When optimally and effectively used, Public Relations (PR) can yield a massive Return On Investment (ROI) for your e-commerce business. It can increase your brand awareness and enhance the visibility of your online store. Besides those, it can also build a positive reputation for your brand through unbiased brand messaging and help you to know how well your brand is doing and where it needs to improve.
Unfortunately, many business owners are oblivious to the role of PR in marketing to the point that it has no place in their e-commerce business strategy.
What is PR?
According to the Public Relations Society of America, Inc. (PRSA), Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics. In other words, it refers to a set of techniques and strategies that helps a brand maintain a mutually beneficial relationship with the public- their target audience.
The primary goal of a PR activity is to disseminate clear-cut messages to specific groups of people which helps to maintain a mutually beneficial relationship with them and create a positive brand image.
Consistency is the key to attracting a targeted audience to your online store. The brand’s message should always be clear and consistent and be honest because consumers want a brand that they can trust. Once they suspect that you are anything less than honest, that can bring a backlash to your brand.
Many appropriate PR to advertising, meanwhile PR is different from it in a number of ways.
Differences between Advertisement and PR
- Advertisement is a paid media whereas PR can be earned.
- Advertisement helps build exposure while PR builds trust.
- Audiences can be sceptical about the advertorial messages whereas PR through the media gives third party validation.
- In Advertisement, business owners have complete creative control, while the media controls the final version in PR.
Getting started with your brand’s PR
Many of today’s online customers are digital natives. They are intuitively conversant with online intrigues and can easily find their way around online marketing strategies of different brands and business owners tactics. They don’t want to be lured into buying anything except they are convinced of a return on the value of every penny to be spent online. This is where PR comes in to help online store owners gently nudge their potential customers in the right direction to their store.
Here are some of the most important information you should know when starting a PR campaign for your e-commerce:
- Know your brand
The first step to crafting a successful PR campaign is having an in-depth knowledge of your brand, its uniqueness and what makes it different from other competitors. You need to define what your brand stands for and what you want it to be known for because you can’t promote a brand image that doesn’t exist.
It helps you structure your campaigns and as well present your message to media channels easily in a way that resonates with your business objectives. So here are some talking points that you should focus on when it comes to defining your e-commerce business.
Who you are as an Entrepreneur
Consider who you are as an individual and distinct it from who your brand is. Create stories around your personal life that can help protect your brand image. Tell about how you started, what motivated you to start, how the journey has so far been and the experiences and lessons that you have gathered as an entrepreneur. Talk about how these experiences and lessons have shaped your decision making in the business.
Who you are as a brand
Consider the business values that you would like to project and be known for. Identify the business culture that you want to imbibe and let that show in your messaging. Having your own business values and making them known through your brand messaging will aid customers to decide whether they are happy to associate with you, or not. Tell your brand’s story also. The history, successes and failures of your brand will help your target audience to understand how far you have come. It can potentially evoke emotions and make people see the brand from a positive perspective.
Who you are as a Business?
What happens when you are able to convince your audience that your brand is great, but they don’t know what you’re actually offering them? It won’t yield the desired result. Thus, you have to be well furnished with the information about your product, its benefits to your audience and what your unique selling points are. Your unique selling point (USP), is the essence of what makes your product or service better than other competitors. Knowing how your product is different and better than your competitors is the key to a successful PR campaign. Also, you should know what your business objectives are. Knowing your business objectives well in advance can help to guide your PR campaign. It will also enable you to measure the success of your campaign.
Who is your audience?
Know your audience and put them into strata.
Identify their specific needs and discover what gets their interest and attention, and create engaging messages around them. Your in-depth knowledge of who your audience is and your understanding of what their needs and interests are will enable you to convey the right messages about your brand.
- Get a PR team.
Consistency is the key in PR. You need to constantly relate with your target audience.
More than ever, consumers often look up to brands for advice and useful information about their products because they see them as thought leaders in their respective industries. For example, many e-commerce brands have a website with a blog, where they can educate their audience.
There’s so much to do to achieve any PR objective and you cannot single-handedly do it effectively, hence you need a team of PR professionals to work together. A few key roles on your team can help make PR easier. Sometimes one person can have several roles, but it’s best to have at least a couple of people in charge of different things. Here are some of the roles you should consider getting on your PR team:
PR specialist: This personnel will be saddled with the responsibility of constantly networking and writing pitches to the media, building an outreach list, and finding and coordinating PR opportunities and campaigns in order to establish the brand and portray it in a positive light.
