Public Relations

Public Relations (PR) is a set of strategic communication used by organizations or individuals to build and sustain relations amongst the target audience and various stakeholders. It envisages creativity, content curation, and reaching out to the target audience with exemplary communication efforts. Due to digitization, industrialization and global disruption, the human behavioral pattern has developed, so public relations’ role and working style has changed multifaceted.

The pandemic and technological trends like the utilization of online media, social media and digital marketing have reinforced the adoption of new-age technology for business development and effectively integrated marketing communication efforts which actively contributed to the transformation and expansion of the public relations industry.

Here are the top 5 notable trends that are reshaping the public relations industry in 2022:

1. Personalized PR Pitching

Communicating with key media with the same set of messages proved to be impotent as every journalist has a different mindset. Personalized pitches to specific journalists or influencers first present an eye-catching idea that is hard to miss. Second, tap directly on their interest to provide precise information in news-worthy content that maximizes the chance of being published by the targeted media outlets. It empowers PR professionals to create instant trust and nourish the relationship with media outlets and professionals who become supportive when pitching in the future.

2. Influencer Marketing

With the increased penetration of online and social media platforms, audiences have begun to trust peers’ recommendations as it generates curiosity regarding products or brands. People find more authenticity in content and recommendation from actual consumers, celebrities or influencers rather than in other forms of promotions and advertising.

Influencer marketing involves endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have an expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field. They upload sponsored content on their social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, or other online channels.

3. Tailored Content Strategy for the greater outreach

A customized content strategy builds customer loyalty and meets the objectives because it directly meets the target audience and potential customers. Tailored content is all about delivering experiences that speak directly to target customers.

PR professionals must emphasize their content strategy efficiently, ensuring its uniqueness engages and reaches the target audience. Incorporating appropriate keywords and other SEO optimization tactics makes the content visible on initial search pages, increasing search engine rankings. The personalized content strategy supported by data analytics and conclusion from existing campaigns proves a great way to place the client’s brand in the right spots.

4. Leveraging the power of Digital Media

With the news earlier restricted to only the traditional means such as newspapers and magazines, the entry of this new medium transformed the landscape and made information and news available anytime, anywhere.

From online press releases and sharing on social media platforms, the possibilities of digital PR are endless. With Web 3.0, marketing communication horizons are expanding further and brands can extend their presence into the digital world and gain immense publicity across the platforms that their target audience uses.

5. Impact Evaluation

In the Public Relations domain, it’s a challenge to show the impact generated as it is less tangible than other services. All clients want to know the impression created and whether the money, time and efforts that went into a campaign changed consumer behaviour and profit generated.

To prove the campaign’s ROI, meaningful metrics that relate directly to business goals and objectives are required. PR firms can create winning strategies, deploy them through suitable platforms, and create and measure campaign success metrics.

Credits:
Content: Vaibhav Chandra
Graphics: Shrikant Landge
Publisher: Media Value Works
Social Media: Ravish Dhiran

Public Relations is the blend of art and science which manages the flow of communication among an organization and its target audience to build, manage and sustain its positive reputation. It involves monitoring and evaluating public attitudes and maintaining the mutual relationship. The public could be employees, the financial public (shareholders, financial media, investment and financial analysts), potential customers, government, women, youth and the general public.

Let’s discuss the top 6 functions of the public relations –

1) Target Audience Relations – For any flourishing enterprise, it is imperative to create and maintain a positive relationship with its target audience. Every activity must be seen, and the voice is heard by the target audience for conveying a strong message that says you are all about the common cause.

The public relations department often works closely across departments to achieve good relations through newsletters, magazines, corporate video, writing brochures, and preparing audio-visual materials for training and policy-transmission purposes.

2) Media Relations – Media is considered a crucial target public is requiring deliberate and effective effort. It is a mutually beneficial relationship between journalists and public relations professionals. One of the most significant benefits for journalists is the easy access to story ideas and sources. The public relation department is the one that supplies all information to media persons and organizations. and are responsible for dealing with and maintaining better relations with the media.

