If your business is small, that does not mean that you can afford to lose client. And - unfortunately - one bad blog comment or forum post that has managed to rank Google page 1 for the name of your brand (product, service, etc.) can seriously damage your sales.
But what if my market is just 100 clients? I cannot afford to pay for the expensive PR games!
Luckily you should not pay any big money, because new technologies will help you to go through the process of protecting the reputation of your brand/product/service at a fraction of a cost.
This is how it becomes possible...
Instead of using simple online PR, you can use PR + SEO. For those of you who do not know what SEO means, this is search engine optimization and the aim of SEO is to push a certain web page to higher ranks in search engines.
This can sound strange, but PR + SEO costs LESS that simply PR. But this is a fact.
Instead of creating tons of info, you can create just a few public opinion units (article or press release or video or forum post or blog publication or blog comment) and then - with the help of SEO instruments - you can push these public opinion units up in search engine ranks. And you control on what keywords you are pushing them.
No longer you need to disperse the efforts, create tons of info and then hope that sooner or later it will rank well. Instead you create just a few different publications, push them up for the keywords you need - and the reputation is protected.
So, do the comparison game yourself. On hand, budget for creation of dozens of articles, press releases, media buzz (most likely this will cost you a few thousand USD at least!) or just a few publications pushed up with SEO instruments to page 1 for the keywords that you need (most likely this will cost you a few hundreds of bucks).
Several thousand USD vs few hundreds USD.
For the owner of small business with small budget the frugality of the later option is obvious. And with a few-to-several sales the owner will compensate the expenses. In any case you will lose these sales if you don't work proactively and do not "control" what people see in search engines for the name of your brand/product/service.
As you can see, PR can be frugal, provided it is done together with SEO. And looks like this combination of PR+SEO has great chances to become a new trend on the market of public relations.
For more information about frugal public relations techniques, please join the discussion held on this blog post.
