, with the whole notion of building that credibility and trust For some people, particularly in in services or expertise based businesses, you know, a lot of you are out there are in the knowledge knowledge business, and service, business. Then your what your, experience, your expertise, your skill sets, your IP, your the frameworks, the IP frameworks you have, and that you use, the way you go about doing things, your wisdom. I mean, all of that is wrapped up and to help build that, that, you know, strong expert profile and reputation, both individually. It's always gonna be individually, but, also, you know, there's a trickle effect into your business brand as well.

Again, if you are running a business and employing people, like a law firm or an accountancy firm or a management consultancy, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But for some of you, building a thought leadership, carving out and building a thought leadership positioning in the marketplace might be the strategy, a strategy worth employing that that lifts you up above everyone else. Yes, there are plenty of experts out there, domain experts, but people gravitate to thought leaders and thought leaders are often experts in their own right, but they don't they can join dots. They can get you thinking about different topics. They can change the way you think about a particular issue.

They can change you with your their ideas. So that's what people gravitate to true thought leaders, because they're what they're saying is newsworthy. It's interesting, etcetera, etcetera. But also you need to be demonstrating expertise, domain expertise as well. So, again, we we do cover often on this podcast and, we'll come back to it again and again, expert versus a thought leader and the difference.

But chances are, you know, if you are in the service based business, then, you know, you you're working in the knowledge economy, the expertise economy, then then, you're in a great position to build yourself up as a genuine bonafide thought leader in a really genuine and authentic way. And, that will also have help when you go to get some, ink. If you wanted to go down the media relations path or do guest posts for other people's blogs or, maybe pitch yourself as someone who's got a great, an opinion piece for industry trade journal or become a guest on other people's podcasts, or even go on to radio. Go on to radio and discuss a topical, you know, issue that's pounding away in in the marketplace at the as we speak, then all of these things help potentially build you as certainly as a credible expert and a potentially a thought leader in the marketplace. And then we have things like community engagement.

This means that, you know, a lot of times we talk about being building our own community, but we're not part of anyone else's community. And I think we have our own community where we're based, But some people are running virtual businesses and they, you know, they operate remotely and their community is all online. But are you part of other people's communities, And how can you engage others in in other in your local community or in a in a broader, online community as well? And often in PR, PR is is hand in glove with crisis and issues management. For a lot of small businesses, this is not an issue, but it can become an issue.

As we know when something, when the brown stuff hits the fan and something happens, from a business's perspective, the, you know, the owner or someone in the business says or does the wrong thing on social media, that can blow up really, really quickly. My stance on this, I don't get too involved in this. And and, you know, you have people who just deal with crisis and issues management in big organizations and big companies, and that, you know, that's they've got to be across so many more touch points. My thinking on crisis and issues management is, yes, always be aware of issues before they become crisis. A crisis is an issue that's got out of control, And a lot of times things can be seen in advance.

So there are people that do that. I mean, common sense comes into play here. But if you build a brand that's known like trusted friend of mine talked about positively, all of that thing, it's a great brand. You're you fronted as a great leader. You're very PR minded.

You have a PR mindset. You're always out there communicating with people and getting on the front foot and and, adding delivering value and without the expectation of getting anything in return, all of this is great PR stuff, then, you know, if something does go wrong and you get on the front foot anyway and you have already an audience and you have the channels to get out and put your side of the story in, then often you might be able to quell the the the crisis before it well, quell the issue before it even gets to a crisis. A lot of big brands and big companies still haven't got this together because they're not great at communicating. Their leaders are sitting in ivory towers and they're faceless. And that's why we do see a lot of these, crisis and and and issues blow up, very quickly.

And if they've they're companies that people don't like, like banks and telcos and sometimes airlines, there's always a lot of negativity around those sorts of brands. Then when they do get into trouble and there is a a big issue and because they're so big, there will always be issues, then it just becomes mountainous. It just becomes huge and and it's like a runaway train. So, again, part of being a PR, minded person, having a PR mindset is to understand, that that there are issues involved in running a business, particularly around how you're dealing with clients or maybe there's, you know, default with your product or, you know, there might be a an issue, a social issue you take a stand on and other people don't like that. All of these things, common sense prevails in all of that.

But again, if you're an open, and transparent communicator, you lead from the front, you have built an audience, you've got, you know, part of that audience, advocates and champions and enthusiasts enthusiasts of you and your brand. Then you're going to be in a better position to to ride out those storms. So, I think we might target, that particular crisis and issues management topic down the track, but I just did wanna tick it off because it is, something that PR people do get involved with quite often. So in short, PR encompasses so many different things, such a wide range of activities, and they're aimed at building and maintaining, as it says, what's in the tin? Public relations, building positive relationships with with the people who matter the most of the success of your business, and they could be multiple, types of different types of audiences there.

It's about managing perceptions in a genuine and authentic way. It's about effectively communicating messages to all your stakeholders, including your clients and your customers and the people who who influence them. And if you're a part of a bigger organization, then obviously internal as well. And so they're all the things that that, come with being running a good business, and they're all things that PR does and helps you with. So that's why PR, public relations, is so important for anyone running their own business, whether they are they are a solopreneur and running a thriving one person practice or you're running a growing business and employing people, the same, in air quotes, rules apply.

So the the the communications activities, I'll just touch finish on this bit, the communications activities that underpin, your overall PR efforts because comms is is sort of underpins everything that you do. They need to be multichannel, genuine, authentic, fronted by people, not robots, and they need to be ongoing. This is a 365 year, 365 days of the year, exercise. It's an ongoing exercise, and we're building assets and reputation along the way. So in the next episode, we're going to dig into the tactics that are often used, within a PR remit and there are a lot of those.

So strap yourself in and it will be interesting to see how many people out there, how many of you employ, the tactics that we're going to discuss. So we're gonna really rip it all apart and get really, in the weeds with the tactics next week. And, and some of those tactics we will explore even in greater detail further into the podcast, But, I'm building this up slowly, giving you all the foundational, things to think about in a PR sense. This is episode number 6. Now if you like what we talk about here, you might be interested in, in subscribing to our newsletter.

It's funnily enough called become your own PR machine. It's the it's the, newsletter bookend to this podcast. Subscribe and receive top tips, ideas, insights, and trends to help you as a business owner or an entrepreneur unlock, the potential of your business through the power of PR content and digital communications. Plus, you might get a free copy of my audio book, Content Marketing for PR. Till next episode.

See