Back
How to cut through the noise with PR
In the home improvement sector, trust is the most important factor. Installers need to earn the total faith of homeowners if they are to secure their services. From there, homeowners will recommend your business to their friends and family in the area. Trust is the seed from which leads, sales and profit margins start to grow. As such, every home improvement business needs an inventive and coherent PR strategy in order to solidify its reputation.
What is PR?
PR, or Public Relations, is intended to bridge the gap between your business and the public. It’s about making yourself heard, building a reputable brand, and securing partnerships with various high-profile publications. However, excellent communication with the press is only the beginning. To really stand out from the crowd, you need a comprehensive and innovative PR strategy. But in today’s increasingly competitive glazing and home improvement industry, how is this possible?
Purpose. Planning. Execution.
Whatever project we undertake, we always first refer to the Purplex acronym: Purpose, Planning and Execution. This is the marketing mantra we apply to all our operations, both internally and for our clients. An effective and inventive PR strategy is no different. By breaking your campaign down into these three sections, you can begin to clearly map your road to success.
Purpose
When building a unique PR strategy, the first step is to establish the key messages and goals of your campaign. Here are some goals a home improvements business may want to target:
Launching a new product or service
If you’re launching a new product or service, it’s vital that potential customers are aware of it, particularly if it’s something the industry hasn’t seen before. One of our clients, for example, supply an innovative brand of ‘new wave doors’ that is set to change the bifold door market. Many trade magazines in the building and construction industry have ‘new product’ features, which are ideal places to secure a press release.
Lead generation
Quality and sustainable lead generation are, of course, one of the primary concerns for any growing home improvement business. Therefore, it’s likely that this will be a key goal for your PR campaign.
Educate your audience
Effective PR strategies can also help to communicate the more technical aspects of your products to a broad audience. By providing your audience with extensive, accessible information, you can help to build a solid reputation. Homeowners will choose you over other installers if they already view you as a trustworthy source.
Planning
The planning stage is possibly the most important part of the PR campaign. You need to know how to reach your audience in a way that captures their imagination. Of course, to achieve this, you first need to…
Identify your audience
This provides the foundation of your whole campaign. Yes, your target audience are homeowners, but what kind of homeowners? Are you targeting new movers or older long-term residents? Perhaps you’re targeting landlords or more commercial properties that require commercial glazing? The age bracket and interests of your audience will greatly inform how to present your information. From here, you can craft a PR strategy that’s designed to connect with them and their needs.
Build a media list
Once your target audience is established, you can determine which publications, magazines and websites they are likely to read. From here, you can build a list of editors and journalists to reach. These are the people you’ll want to build a strong and fruitful relationship with. You can feed them stories and regularly secure promotion for your business. However, you must be sure to provide any journalists with quality information. Do your research and accumulate the facts needed for a quality story. Home improvement magazines receive thousands of press releases every day, so yours needs to be something worth writing about.
Celebrity endorsements
A classic way to reach your audience is to secure an endorsement from a celebrity that they identify with. Furthermore, the media will inevitably take more notice of your story if there’s a famous face attached. At Purplex, our vast network has helped us to secure several celebrity appearances for big media events. In the world of PR, sometimes who you know is just as important as what you know.
Execution
Choose your words carefully
Every sentence of your press releases has the power to sway your audience one way or the other. When writing them, you need to think very carefully about what information they want to hear, and what type of language and tone will resonate with them. Everything will also need to be consistent with what you’ve released before. This is why it’s crucial that you establish your Purpose from the beginning. What is the core message you are trying to get across?
Tailor press releases to specific publications
When you’re sending stories out to dozens of publications, it can be easy to let your content become somewhat boilerplate. Ordinary stories don’t get published, and do nothing to increase your leads, sales or profits. That’s why it’s worth investing the time in creating exclusive, well-researched content that’s written with particular publications in mind. That way, it’s far more likely to get on the page, and into the hands of your audience.
Remember the human interest
The stories that stick with people are always the ones that appeal to our sense of humanity. Thankfully, the home improvement sector is intrinsically tied to the human experience. Everybody has a home that they want to make as beautiful as possible. Every installation is a potential case study or success story that can highlight your business’s contribution to your local community.
This advice is just the tip of the PR iceberg. To gain the full, exclusive inside scoop, download our whitepaper on how to build the perfect PR strategy.
The PR experts for the home improvement sector
Purplex is a full-service digital marketing agency, here to take your business to the next level. Our expert team of writers and journalists work collaboratively across our social media, SEO and web departments to create a PR strategy that gets results. For more information on how we can power your marketing, please contact us.
It’s time to build.
This entry was posted in News