3) Crisis Communication – Crisis communication is all about managing media representation and relationships whenever some kind of threat takes place related to an organization’s reputation. People in the public relations department handle the components of a crisis communication plan. They are well versed in designating an official spokesperson, content strategy, and logistics to avert the crisis from happening again. The public relations function entails the development and targeted release of messages, both for the internal and external audience. The spokesperson is trained to manage challenging and hostile questions in a peaceful manner.

4) Lobbying – The Public Relations department comprises highly efficient communication professionals who are well-versed in influencing decisions. Lobbying refers to understanding their clients’ concerns, needs, and interests and using their knowledge of the legislative process to educate key decision-makers. It involves interacting with government officials and legislators to influence government decisions that affect the organization’s functioning.

5) Brand Reputation – The fundamental function of public relations is to manage and influence the brand’s positive perception within the target audience. All brand communication efforts comprise the organization’s core values and mission statement, which is reiterated during the dissemination of the message. The PR team communicates information regarding products to the public through media sources, and this leads to comprehensive awareness regarding products among people in the market and boosts brand value.

PR professionals work closely with the marketing team to make noise regarding the product, reinforcing advertising and promotion campaigns. Such strategies are imperative to uphold any enterprise’s goodness, prosperity, and common welfare facets.

6) Counseling – The Public Relations department is very energetic and active as they embrace themselves with new happening and trends across the market and daily basis. They did research, so they have a good understanding of the target audience and concerned market. This department plays a crucial role in marketing communication efforts and empowers top-level management to make multiple decisions. It keeps them aware of all public matters and provides them suggestions in case of any problem or product mishap.

Credits:
Content: Vaibhav Chandra
Graphics: Shrikant Landge
Publisher: Media Value Works
Social Media: Ravish Dhiran

Public relations is a significant consideration for any enterprise. How an organization interacts with their target audience and the impression generated directly projects business benefits and goodwill amongst potential customers and the general public.

Public relations is the most productive and deliberate effort to develop a strong brand image. It strategically communicates and represents an individual or an organization to the target audience to influence public perception. Effective Public Relations efforts are crucial for business development, retaining existing customers, and preventing them from turning to rivals.

Technology has multifacetedly empowered every aspect of modern businesses, and no industry has been left untouched. Tech advancements have shaped numerous previously intense and sophisticated tasks much easier and cheaper to complete, and the public relations industry is no exception to tech advancements.

Monitoring the Coverage

All PR efforts go waste if the coverage garnered across media is not monitored. The surveillance of media and coverage has always been challenging aspects of the public relations industry, but it has changed drastically.

Earlier, media monitoring meant checking the local and national press, mainly via newspapers, television news and radio programs, cutting the newspaper clippings or print coverage and sharing it with the client. Today, many data analytics-based media monitoring tools are available to check online coverage by keywords and social media impressions. More crucial is getting a better understanding of what people are saying about a company on social media.

Robust Research

The majority of pr professionals’ time goes into researching and developing effective pr strategies. Research scenarios have changed drastically with the dawn of the internet and search engines. Before the Internet and search engines, pr professionals manually collected information from newspaper clippings, press releases, marketing agencies, magazines, etc.

Today we have most of the information available on just a finger type. Search engines have exceptionally empowered the pr industry to get the research work robust and be one step ahead of competitors.

Tracking Performance

In the Public Relations industry, showing the impact generated is challenging as these services are less tangible than others. It was challenging to show the results of integrated marketing communications campaigns in the past due to manual and non-precise tracking. But the digital world has finally been armed with tools to help with PR measurement and optimization. Setting a list of such KPIs gathers data and analyses the organization’s performance. Analytical data generated from online media websites and social media sites, including social media mentions such as tagging, tweeting, etc., consumer surveys to scale brand awareness, and other AI and ML-based tools widely used to determine PR reach.

The metrics and analytics support strategy makers to have a holistic view of the bigger picture and the details about the outcomes of campaigns and future approaches to making new strategies more robust and result-oriented.

Online Events

Holding industry events such as award ceremonies, conferences, seminars, training, skill development workshops, etc., is a thought-provoking effective measure to solidify the organization’s presence and voice as a leading industry personality.

Events are the best place to communicate with the potential audience and customers with a common interest. Developing and nurturing relationships is crucial, which leads to fulfilling objective sets such as business development, goodwill management and creating a customer base.