Content creator: This personnel is responsible for creating engaging content for your PR activities. The person must be a good writer with an understanding of your brand voice and tone and must have a deep knowledge of your brand and its industry.
Spokesperson: The ideal person for this role must be an orator, one who feels comfortable with speaking publicly in interviews, comment boxes, videos, articles, and more. This person will also be responsible for engagement with the audience on social platforms. The business owner can function as the spokesperson for an e-commerce store that is just starting out.
Some PR activities may be costly, but when you’re just starting out, all you need is the willingness to maintain a constant relationship with people and media outlets as well as damn good content.
- Engage Your Audience Online
The good news about e-commerce is that it is an online store which makes it interesting to engage with your target audience because those who patronize online stores are online. Many of them spend about 2-3 hours on averagely online every day. Hence you can create a PR campaign and easily spark up conversations on the social media on the campaign, engage with the audience, or join discussions on pages where your target audience are.
Active engagement across platforms helps establish your brand relevance. Be part of the conversation in your niche area or industry if you can’t start one. You may start by liking and sharing posts from pages where your target audience are if you're just starting out and can’t join in the conversation yet. Proactively positioning your brand like this can help to quickly establish trust, and set you well on your way to becoming a brand leader.
However, ensure that you don’t appear to them as if you’re trying to sell your product to people rather, assist them with issues related to your product that they are facing. However, you should also be truthful about your brand. Otherwise, this could create distrust.
- Build Your Outreach List
The next step in leveraging PR to boost your e-commerce store and product awareness is to start working on building your outreach list. An outreach list is a list of people in your industry that has the potential to help you reach new audiences and attract more people within your target audience. Here are 4 basic groups you should have in your outreach list.
Traditional Reporters: This list is generically called a media list. It contains the information of professionals working at publications houses (both traditional and online) who cover your industry or types of products.
Industry Bloggers: These are bloggers who run popular blogs relevant to your niche industry. They regularly write stories and review products within your niche industry.
Influencers: These are people who have an active presence on social media and have built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a specific topic or field. They make regular posts about that topic on their preferred social media channels and generate large followings of enthusiastic, engaged people who pay close attention to their content.
Like-Minded Entrepreneurs: These are online store owners or entrepreneurs who align with your values, mission, or product category.
Your main mission is to find the contact information of these people and to prioritize them based on how valuable they are when you want to reach out to them, and how likely you think it would be in being able to convince them to work with you.
To organize your information, create a spreadsheet that has columns and rows for:
Name of influencer or reporter
Group type (reporter, blogger, influencer, entrepreneur)
Associated website or blog
Number of followers
Phone number
Email address
Mailing address
Links to social media profiles
Domain authority
Priority level (high, medium, low)
Likelihood to respond (high, medium, low)
Attempts at contacting the individual (date contacted, goal, response).
The next step is to fill the outreach list with data. Here are two ways you can go about finding the right reporters or influencers:
Manual – manually searching for and adding reporters and influencers based on who you know already (a more qualitative approach).
You can do this by using the business objectives you wish to achieve at the end of the day to search for them.
Streamlined – You can as well use tools like Buzzsumo, Mushrack and Voila Norbert to research and identify influencers who meet your needs.
Once you have identified the reporter or influencer that can help you achieve your business, you can get in contact with them by researching for handles on different social media platforms and send a pitch to them on any other handles.
6 PR Tactics Needed for Your Online Store
Be honest
As trivial as it may sound, honesty is the first tactic and must be the bedrock of your PR strategy and tactics. PR is not about telling lies to project a brand image, it’s about putting the cards on the table as they are. The best PR comes from honesty. Whatever you publish, start by making sure it’s true.
However, being honest about your brand or yourself as the owner doesn’t mean telling or revealing everything to your audience. Some information is not meant for a certain context, time, place and even audience. So, when thinking about your next PR piece or responding to a comment, dissect the information you have. Don’t give more than you should. Know what to say, where to say it, how and when to say it and whom you are to say it to.
Be Objective
Before you begin your PR campaign at all, get a clear written objective that you want to achieve at the end of the campaign. Having an objective you wish to achieve will help you to know what to say, who to say it to, where you should say it, and how you should say it. If your objective is to create brand awareness, then you’ll need to create content that can speak to the needs of your audience and how your brand can help them meet them. Or if your objective is to review your product, then you will need to think of a reporter or blogger that can write about your product.
