Why collaboration is key in levelling the playing field for small business PR

The bottom line is that big businesses have muscle and fighting them on the same terms will just keep ending up with blooded noses for the small businesses.

Sniping away at their ankles though might just take them by surprise, and one such opportunity is in PR.

Most smaller businesses simply give up on trying to get their voices heard in the press as they don’t have the cash to blow on big PR Agencies. Reasonable? Yes, absolutely.  Big businesses spend £15 billion on PR each year, (https://www.prca.org.uk/sites/default/files/PRCA_PR_Census_2019_v9-8-pdf%20%285%29.pdf), and guess what….the big Agencies are happy to take it, as would we all.

This leaves smaller businesses in the PR shadows, but pretending to be big by making the most of social media. Smaller businesses spend three times as much cash on social media than on traditional PR (https://www.marketingtechnews.net/news/2018/feb/19/uk-small-businesses-planning-increase-marketing-spend-201819/).  Yet the value of independent journalists and commentators making  a positive comment about a brand hits the consumer four times as powerfully as a ‘We’re great, buy our product’ advert.

But, hold the presses…times are changing!

The rise of freelancing, the gig economy and the use of platforms which match PR freelancers to clients are popping up as disrupting go-to solution for those businesses with a hunger for PR, but not the budgets to feed large established agencies.

The difficulty has in the past been ‘how to find a PR freelancer with specialist knowledge of my industry’

Search engine technology means that freelancers with specific skills and often working in jeans and tee shirts (and probably no socks) from home can link directly with small businesses looking for one off contracts that need doing at an affordable cost, and no long term tie ins.  Through these PR is alive and kicking for small businesses, and platforms like The PR Cavalry (https://prcavalry.com) have potential nomadic clients volumes well in excess of large traditional agencies.