Ever heard about an important yet frequently overlooked (and might we say, severely underrated) marketing component called PR?

You’ve uncovered your brand purpose, iterated (and reiterated) your product or service to near perfection, pitched and sold your offering like hot cakes and built decent traction worthy of recognition. So what can startups easily do to push PR? The easiest (and most cost efficient) way would be to use the appeal of its founder to champion the brand’s story. In short, leveraging yourself as the brand’s key PR asset to share your beliefs, stories and actions.

Take Bryan Loo and his team at Loob Holdings, the holding company of homegrown bubble tea champ Tealive who made the decision to offer 250,000 vitamin C doses as a free booster option in Tealive drinks across all outlets in Malaysia following the recent movement restriction order. A clear winner in using Bryan’s appeal as the founder to push his belief that health is wealth during a pandemic.

Despite your startup’s best marketing efforts from pushing out social media content, running various promos and dropping bills on ad spend, this may not nearly be enough to crossover to “household brand name” status. Now, I know some of you might be thinking - PR sort of sounds like what advertising, social media marketing and influencer marketing is. So what’s the difference?

1. PR is responsible for communicating news and story angles to produce earned and unpaid media.

2. Advertising is a paid means of communication that uses strategy and messaging about the benefits of a product or service to influence a target audience’s attitudes or behaviours.

3. Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your target audience in order to build your brand, increase sales and drive website traffic.

4. Influencer marketing is the art of engaging with and promoting a brand’s product to influencers which would entail a strategic and paid transaction whereby the influencer receives a mix of financial or in-kind compensation in exchange for their media contributions.

The difference lies in the push versus pull marketing strategy. The goal of advertising, social media marketing and influencer marketing is to bring what you offer to customers in your marketing, creating that “push” towards consumers. On the other hand, the goal of PR is creating brand narratives to build and enhance reputations in order to generate positive publicity and constant buzz, creating that “pull” for consumers to be drawn into the brand.

Visionary tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is notorious (in both a good and bad way) for his public antics. If you come across his interviews talking about SpaceX with the media, his goal has been repeatedly mentioned - to colonise Mars. In one of his more recent stunts, he announced a partnership with a Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to send eight brave (and dare we say crazy?!) artists on a weeklong private spaceship to the moon in 2023 in an effort to promote art and the universe. Now that’s a news angle you can’t possibly miss!

If you’ve heard of PR, good on you! No, really, having come from a PR agency in my past life, explaining the magic of PR is only the beginning of a long, arduous battle. But once you understand its wonders and what effective PR can do for your brand, the battle is half won. To those who aren’t so familiar or have not heard of PR before - don’t be shy, we all learn something new each day!

Are you seeking guidance on your brand’s PR activities? Get in touch with us to find out how we can help you.