Perfecting The Art of Consumer Public Relations
Reach a Wider Audience with Targeted Public Relations
Happy, engaged, and repeat customers can help you to grow your business. In an age where consumers want to authentically connect with your brand, auto-response messaging won’t do the trick. If lasting, meaningful consumer relationships are your brand’s end goal, then you’ll have to invest in consumer public relations.
In this article, we’ll explore what consumer PR is and how you can use it to benefit your company.
Exclusive Insight into Industry Strategies and Trends
What Is Consumer PR?
Consumer PR refers to how a company interacts and communicates with the general public.
This includes customers, employees, the media, and key company stakeholders.
Where marketing solely focuses on increasing company revenue, consumer PR increases brand awareness. It facilitates authentic connections between a brand and its target audience.
Essentially, consumer PR can help you to mold your company’s reputation in a way that truly reflects the company’s ideals, vision, and principles.
How To Perfect Your Consumer Public Relations
When applied correctly, consumer PR can help you to attract more customers, grow existing relationships, and learn from each customer interaction. So, here’s how to master your consumer PR.
Understand Your Audience
It may sound simple, but really getting to know your target audience takes time and some sound strategy. A deep understanding of your customers will serve as the foundation for your communication style going forward and will ensure that your messaging resonates with its intended audience.
The best way to understand your target audience is to delve into market research. However, you can also learn a lot by experimenting and challenging common assumptions that you may unwittingly harbor.
If you’re targeting a number of different audiences, it’s best to develop multiple customer personas for each messaging goal you have. These personas should guide your communication tone and style and can help you position each message in such a way that it keeps your target audience engaged.
Choose The Right Content
After you have a solid grip on who your customers are, how they liked to be addressed, and what piques their interests, you’ll have a much easier time developing your consumer PR content strategy.
A key part of formulating and executing a content strategy will be knowing what your target audience deems as newsworthy.
Posting random content on your company’s social media platforms simply won’t suffice. Blogging about evergreen topics that have been written about a hundred times before also won’t do. You’ve got to sink your teeth into the gritty details of a story that will make your intended audience feel something.
More often than not, it’s not the story itself that sparks interest, but rather how you tell it that will intrigue your reader.
If you have to report on boring corporate news, put a personal spin on it. If there’s a new product launch in the pipeline, turn it into an eye-catching campaign that will both dazzle and awe.
Whatever you choose to report on, just remember to serve your target audience content that they will find interesting.
Make Things Personal
Consumers want to feel valued and heard. It is your job to make sure that your messaging reflects your company’s attentiveness to each customer’s query.
Whether it’s a customer service response, an email, a reply on social media, or a handwritten note accompanying a product delivery, you can make each consumer feel valued by personalizing your messaging.
Why is this important? These days, every customer has a thousand different vendors to choose from. Yet, they chose to support your business. So, you need to show them that they’re making the right choice and don’t just see them as some nameless paying customer.
Personal messaging shows each customer that you value their purchase. It will also create an opportunity for you to connect with that customer.
Be An Industry Leader
Consumers want to support and work with companies that are well-known, respected leaders in their industry.
Because there is so much online noise, the demand for trusted expertise is growing. Want to prove that your walk can match your talk? Then you’ll have to come up with content strategies that will help to establish your company as a thought leader.
This means you’ll have to publish interesting articles, commentary, and opinions concerning the latest trends and events that are taking your industry by storm. This will require you to practice active listening and be aware of all of the pertinent questions being asked on a certain topic. Then you can be the first to provide the answers.
Company presentations, editorials, and Q&As are all excellent ways to establish yourself as an expert within your industry.
In Summary
Although it can be a time-consuming task, perfecting your consumer public relations strategy is well worth it in the end. Not only will it help you to connect with each customer in a more authentic way, but it will also make your customers feel valued.
By understanding how to communicate with your target audience, you will make it much more enjoyable and rewarding for your intended audience to keep up with your brand.
Founder and President at The Hoyt Organization
With over 25 years of experience, Leeza’s campaigns have garnered over 150 awards from top public relations organizations nationwide. Additionally, THO serves as the Los Angeles area partner of the Public Relations Global Network, granting clients access to over 50 global markets. The agency was also named to one of the top 200 firms in the country by Forbes magazine in 2021, and she has been named by Globest.com as a Woman of Influence and a Woman to Watch, among other designations.
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