As a small business owner, you’ve undoubtedly wondered how to incorporate public relations into your marketing strategy. How can PR help your business? Is it even necessary? And should you hire an agency or PR manager in-house, or just try to go it alone? All have pros and cons that you need to think about. We’ve compiled some interesting thinking points as you ponder how to incorporate this marketing tool into your overall business plan. This post ended up being pretty long, so we are splitting it into two parts. Tune back in next week for part deux!

Is PR necessary?

This is a question that surprising few small businesses ask themselves, but the answer is often “no” or at least, “not yet.” At the beginning phases of your business, PR is often not necessary. Keep in mind that public relations is not “marketing,” but just one small aspect of it. PR is about monitoring your reputation and sharing news about your business. If you are in the early stages of creating your business, chances are you don’t have much of a reputation (yet!). As to the latter, PR is only necessary when you have something truly newsworthy to share, so save it for these rare and special occasions.

Should I hire an agency or an in-house PR manager?

There are many benefits to hiring a PR agency or a manager to work in-house with you. When you hire a PR agency or professional, you are paying for the connections that they already have with the media, which can be a great way to get coverage and credibility for your business. However, the monthly retainer is often prohibitively expensive for start ups and small businesses, and you will probably end up being charged for services that you don’t need. In addition, agencies have dozens of other clients to tend to, so it is very likely that your business could fall by the wayside when building your reputation is at its most delicate, early stages.

How much does it cost? Can I afford it?

As you probably already know, hiring a PR agency or PR manager isn’t exactly cheap. Depending on the size of the agency, the retainer alone could set you back a few thousand to 15k per month. And according the the U.S. Bureau of Labor, hiring a PR manager to work in-house with you costs about $60k per year. That’s a lot of pocket change. Luckily, online PR services like PressKing allow you to spend as much as you want, whenever you want. So if you don’t have a ton of news to share every month, it’s probably smarter and more cost-effective to go with an online PR service. Plus, online PR services are better than traditional PR agencies for improving online visibility, page rank, Alexa Rank, SEO, etc.

As you can see, this is an important topic that we wanted to devote some time and energy to, but we don’t want you to bite off more than you can chew at once. So tune in for the exciting conclusion next week!

Until then,

The PressKing Team