Henry Ford revolutionised manufacturing with the assembly line, a process that maximised every dollar spent. Ford famously said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” His relentless focus on efficiency and strategic investment turned Ford Motor Company into an industry giant, proving that smart budget management can transform an organisation’s fortunes. This blog will tell you how you can achieve a remarkable impact by investing smartly and making the most of your PR budget.
For any business to be successful, they must be able to manage their budgets across all departments – this is no different when it comes to PR. A potential barrier to organisations using PR is that they won’t be able to do enough with the resources they have.
This prevents these companies from leveraging the many benefits that PR can bring, such as supporting organic lead generation and recruitment efforts. To help overcome this obstacle, here are 6 ways to make the most of you budget and drive real value for your business through PR.
1: Set Clear Objectives from the Start
In order to drive PR value, you must first decide what you want to achieve. For some companies, this may be attracting investment. For others, reputation management could be top of the priority list. Once you’ve decided what your objectives are, you’ll be able to plan a strategy aligned with the outcomes that are most important to your organisation and make the most of your PR budget. This will ensure that you don’t waste PR resources on goals that aren’t relevant to your business.
2: Choose the Right PR Partner or Team
Perhaps the most important aspect to consider when ensuring that your investment in PR is delivering a return, or doing anything else related to PR for that matter, is making sure that you have the right PR partner to help you. An experienced agency can support your PR efforts, ensuring that activities align with what you want to achieve and doing the heavy lifting in terms of content creation (saving your team time). They can also work to your budgetary requirements and often have different packages to choose from.
3: Value Quality Over Quantity
To assess PR value and impact, you have to remember that quality is better than quantity. This means generating coverage in publications and on channels that get your brand in front of your target audience. In other words, you need to focus your PR strategy to make the most of your budget. For example, if you’re looking to generate leads for your business, sharing news with relevant trade outlets will help to reach prospective customers, rather than targeting a broad range of media using “spray and pray” tactics.
4: Make Measurement a Priority
Tying in the need to set clear objectives, another way to make the most of your PR budget and drive PR value is to set clear deliverables or KPIs with your PR team or partner early in the process. These may include media reach, website traffic or inbound enquiries. This way, everyone is on the same page regarding your organisation’s PR goals. It also allows you to see if changes are needed – which brings us to our next point…
5: Be Flexible with Budget Allocation
People may think that in order to get a return on investment and drive PR value, they need to stick strictly to their plan. There is some truth in this as it can take time for the impact to be realised, but flexibility is crucial. Avoid locking the budget into long-term tactics that may not deliver. An organisation must be able to quickly shift resources as their business, and the market landscape, evolves. For instance, you might start out by channelling your PR efforts into boosting your employer brand to help talent retention and attraction, but your focus then might shift to supporting international expansion.
6: Leverage and Repurpose Content across platforms
Producing content from scratch is essential for any PR activity – after all, quality content is the backbone to successful PR – but it can be time-consuming. However, you can mitigate this by repurposing your content across multiple platforms. This could mean turning press releases into blogs or using media coverage for social media posts. As a result, PR is all about maximising the outcome and value of activities, enabling you to make the most of your PR budget.
As you can see, there are many ways to make the most of your PR budget. A smart strategy is not about spending less but spending wisely. If you are able to strategically manage your budget and plan, you can start thinking about PR not as a cost but as an investment which delivers real value for your business. Just as Henry Ford transformed his company by focusing on making every dollar count, your business can achieve remarkable results by applying the same principles to making the most of your PR budget and turn thoughtful investment into lasting impact.
If you want to find out more about how Comit can help you make the most of your PR budget, get in touch with the team today!