Every savvy business owner wants publicity to capitalize on the attention of a target audience. Getting PR for your product or service is the most reliable way to build awareness and increase sales. In an attempt to maximize outreach, businesses leverage numerous marketing tools to gain publicity. Let’s check the top 5 instruments that can help you spread the word about your business.
Why is publicity important for your business?
Despite numerous stereotypes, effective business publicity has long stepped beyond the line of news releases. Today, you can find hundreds of channels, including social media, blogging, podcasting, and contest management, that can generate online publicity for your business. There are several reasons why you definitely need publicity to promote a product or a service:
- Build up credibility. Promoting businesses through external intermediaries helps establish trust with the target clients.
- Get the message across . The number of sales depends on how many people discover a business. PR is an excellent channel for getting the message across to prospective clients.
- Establish partnerships . Publicity gains industry positioning for your business which maximizes your chances for establishing strategic alliances.
The Top 5 tools to get publicity for your business
To help you find the perfect tool that resonates with your business strategy, we’ve created the list of top 5 platforms for gaining publicity:
HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
This is the free email newsletter service that focuses on matching reporters and business experts. Providing your expert opinion about a business and posting it on a high-traffic site is what you gain using HARO. Since the platform is actively used by such huge news outlets as The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, it offers a great opportunity to make a business into a star by sharing your professional knowledge.
- The easy module for content promotion.
- The tool can be used free of charge by both businesses and reporters.
- Waiting for email responses can be time-consuming.
Judgify is a start to finish award management software. The idea of setting up award events to get free publicity can relate to many different types of campaigns. In particular, Judgify is a helpful tool for organizing business challenges, creative and industry competitions, startup pitching, charity events, etc. From a small startup to a large corporation, every business can leverage contests to showcase a product, raise awareness, or establish industry positioning.
The Judgify toolkit integrates several automated modules for award event management that are responsible for easy entry submission, scoring, and reporting – all in one.
- The feature of public voting helps ensure maximal outreach
- Judgify has a Free Plan for free events
- Businesses can use white labeling to build an effective showcase for their company
- The absence of the social media module
BuzzSumo is an online tool for research and monitoring that allows businesses to follow content trends and find influencers. The platform focuses on social media as the resource for tracking which means you can use BuzzSumo to research the hottest social media keywords, topics, and patterns.
Apart from this, BuzzSumo helps businesses gain publicity through social media influencers. For instance, you can seek the most popular Twitter influencers based on your target topic and pitch your content.
- An easy-to-use activity dashboard
- The modules that allow tracking competitors’ campaigns
- The high cost of use (starting with $79 per month for a basic plan)
Guest post blogging is a reliable way to introduce your business to a new audience. Creating content that reflects the assets of a business or the core product features and posting it on someone’s blog helps you build great business exposure. Guest Post Tracker is the platform that unites more than 1000 blogs open to guest post exchange cooperation. The tool also provides a handy dashboard for guest post outreach management to help businesses keep track of the posts.
- The huge list of blogs which updates regularly
- Affordable price ($9 per month)
- Most of the blogs are paid
If you’re wondering how to do publicity for a small business, you should check out online directories like Google My Business. This service helps insure the visibility of a business by listing its basic information including the address, phone number, and opening hours online. With the help of online directories, you ensure that when people look for businesses in your industry, your listing comes up in the search.
- Provides access to metrics and customer reviews
- Use of the online directory is free
- There are some limitations like the obligation to list a mailing address, country
accessibility, etc.
How to choose the best publicity tool for your business.
Whether you choose one specific tool or create your custom toolkit for gaining publicity, depends on the goals you pursue. Here are some tips and tricks for picking your perfect publicity instruments:
- Develop SMART PR goals for your business and think about how you could automate each of them.
- Set up a PR budget. Not every tool for gaining publicity can be used for free. To understand your limits, set a specific PR budget and look for the tools that can implement it.
- Think of the audience. Tailoring tools to the needs of a target audience is crucial. To gain publicity you have to promote your business in an arena where a potential client can discover it.
- Experiment. Set a timeline for using specific publicity tools and track how well each of them helps you promote your business. To understand what works perfectly for you, consider experimenting with publicity toolkits.
Conclusion
To magnify public attention, business owners should have a secret weapon for gaining publicity. Although the selection of the perfect publicity toolkit is quite a challenge, it helps unleash the marketing potential of a business and reach a target audience in the shortest possible time.
If you’d like to find out more on publicity generation for your business, check out this article.