By setting out objectives for the campaign; you can better measure the successes and failures of your campaign, and spot any shortcomings to improve on in the future.
Be audience-centric, not product-centric.
The fact is that your audience doesn’t need you, hence they have no obligation to be interested in you, or your brand or your story; you are the one that needs them. The only thing they are interested in all of these is the benefits therein for them. So, whenever you want to generate news or a story around your brand, do so from the perspective of an audience. Use the benefits that the audience stands to get as a lens to filter your brand story or news to them.
To check if your brand story or news is audience-centric, you may replace your brand’s name with a competitor, a popular name and a name you don’t like. Then, ask yourself how the news or story makes you feel, whether you still care about what you’re communicating. If it’s boring, start again, and try to find the public benefit. Talk about your audience rather than your brand.
Focusing on your products or announcing your new arrivals or the number of units sold without mentioning what the audience stand to benefit from is a bad way to communicate and it will never get the interest of the target audience.
Be a Contributor to External Media
You can possibly leverage any news circle to project your brand image. You can disseminate your brand story or news to different groups of people, but the message must be tailored to meet the interest of each group. All you need to do is find the right angle, channel and medium to relate with them.
Let’s quickly break down these terms:
Angle
Your angle is the theme or the subject matter of your brand message. It can be likened to a lens through which you filter your brand information. When pitching your brand story to the media, think about how your story will be of interest to the reporter, blogger or influencer that you are pitching to. This means that the angle through which you want to relate with that media is the interest area or area of coverage of that media. And to your audience, an angle is the part of your story that can get the attention of your audience.
Channel
There are basically three types of channels that you can use to leverage your e-commerce store. They are owned, earned, and paid. Let’s break each of them down.
Owned channels are the ones your brand owns and controls; for example, your website, social media accounts, press page, etc.
Earned media are the external channels, like news media, business partnerships, influencers, bloggers, thought leaders, etc. that pick interest to write about your brand. You don’t pay for this kind of coverage, you earn it. And you can’t also control what they publish; your opinion doesn’t count. Meanwhile, this should be one of the goals of your PR strategy. So if you get a mention, it’s time to celebrate. This is the most valuable type of coverage in terms of PR.
The last channel - paid media is not wholly a PR channel. It predominantly falls under the category of advertising. This is a media you pay for to project the image of your brand.
Medium
Technology has been of great benefit to PR such as it has opened up several mediums through which the target audience could be reached. Meanwhile, choosing the right medium depends on the angle and channel you chose and the interest of your audience. Below are a few PR media:
Article (news or blog)
Interview
Panel discussion
Media parley
Podcast
Radio
TV
Press release
Research
Social media post
Video
Webinar
For example, here’s how a fashion brand in Lagos, Nigeria; Owanbe Community runs a blog to reach her audience and later turn them into buyers. The brand writes fashion stories of audience interest and directs them to place orders on her Instagram page where they have their products and styles displayed in an attractive way that gets the attention of the audience and turns them into customers immediately.
Be Newsworthy
You need to speak the language of the media. The media professionals that you will need to collaborate with for any PR campaign are a very busy set of people and only exciting, newsworthy and near-ready-to-use information can draw their attention to you. If you can offer them bespoke, high-quality niche content, that’s a win-win for both of you.
To make sure your message is clear and newsworthy, follow the five Ws of reporting, which are; the who, the what, the where, the when, the why and maybe sometimes the how of your story.
The more ready-to-use your PR content is, the more likely it is to be picked up by a media outlet.
Be clear with your message
As a brand, you should have a tone through which you communicate to your audience and stick with the tone. Brand tone will aid you to have a clear message across platforms that don’t confuse your audience. People will know your brand through your tone.
Being clear with your message will make your brand easily identifiable as people will find you consistent and easier to recognize amidst other competitors. Through a clear message that speaks directly to your audience, you can get them all emotional and they will willingly share your information. This means that any online content you produce is more likely to be shared, due to it being relatable or recognizable.
Regardless of which medium you decide you use, you should always try to make your content clear and concise and comprehensible.
Conclusion
Making your brand a household name is a great feat that every business owner wishes to attain, and PR is just the right tool to achieve that. This is why Bill Gates says, “if I were down to one dollar, I would spend it on PR.” He actually understood the essence of PR before he could make such an indelible statement. With effective PR, you are just a stone throw to getting your brand on the lips of the public and building a valuable positive reputation for your brand.
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