PR ON THE GO April 21, 2022

Experts Answer:

How can PR drive audience engagement?

To help you get your audience to engage more with your brand, we asked CEOs and PR leaders this question for their best ideas. From promoting the reputation of your business to creating a sense of expertise in your niche, there are several practical ways to take advantage of PR to drive up audience engagement for your business.

Here are six ways PR can drive audience engagement:

Promote Reputation of Business

Nick Shackelford, Structured Agency

"PR can strengthen audience engagement because it can enhance a business's credibility. When audiences see that a business has put out an official press release, it adds a layer of professionalism to the business. Furthermore, being featured in well-established publications can make businesses appear more reputable. Giving people such an impression will allow them to feel more comfortable engaging with these businesses."


Encourage Community Participation

Axel Hernborg, Tripplo.com

"User-Generated Content (UGC) Share content curated by your target audience. Request that your community send in or share photos and videos of themselves using your product or service and then feature them on your social media accounts. This helps create a sense of community and gets your audience excited to see themselves featured. It's a fun way to bring your brand to life and encourage community participation."


Provide Transparency About Brand

Natalia Brzezinska, PhotoAiD

"One great example of thought leadership content for B2B startups is a blog post on the top mistakes that startup founders make when pitching to investors. This kind of content is highly practical, as it provides insights that can help founders avoid making common mistakes. By sharing this kind of advice, startups can position themselves as thought leaders in the space, and help their readers learn and grow."


PR ON THE GO Media Lists: Carefully curated journalist contacts and verified email addresses.


Respond Actively To Comments and Enquiries

Joe Spector, Dutch

"Social media is a great channel for brands to communicate with their customers directly and build strong relationships with them. Customers like to see it when brands actually take the time to respond to comments on their social media posts, so showing that you interact with your audience will help set your brand apart from most. It’s also important to have some personalization and personality when you respond to users, staying true to your brand’s voice. This will not only give your customers someone to talk to, but someone to talk about as well."


Engage Audience Through Two-way Communication

Marco Genaro Palma, PRLab

"A great way to increase audience engagement is by thinking about two-way communication. This can be in various forms, but the focus is to involve the audience in the campaign itself. The most popular way is by reacting and implementing feedback, but the more participation the public feels it has, the more engaged they tend to be.

A perfect example of this successful method is Doritos breaking the Super Bowl in 2006 by giving its target audience the ability to create their own idea for a Doritos ad. It also featured a reward if that ad ranked highest on the USA Today Ad Meter. This experiment had enormous success, which proved that the audience is vastly more engaged when they get the feeling they can make a difference. So use a two-way communication method in any form (feedback, Q&As, audience participation, etc) and this will increase and drive your target audience’s engagement. "


Create A Sense of Expertise in Your Niche

Agata Szczepanek, MyPerfectResume

"PR can help you drive audience engagement when it uses the brand specifics to craft certain campaigns. The campaign you want to launch has to be not only catchy, informative, humorous, or shocking. It also has to lie within your vertical. If you start talking about things you don't know about you will be labeled unprofessional. Your image and reputation will suffer. So, find a topic that relates to your industry and build our shareable campaign around it. If you're in the food business, don't refer to fashion. If you're in marketing, don't address medical-related topics. Don't try to be an expert in a field you don't know."


Thank you! This experts roundup was created in collaboration with Terkel. Sign up at terkel.io to answer questions and get published.

Subscribe to our growthhacking newsletter.

Follow the latest PR hacks from our experts.


PR ON THE GO

The Entrepreneur's Source For Global Prime PR Hacks.