Introducing your client or spokesperson in-person leaves a long-lasting impression as the public remembers by the face, visuals, event ambience, and integrated communication. After the pandemic’s inception, most events have shifted to online mode, allowing the maximum number of people to join and pr professionals to publicize on a more prominent front.

The impact of Technology on the public relations industry will continue to evolve in future. Implementing data analytics tools, machine learning, and AI have tremendous potential to empower PR professionals to understand better editors, reporters, bloggers, influencers, and analysts.

Media Value Works have embraced technological advancements and provided its clients with effective and impactful public relations campaigns.

Contact us to learn how we can help you develop a better PR strategy for your business.

Credits:
Content: Vaibhav Chandra
Graphics: Shrikant Landge
Publisher: Media Value Works
Social Media: Ravish Dhiran

The rapidly expanding use cases of data science and big data analysis have now penetrated the Real Estate sector, an industry which is poised to touch $4,263.7 billion globally by the year 2025, as per Grandview Research.

The capability to make better data driven decisions results in improved efficiency and cost savings for the entire stakeholders of the real estate industry. Some of the immense benefits of a seamless availability of  data and better informed decisions for the sector include-:

• Reduction in construction, operations and maintenance costs of real estate projects and equipment.
• Avoidance of time and cost overruns of projects
• More effective project planning and execution
• Less accidents on sites
• Better ability to drive customer loyalty for repeat purchases
• Better contracts and other documents management
• Significant savings in O&M through better warranty management
• More effective sourcing through well-organized vendor management
• Better compliance with government regulations

A data-driven approach also significantly lowers the OPEX of real estate players by enabling consistency, objective decision making, standardization & benchmarking, comparing against benchmarks for course correction, availability of insights for better informed decision making, predictive analytics etc.

Even a 5 percent reduction in cost of rebars and cement can save crores of rupees in a single project. That is the power of data driven decisions. 

Enhanced Market Outreach

Real estate buyers face a host of choices and options when it comes to purchasing a property. This makes it difficult for realtors to understand what property will interest a particular set of customers?, how will they zero in on numerous potential clients? The answer to that is data-driven decisions.

While agents still dominate the industry in reaching out to end customers, data analysis tools are now precisely capturing customer sentiments and expectations. This has enabled realtors with improved targeted marketing by acquiring the customised requirements of customers.

Prevailing Challenges in Indian Real Estate Sector

Real Estate operations generate huge volumes of data including-

• Research to identify the best locations to set up new projects at
• Project design, planning, budgeting
• Sourcing
• Construction operations
• Lead generation and management
• Contracts and document management – partners, suppliers, government, customers
• Property maintenance and management
• Society formation, conveyance and handover

Some of the major challenges facing the real estate industry are lack of established processes to identify and capture useful data, lack of awareness about the availability of technology to capture, analyze and use this data for better-informed decision making.

The largely unorganized nature of this industry that has a few large names and a huge mass of unorganized sub-contractor and labor supply industry comes as another challenge. The most common inhibitor to data driven approach in the real estate sector however comes as a lack of awareness regarding how technology deployment can drive break-through improvements in profitability, timeliness and quality of projects.

Besides lack of awareness, the availability of specialized technology products and service providers is another challenge in this industry.

Also sourcing, construction, operations and maintenance processes in the real estate sector are full of inefficiencies, due to the largely unorganized nature of the bulk of the industry. Even the large known brands to have to depend on subcontractors from the unorganized sector for some of their activities.

Many of the large IT service providers who also provide services to this industry treat this as just one of the many verticals they service, and a relatively small sector in comparison with the other sectors like BFSI, Telecom, etc that they are active in.

IT In Indian Real Estate Sector

The Indian real estate sector is fairly new to the concept of deploying IT in its operations. It is however experiencing increasing openness, especially at a point when the industry is going through troubled times and most players are looking actively for ways to drive efficiencies in their operations.

The government of India has also been very active in deploying technology for transparency and efficiency in infrastructure megaprojects, which is driving visibility for the good technology can do in the real estate sector too.

In the near future, as the networking technology continues to progress, it will create increasing amounts of data in and around structures, their use, and their users, further boosting innovation and disruption in the segment.