How PR can help you increase your sales significantly

PR is an efficient way to increase sales but is, unfortunately, too often ignored. Yet, for small businesses, one of your main concerns is likely to be sales. How do you increase your sales? Should you go to networking events? Should you advertise? Should you be carrying out marketing activity?

Actually, all three of the above are important for any business, and PR is an essential part of your marketing mix. If done in the right way, you can help increase your revenue through PR. Here are three reasons why.

1)  Become An Expert In Your Field:

If you are consistently commenting on things in the news that relate to your business, journalists are more likely to see you as the ‘go to’ person in your industry.

If you can achieve this, it’s likely that they will eventually call you when a story breaks to hear your thoughts. This does take time though, and you will need to develop a relationship with the journalists.

If journalists do see you as an expert in your field and begin to cover you more, it’s very likely that your potential customers will start to see you as the place to go as well.

Remember that you never know which piece of content or article your potential customers will read, or even how much they will read, so consistency is the key with this.

2)  Independent Promotion:

It’s natural for a small business to talk about themselves and promote how good they are, but if done well PR will give you third party promotion too.

Third party testimonials add credibility to a brand, and consumers are far more likely to believe an independent source compared to the business owner or staff members.

In today’s internet age, it’s very likely that your potential customers will be searching online for your product or service, so if you have a series of independent sources speaking highly about your business it will impress them more than just an advert you have placed.

Typically, a piece of coverage is worth around three times as much as an advert, so in many cases, PR is also more cost-effective.

3) PR can help you increase the traffic of your website

Beyond the fact that public relations can help you with your brand profile and authority, it can also boost your website traffic significantly. 

Most of the time, journalists or bloggers will add a link to your website in their article, generating traffic. So even if the piece is not directly promoting your products or services, readers have the opportunity to learn more about your business by visiting the site. This is why you need to make sure that the landing page, in many cases your home page, is user-friendly. User experience plays a very important role in the conversion process.

Increasing the volume of traffic on your website should logically increase the volume of your sales. Don't hesitate to target publications or blogs with a high volume of traffic, it is the best way to increase yours.

PR can also help you to boost your SEO. One important part of what search engines robots are tracking is the internal and external linking on your website. Backlinks to your website coming from different sources are then very important. Also, note that many news websites have a very good authority score online so it's even more interesting for your SEO. 

PR is about consistency, so the tips above will only apply if you regularly take action to improve the PR of your small business. The more you put into your PR strategy, as with any marketing avenue, the more you will get out of it, and while one piece of content might receive limited traction, another piece may fly.

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Written by: Ben Caine, Client Manager

As a former journalist, Ben has a keen eye for news. He is passionate about small businesses, and is the main point of contact if you need help making full use of the JournoLink platform.