PR Trends that are worth following in 2019

By the time 2019 rolls around, 2.77 billion people will be on social media. What does this mean for your brand? On top of running your startup and small business, the challenge to perform on social media can put a strain on your work-life balance. Luckily for you, we’re here to give you a trend cheat sheet so you can stand out from the crowd. Here’s a wave of PR trends that are worth riding on:

IF YOUR TEAM AIN’T LEARNING, YOU AIN’T LEADING.

Want to know a little-known secret? Supporting others won’t kill your success. It builds it! It’s all about lifting your team up to be the best they can be.

Platforms like LinkedIn allow professionals of all positions to share their personal lessons from the workplace. It’s important to make sure your employees have a good experience while they work for you – their word of mouth is as powerful as anyone else’s in the new age of media. With this being said, being transparent amongst your employees and fostering their success will only reflect better on who you are as a company.

Encourage your team to share their insights and experiences online and help them gain a digital presence. This way, your business can get more exposure through their personal brand and increase your company’s ethos with all the good they have to say about your biz. It’s hard to make people give a shit about companies, but very easy to convince them to like who you are as a person. No wonder influencers are so successful!

LEAVE IT TO THE EXPERTS

We get it. If you’re building your empire from scratch, budgets and multitasking mean everything. You may feel inclined to manage your own PR and digital communications, but you might actually be doing more harm than good by doing so. To gain a following, it’s essential to produce engagement and trust us when we say that it’s a time-consuming feat.

There’s a growing trend in businesses leaving their brands in good hands: PR specialists. From hiring an internal PR team to specialized PR firms, there’s a solution for everyone no matter the budget. With public relations being at the heart of digital presence and brand management, it’s easy to see why calling in the experts is a rising trend in the startup world.

Not financially there to afford any of the options above? You can invest in marketing tools like BuzzSumo and Hootsuite instead. They’ll require more work, but you’ll have more control and save money on PR and Marketing.

DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Stories sell, products don’t. Take a look at how pharmaceutical drugs do their marketing: when you buy their drug, you’ll become more of yourself. You’re going to be more social, have a great life, and conquer the world. You’re buying the idea and not the science of it. The same goes for every other market out there! If Advil is selling with storytelling, why shouldn’t you?

Remember how we mentioned that people like to connect with people and not companies? Creating a personality online is crucial to driving sales. Share the stories about your company. Tell the world who your customers are, how your product is changing lives, and how you stand out from your competition. If your brand was a person, what would they be like? What are their passions and frustrations? The world is waiting for you to tell them.

From the looks of it, these trends are here to stay. We would also like to remind everyone that it’s about the quality of the content you produce, and not the quantity based on likes and followers (Micro-influencing is also a trend! Perhaps we’ll cover that another time).

What are some PR trends that you’ve noticed lately?

If you’re looking to partner up with a PR Agency to amp up your online presence feel free to contact us to book a free consultation to see if we’re the right fit for you.