What is PR?
Today, ecommerce businesses have to work extra hard at creating brand awareness and setting themselves apart from competitors.
With more and more product categories popping up in the market and competing with one another - it is a race to the top. It’s up to the ecommerce business owners to develop strategies that will help them create a lasting impression in the minds of the customers and carve out a place for their business.
As an online seller, your aim should be to become the ‘go-to’ site for products in your category - that way, customers won’t have to be looking around for products on google.
PR is an effective strategy that will help you achieve this.
In short, public relations, or PR, refers to all the activities that a business undertakes to maintain the right relationship with the public. An uptick in demand for online retail has reportedly brought forth new opportunities in PR for ecommerce companies. How the public perceives the business is of paramount importance to it. PR is all about conveying the right messages to specific groups of people and shaping a company’s positive image in the customers’ minds.
PR vs. Marketing
PR and marketing go hand in hand. If you were to compare the two, you would find that they complement each other. Most online sellers use a combination of PR, digital marketing, and content marketing strategies to reach out to customers, to establish themselves in the market, and to hike sales.
Marketing campaigns are all about deals, discounts, and promotions that are attractive and irresistible. They are aimed at your ecommerce business’ growth within the market. On the other hand, PR is all about news, facts, interviews, and articles that the public would find worth reminiscing over to grow brand awareness for your online venture.
How to come up with a PR strategy for your e-commerce business?
Here are a few simple steps to come up with a winning PR strategy:
1. Partner with the right brand: To earn your customers’ trust, you must be seen to be aligned with the brands they trust. For instance, be present in the market through ecommerce platforms with an established name.
2. Appeal to your customers’ emotions: Trigger a feeling in your customer’s minds to inspire them and make them consider your online store. For this, you can try and reinforce your customers’ beliefs through your PR activities or challenge their thinking with a disruptive idea or story that may grab their interest. When your customer begins to relate with you, you can consider half the battle won.
3. Make them take action- The most successful PR campaign is the one that gets everybody talking. But it isn’t easy to achieve viral fame, no matter what measures you take. This is not to say campaigns that aren’t viral aren't all that successful. With thought-through execution, you can effectively reach your customers through email blasts, social media, broadcast media, journalism, and more.
What are the top PR channels that you need to be focusing on for your online store?
1. Get your business to feature in articles: Reporters always like a good story. Reach out to a reporter to feature your online venture in an article or interview someone from your company.
2. Reach out through Radio & Television - Approach the producer of a radio or a TV show to have someone from the company be a guest on their show to share expert advice on a topic selected for discussion.
3. Get expert articles written by someone in your company - Pitch the idea for an article to the editors of a publication after considering the type of articles they publish and the writer guidelines that they have set.
4. Be positive and be current - Let’s assume that you are an online retailer selling five different kinds of biscuits, and you hear that there is a natural disaster - a flood, that has affected your region. Your company could help out by sending biscuit packages to rescue workers and the campsites’ victims. Apart from this, you can also donate $1 for every sale made for the next 30 days to the disaster relief fund. A good PR person will have this sorted for your ecommerce business - by informing the press, having the CEO available for interviews, and sending out personalized thank-you notes to everyone who has placed orders during the 30 days.
Excellent customer support is another great strategy to keep your brand in your customers’ good books, and for this, you can trust DelightChat to do the job.
