THE POWER OF PR: BRAND CREDIBILITY
How often have you foregone a purchase, simply because you weren’t confident that the business was credible? No matter the industry, trust plays a tremendous role in determining the success of a business, brand, or event.
With inflation wreaking havoc on not only the local economy, but economies globally, consumers and businesses alike are extra cautious and likely to contemplate their expenditure.
The truth is, credibility cannot be bought, forced, or forged. Credibility is earned through repeat quality and satisfaction. What steps can you take, as an event organiser, to elevate your brand’s credibility in the market to support in driving sales and securing sponsorship?
1)Create Brand Awareness:
The first question your target audience will ask themselves is ‘Is this brand well-known? Have I heard of them before?’ To elevate your brand or event’s awareness in the market, you need to be producing quality content consistently and constantly.
This begins with understanding where to find your target audience and what type of content they resonate with. Are you trying to secure exhibitors for an upcoming trade event? You may not find engineers reading the latest issue of Glamour or scrolling through TikTok, but you are likely to have success with a well-placed article in Engineering News or on LinkedIn.
Through right-fit placement of content on your brand, across a variety of channels, your audience will start to experience – what we call in marketing – the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or the ‘frequency illusion’: a cognitive bias that explains how a name, word or thing that has come to our attention recently appears with improbable frequency shortly afterwards. Essentially, you see it everywhere.
2)Competency
Whilst knowing your brand or event exists is the first step in building credibility, your target audience is likely to ask ‘Does this brand add value to me? Does their offering resonate with mine?
When an audience associates a brand with higher competence, they will likely perceive the brand as more reliable in its claims.
What value do you offer your audience: Are you offering workshops with CPD points? Have you secured speakers or thought leaders who will be addressing pertinent topics relevant to the industry?
Highlight these offerings in your communication. Your conference producer spends a lot of time and energy curating a quality programme for the event, so reap those rewards by showcasing your offering across media channels.
3)Listen and Learn
This is something so simple, yet it is so often overlooked. Many brands are focused on talking at their audience and don’t spend much time investing in the power of listening.
Investing in a listening or tracking tool – whether Hubspot, Hootsuite or Sprout – is the ideal way to monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, products, and keywords related to your business. Social media listening tools allow you to build a solid understanding of exactly how customers and potential customers think about you by analyzing what they say on social channels.[1]
Another way to listen is to get direct feedback from your delegates, exhibitors, and speakers – and use it. Did they find your event brought about immense value in prospective partnership deals? Ask them if you can use that testimonial in your PR and marketing to cement your brand’s credibility and showcase the value you can add.
Have you received unfavourable feedback? Learn from it to adapt and better your offering for future events.
Credibility is important because it helps to influence your audience’s patterns, behaviours and thoughts. PR, with reputation management at its core, can support your brand or event in elevating awareness, showcasing your competency, and managing your reputation across platforms.
For a successful PR strategy in building your brand credibility, in addition to what has been covered, you must analyse your website and optimise it accordingly. The next Power of PR article will unpack the importance of SEO and how PR is able to support in higher ranking on search engines.
About Pulse Communications
Born out of a passion for purpose-led communications, Pulse Communications aims to reinvigorate brands through impactful story-telling, meaningful relationships and an expert grasp of the media landscape.
Specialised in public relations, influencer engagement, campaign management and execution, content creation and creative concepts; Pulse Communications has the understanding and experience that communications needs are unique to each individual business, offering tailored strategic communications services that drive messaging to support a brand’s objectives.
All work produced by Pulse Communications is done so with intent, and integrity at the core, with the ambition to achieve effective and top-quality results.
[1] https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-business/