3 Quick Tips for Improving Your Small Businesses PR

By Molly Nowak

In today’s society, there are many new ways to improve your small business’s public relations strategies. Having strong public relations is beneficial in numerous ways, like creating stronger customer relationships, increasing small business's credibility, trust, and more.

In the long-run, this can bring more sales and increase your small businesses revenue overall. That is why public relations is a major resource to have in a business.

Now, how can I do this, you may be asking. Well, here are three quick tips that you can use to improve your small business’s public relations strategy:

1.) Use Social Media

Social media is one of the best tools to use for your PR strategy plan. Using social media, it makes it easier to connect with your customers, keep your audience aware of new products, talk about promotions, use influencers to promote, etc. An article from Inc.com states, “social media eliminates the walls between members of the public and a brand, shortens the time a company has to react to relevant stories, and blurs the line between marketing and public relations.” Using social media is more time efficient for announcing new releases or trying to interact with your audience, without having to spend hours creating an email blast or press release. There are many social media outlets you can use for your small business, but don’t forget who your target audience is. If you are targeting teenagers/young adults, Instagram, Twitter or maybe TikTok would be your best outlet to use because that is where you would find most teenagers.

2.) Customer Service

Nothing is more important and detrimental to a small business than its reputation. The best way your business can gain the trust and love from your customers is by having good quality customer service. It is important to get as much feedback as you can, but you can’t always assume it will be positive. Many people will like to share their negative feedback on businesses platforms for everyone to see, which can be very damaging to your business and it’s reputation, as well as it’s future revenue. To keep your businesses reputation and its good quality customer service, try using some of these ways from Divvy.com to help maintain a great name:

1. Have someone or a team dedicated to watching social media accounts and other online feedback sites. By monitoring your businesses sites, the team member will be on-top of all feedback and reviews you get from your audience or customers so they can take care of any type of responses you may get.

2. Respond quickly in the manner in which the customer first reached out. This is important because you don’t want a customer to have a simple question and then have to have them go through three other steps just to reach a human voice. So, keep your customer service phone number, email, or whatever it may be, easy to find so that a customer is able to reach customer service as quickly and easily as possible.

3. Use social media management tools. There are plenty of tools to keep your social media accounts up to date on posts and monitoring messages. By using one of those resources, you can help manage messages on social media, assign messages to people and keep a trail of how issues were resolved.

3.) Promotions

Escpeically for a small business, promotions can be a huge way to gather interest from and create new customers, as well as boosting sales. There are so many different options to choose from when thinking about promotions; there’s coupons, giveaways, flash sales, BOGO, etc. When your audience notices that your business is frequently holding these promotions, it will make them feel valued and that you care. Try holding a giveaway when dropping a new product, or hold a flash sale during a holiday. This is also a good way to engage and interact with your audience while having fun and helping out a customer.

In Summary

Just based off of three examples of how to improve your small businesses public relations strategy while personally experimenting with them, it has made a huge difference in my businesses overall performance. These are an essential way to grow your business, maintain happy and loyal customers and continue revenue growth.