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The first recognized public relations (PR) campaign is widely credited to Phineas Taylor Barnum, a circus owner and promoter. Cynics would say the industry has not moved on very far from its origins in a circus environment, but times have certainly changed.

Public Relations is now a multi-billion pound world-wide industry that is, whether you like it or not, at the heart of everyday life. If you are reading this in your office, on your couch, travelling on a train or even sat on your yacht, if you look at the products surrounding you I guarantee they will all be made by a company with a PR team capable of spotting a potential media angle from 40 paces. What is Public Relations These companies may or may not be huge in comparison to your business but that is the simplicity of PR, it is a business tool that can applied to any business, no matter what size. Not only can it be easily applied to your product or service but what's more, it is one of the best ways of delivering value to your business. Good quality editorial, as generated by PR professionals, gets the phones ringing, increases footfall to your premises or gets you whatever you need to get those sales up.

In today's media savvy world more companies are beginning to realise the importance of putting PR at the heart of its business decision making process. Think about it, nowadays if a customer experiences bad service or enters into some form of dispute with a business they no longer give companies the chance to rectify the situation. More often than not they go straight to the media, and increasingly this applies to regional media and is not just the playground of the national press. This brings me into the realms of PR crisis management and I want to try and steer clear of the doom and gloom and stick to how PR can make you money. definition of public relations There are many definitions of Public Relations but simply put the following few words sums it up pretty well, "Public relations is the practice of getting attention and shaping public opinion".

Most commonly, the PR industry comes down to three separate areas. The first is corporate or profile PR, where a business sends out general messages about company results, new employees or alike. The second is re-active PR, where a company gets asked a question about its business or service/products and has to think of the public perception of any response they give. The third, and most important for small to medium sized companies, is product or service PR.

If a company can get a positive product or service mention in a newspaper or magazine that your target market reads it WILL deliver benefit through increased sales as readers perceive editorial as having greater credibility than adverts. PR works even better when used as part of wider marketing campaign.

Product or service PR is essentially part of the "marketing mix". This means that when a company is looking to announce a new service or product range it will usually plan to run either one or a few (or better still all) of the following; advertising, direct mailing, telemarketing, online promotion, and the all important press release. If you time these to run in sequence then you will see a marked increase in the success of your overall campaign.

This brings the article nicely on to measuring the business value of public relations. It is true that you can use measurements such as finding out how much the equivalent sized article would have cost if it was purchased as advertising space and measuring column inches of coverage, but this is not good enough for some business owners.

Our company use a simple measure; we ask you how much money our work has generated. We either ask for a PR dedicated customer phone number that we can include with press releases or ask that as part of the sales process the customer is asked what made them get in touch, or, "how did you hear about us". This gives a much more easy to identify benefit.

This is what your PR person or company should be doing for you, asking how much money they have added to your bottom line.

A major public relations campaign we were involved with was for a financial services company that spent a large amount on all elements of its marketing mix and you know what, editorial kicked the pants off the 3 month long advertising campaign. In those three months a quarter of all sales were attributed to editorial, which is a very healthy amount and much more than any one single advert which is a total reversal from usual industry trends. This suggests to me that more people are switching off from advertising messages, which makes PR even more valuable.