Extending Your Advertising Through Public Relations
Kathy Burnham, APR, senior vice president, Padilla Speer Beardsley Manufacturing

Your company has developed a great product, delivers fantastic services and you have satisfied, happy customers. You develop a great, eye-catching advertisement that shows off your product and has a great call to action. You think you're set. Well, you've done a lot of things right, but there are ways to extend that message from the glossy, colorful, full-page ad that will have even greater impact.

Some standard public relations activities can help extend the messaging that begins with advertising and progresses to demonstrate solutions, thought-leadership and expertise. Advertising is great at helping to build awareness about a brand or product, but since advertising copy is quick and to the point, filled with graphics and photos, there's little time to truly dive into the benefits of what the product actually does. That's where public relations activities shine.

Several public relations tactics can help deliver messages about your product's benefits, and how your customers do their jobs better because of them.

Bylined articles

Bylined articles discuss a technical issue and detail why that issue is a challenge to industry. It also details solutions. For example, high energy prices is an issue that face manufacturers and consumers. A recent bylined article by an automation manufacturer discussed how variable speed drives can help manufacturers reduce energy costs by controlling motors that operate fans and pumps in industrial settings. To be valuable to readers, the information must be unbiased (read: non-commercial and non-promotional) and provide solid information people can take back to their jobs. Bylined articles can benefit your company by discussing the exact challenges that your company solves with its products.

Case Studies

When you tell your friends a story, you use examples. When your sales people talk to prospects, they talk about the experience they have with other companies in similar situations. Case studies do the same thing, but to a wide audience. Trade publications, such as Plant Services, are always looking for interesting case studies that show readers how companies are using technology to solve challenges and make plants more productive. Developing case studies that focus on the end user, not on the products you sell, and submitting them for publication is a fantastic way to use public relations to help tell your story, and extend your communications and marketing activities.

All in all, public relations enables you to tell your story more in-depth than an advertisement or brochure can. Developing bylined articles and can also give your company and staff credibility, and position you as experts in your field. All this can help do what every manufacturers needs: Sell more product.