Public Relations Advantages, Challenges and Opportunities

With the help of public relations, companies can improve their reputations and raise their business profiles.

When it’s done effectively, PR can be a cost-effective way for businesses to get their message across to a large number of people from a target audience.

Nevertheless, it’s not always easy to guarantee the success of certain PR strategies.

Advantages

Public relations efforts bring many advantages to companies. Some of them include getting a bigger reach, because a well-crafted story can be picked up and covered by multiple media outlets.

This exposes a company’s message to a large audience of potential consumers. PR is also able to influence people because many audiences are a lot more likely to believe and trust messages that come from objective sources instead of ads that a company pays for.

This makes PR one of the most effective and credible forms of promotion, which makes it incredibly persuasive.

Public relations is also cost-effective because it’s able to reach a large audience by working with media outlets in advertising efforts rather than by buying media placements.

Challenges

However, public relations also comes with its own sets of challenges for companies. There are no guaranteed results from PR efforts.

This means that even if a company works with a great agency to craft a good press release, it doesn’t mean that the press release is going to be covered by outlets.

It also means that all of the additional investments such as communicating with journalists and getting suitable photography, are not necessarily going to pan out as planned.

No one can ever guarantee that a story is going to get published, which can result in a poor return on investment (ROI).

Additionally, unlike with advertising, where companies have direct control of their portrayal, PR means the company can’t exactly be in control of how it’s going to be portrayed by the media, or when and where its messages are going to appear.

It’s also difficult for companies to measure the effectiveness of their PR efforts.

While it’s easy to count the number of published stories and media mentions, it’s not easy to evaluate the impact all of those have on the target audience.

Opportunities

Fortunately, once a company has identified the media outlets it wants to target, it gets plenty of opportunities for PR efforts that can be effective at the end of the day.

That means companies should create press releases around their product launches or other successes and achievements.

Companies can create their own opportunities for additional publicity, such as by giving their expert opinions on current industry affairs, submitting articles for publication, developing studies and sharing the results with the press, and more.

As long as the stories or press releases are tailored for every different media outlet, it’s likely that companies will see success with them.

PR opportunities for companies can also come in the form of new business partnerships, new premises or staff members, significant anniversaries, involvement with charity organizations, or changes in the business structure of a company.

Ronn Torossian is the CEO and Founder of 5W Public Relations. 5W PR is a leading digital PR and influencer marketing agency.