Stagnation is one of the great fears of every business owner. Periods of strong growth can be exciting while they last, but when interest begins to wane, it can send entrepreneurs and CEOs scrambling to find the next big boost for their business. Whether it’s an issue with your branding, messaging, business model, budgeting, or even company culture, there are many reasons why a business’s growth might slow, stop, or never start to begin with.
Below are a few of the most common obstacles to growth that PR services might be able to solve:
No digital footprint.
- The business world has changed quite a bit over the past few decades. The Internet and search engines have become inextricably linked to the investment and sales process.
- The Internet has become the go-to tool for researching and assessing potential investments. This means that a brand’s digital footprint is more important than ever, as search results can be an investor and customer’s first (and only) impression of your business.
- An investor evaluating your company will want to see some kind of brand authority or buzz about your business before investing.
- PR can help you take control of what investors (and the general public) knows and sees about your business.
Avoiding investments with delayed returns.
- Careful budgeters are often suspicious of PR-related costs, as the correlation between PR efforts and an increase in interest or sales is often not as clear or linear as other investments. The returns are not as quick or clear, the rewards often ambiguous until further down the line.
- Not everyone runs to google immediately upon hearing about a product or business they’re interested in. Hearing about an exciting new product on a podcast while driving or browsing through headlines on a lunch break does not leave customers with enough time to go straight to your website and draw a clear path from the moment of airing to the initial click to the final conversion.
- With PR efforts, returns may not show themselves immediately or all at once. However, this does not mean that they should be disregarded as ineffective. Instead, try to analyze why it might have not worked. Did your outlet, tone, or branding align with your target audience’s preferences? Is your website up-to-date? Where in the process are customers falling off?
Problems with your website.
- PR can bring the horse to water, but you have to make it drink. If you want your PR efforts to be effective, you need to make it easy on customers. Sending them to a broken down or outdated website is a quick way to render your own efforts obsolete.
- To maximize conversions, any part of your site that you send customers to should be functional, optimized, updated, and conversion-ready.
- Outdated or confusing designs, dead pages, broken links – users pick up on these issues quickly. All of these are little red flags that can cause real doubts in customers and prevent conversions.
Distance from customers, or lack of engagement.
- For growing businesses, it’s especially important to connect with your audience. If a customer takes the time to shout you out on social media, responding to them can solidify that customer relationship (who doesn’t like being shouted out by a blue-checked business)? Nurture these connections on social media.
- Other ways to connect with audiences are to host Q-and-A’s, Reddit AMAs, live sessions, discussions or seminars on industry topics, starting a conversation on Twitter, etc.
Lack of brand authority.
- Lack of credibility or brand authority is one of the biggest obstacles to growth and conversion that modern businesses face.
- This is a threefold issue. Lack of credibility will cost you investments, customers, and media opportunities. Investors that search for your brand and find little or nothing may be skeptical of your expertise, while customers may not trust a business that no one seems to have heard of. The media is rightfully hesitant to report on unproven or illegitimate companies, which can make it hard to get the word out about your business.
- Establishing brand authority can open up doors you never knew existed. Gaining the trust of your customers, investors, industry, and local media is no easy task, but it can be enormously beneficial to the continued success of your business.
As noted by PR experts at Imperium Group, PR has become more important than ever. With businesses living and dying by their search engine rankings, the number of risks that PR can mediate and the scope of benefits it can provide have never been higher. Imperium Group advises that entrepreneurs and business owners give serious consideration to how PR services could benefit them.
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