If you are looking to increase your business range and want to expose your brand to the people who are interested in your product or services then Public relations is the answer.

Every company big or small regardless of their industry or size needs public relations as it defines how a company interacts or communicates with the people. People include all the customers, journalists, politicians, partners, philanthropists, and the general public even the government needs public relations.

The question is why? Because the customer wants to do the business with the ones they trust nowadays and public relations are the best to build and encourage trust.

What are Public Relations?

Public relations (PR) is the practice of controlling media channels to develop a positive public image and promote your organization. Especially in times of crisis, PR manages your communications and your business brand. How a brand manages to spread the information is Public Relations so it is similar to branding. The difference is that branding focus on logos and websites and related to marketing materials while PR is more focused on your brand reputation and communication.

Various media channels are being used for reputation and communication by a brand to manage its PR.

Media: Owned vs. Paid vs. Earned

There are three types of Public Relations i.e. owned, paid, and earned.

The purpose of each type is the same i.e. to build a positive brand image but the strategies are different.

Your PR strategies must include all these categories as they provide a different way to build trust and engage your audience.

Owned media:

Any content that a business control itself can be defined as owned media. It’s mostly the go-to-strategy to build a PR campaign for a business. This is the most important type of Public Relations related to media as you control it unlike the other two media so you should be focusing on it more.

Owned media controls

• Posts of social media
• Content of Blog
• Website copy
• Email newsletters

These are the extensions of your brand. The more owned media you have is the more chances to expand your brand presence in the digital area. Your content marketing strategy will primarily drive owned media. The mainstay of owned media is providing valuable and educational content, that is not self-promotional for an organization. The key to distributing it widely is encouraging this content on social media. It acts as a “home base” for your Public Relations activity. People will likely reference your media when they write about your product or brand in their coverage.

Paid media:

In the marketing world, it is not uncommon to pay to promote your content. It is not different in PR as well. To make your content visible paid media is used. It is a normal practice to promote owned media. Paid media is the best way if you want to promote your content to drive earned media as well as direct passage to owned media assets. To promote content paying is the best way to create exposure. Paid media includes:

• Social media advertising
• Influencer marketing
• Pay-per-click (PPC)

Social media sites offer advertising that could promote your content as well as the website.  Boosting Public Relations content by putting some funds is becoming popular. Content is reaching to the people you want to see it as the majority of social platforms are getting out of reach for business account. 

Display ads and Pay Per Click is an effective way to increase traffic and to drive searches for your website. The most common form of PPC is Search Engine Advertising. Bidding is done on the keywords that will display on the organic search results. As the name suggests every time someone clicks on an advert you will pay to be directed to your website.

Earned media:

The approach used to increase conversation around your brand is Earned media. It is word of mouth and is the best tactic to build a good reputation. It is the result of your efforts in paid and owned media. It’s the hardest type to achieve. It takes a lot of consistency and hard work that is the reason it is termed as earned. If the owned media is the destination then the earned media is the vehicle with the help of which you reach there. Good content and the first-page ranking is the biggest drivers. Earned media includes:

• Mentions in industry news and reviews
• Praise from customers on social media
• High rankings on search engines

The content should be worthwhile if you want to receive the value of earned media. Content can be in any form it can be a blog, video a press release the bottom line is that the content should be the best. All three media are used to create brand awareness, create leads, and convert them into paying customers.

All three elements are very important to digital media it’s up to you to decide where you want to allocate your resources. In case of owned media, they are the extensions of your brand and help people to interact with your brand but you need to maintain it, the more the merrier. Earned media is the online word of mouth. Good SEO and content strategies are the most effective. Paid media is a great way to promote content to generate more earned media.

Measurement tools:

How to measure paid media:

Your advertised media will measure your paid media. Internal analytical software is used by some social networks for promoted social media posts. All social networking sites have built-in analytics for Public Relations. Instagram has plenty of third-party Instagram analytical tools available yet they have to introduce their option. Social analytics software can track these posts. SEMRush or Ahrefs are some of the software’s that can help in tracking paid search performance as well as the SEO efforts and organic search.

In Google Analytics, there are different channels as paid search, paid social, and display so that it will be easy for you to measure which websites rings more traffic to your website and resulted in new customers and sales.

How to measure owned media:

The analytics platforms of social media you are using can measure owned media. A social analytics tool can provide extensive analysis to measure your efforts. Owned media analysis include Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter via channel feature. With the help of this, you can not only analyze your owned media channels but also your competitors. To know what is working and what is not you need to examine your channel. Use metrics to look at the posts retweets, mentions, and get to know deeper about your community and content. You can identify which platform is best, which content is best, and apply those to your future campaigns. You can also make a comparison with your competitors and drive brand advocacy by identifying the most influential ad active fan and promote them. The main purpose of social marketing strategies and content is to gain buying customers.

How to measure earned media:

Any quoting of your brand that is outside of your owned channels is earned media. Brandwatch Analytics is a social analytics tool that is the simplest way to monitor every web in which you are mention so that nothing got missed. You can track the mentions of earned media when you exclude your owned media wherever they appear. 

PR and Reputation management:

Public Relations specialists are mainly focused on earned media and social analytics helps in simplifying the process of finding and classifying press mentions. Many companies assist PR strategy by automatically categorize mentions into types of pages and make it easy to know the new mentions. Many PR specialists assign AVE (advertising value equivalency) to web mentions. All mentions are not positive of course. With the help of negative mentions monitored by earned media you can monitor your reputation and at times deals with the situations as they arise

Content strategy and influencer identification:

Content strategy can e improved with the help of Earned media. You can understand your audience and what they want t read by identifying your audience. The tweets and headlines that engage them you can identify them. You can also identify by monitoring the metrics the most influential person that shares your content and contact with those influencers to improve your relationship. To understand how well your official hashtags are being adopted by comparing owned vs. earned hashtags. You can identify what more hashtags you need to use and which are the phrases that are used by your audience the most.

Accepting the voice of the customer:

You can identify the needs of your customers when you monitor what your customers are saying about you. The voice of the customer can be taken into account by using emailed reports and command center software and making it noticeable for everyone that is an important factor for Public Relations. The visibility of your earned media shows you the importance of listening to your customers. By focusing on all three you can understand that where you want to focus. You can uncover detailed information inside each channel by using a social analytics tool.