Public Relations builds your reputation and increases your visibility to potential customers and partners, as well as ensuring that key audiences understand and accept your position. Forming and implementing a PR strategy is not about making friends; it's about removing obstacles to your business.
A strong publicity strategy builds awareness of companies, their offerings and their place in the market. It builds credibility and faith in the brand by constructing a coherent story that is communicated through media of who the company is, and what it stands for.
PR builds and protects brands and the companies that own them. It is the creation of a common knowledge in the minds of a public that reflects what you'd want them to think about you. PR is the "But everyone knows...", the "I heard that...", the "Someone told me ...", the "I read somewhere...".
Effective Public Relations is the knowledge that you leave with your audiences, built up by telling your story again and again, in a hundred different ways, in a hundred different media, consistently building on simple, clear themes.
Public Relations helps build that feeling of confidence audiences have in your organisation - confidence built by being consistent, clear, open and honest.
When your sales people call prospects, they'll be welcomed and understood. When customers contact you, they already know why they want to do business with you. When something goes wrong, PR earns you the benefit of the doubt and buys time to make things right - before you see a storm of negative publicity in the media.
Our Public Relations methodology incorporates all forms of media - traditional print and broadcast, and the newer online media, including blogs, social media sites, forums and others, both Web-based and mobile.
We have an approach that we believe is quite enlightened. Read on to understand how our Public Relations philosophy underpins how conduct strategic PR planning.
The objective of PR is not column inches - it's business growth.
You want a good PR agency because you want to improve your sales and build your brand - that's the bottom-line objective of every business. Whether it's a launch to introduce a product, a campaign to educate the market about an issue, or longer-term brand-building, the objective in PR is to ensure that your commercial people are meeting customers that know what your business is about, and want to talk to you.
We know... everyone says they're strategic. But we enjoy, we live, and we're fascinated by the high tech and telecoms industries, and the business environment we all work in. So "strategic PR" to us means campaigns that have context within current trends, new developments and the hot topics in the industry, and map to your brand.
You can't be strategic if you don't know the industry, read the wires, follow the news and know the who's who. We really are strategic. Trust us. And our strategies.
PR is about influencing people - sometimes one or two, sometimes ten thousand. Sometimes a shotgun approach is the best. Sometimes a sniper's rifle. Sometimes a hand grenade.
Our media relations are based on mutual respect and friendliness, keeping accurate press databases, and knowing which journos are where. We send out releases at the best times, negotiate exclusives, and deliver on time. We take enormous care to produce quality writing. Our online PR tactics are based on an understanding of the technology and the unwritten rules of the Internet world - but are still grounded in high quality content delivered to the right people. Get the basics right, and the rest will follow.
Are you getting positive coverage? Are media asking for you by name when they're doing a feature? Do you know what online conversations are talking about you? Results are summarised in monthly coverage reports, with analysis of tactical activities and their success, making sure you're getting the effort that you're paying for. And more.
Contact us to find out more about how Sentient Communications can help you tell your story to the world.
There is a beautiful poem by Leo Marks called "The Life that I Have". It was also a poem used as a way to encrypt secret messages, most famously by a French agent called Violette Szabó, who was parachuted into German-occupied France by Britain's military intelligence in World War II. She was brave, resourceful, beautiful, young (just 23); she was capture, tortured and shot by the Gestapo in 1944.
What does this have to do with PR? The poem "The Life That I Have" was a poem-code, a simple (and fairly insecure) way to send coded messages during WW II. Leo Marks was the code officer at the SOE during the War, who wrote original poems as they were harder to decipher than established works.
The poem needed to communicate a message - but it could also be a beautiful work in its own right.
The Life That I Have
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.
Leo Marks
