December 5th, 2024
Is PR the Game Changer Your 2025 Business Marketing Needs?
With 2025 just around the corner, businesses will be contemplating marking strategies for the year ahead and thinking how they are going to support business objectives.
However, in the wake of the October 2024 Budget and general economic doom and gloom, it is more than likely that some businesses may be thinking about cutting their marketing spend. Knee-jerk reactions will be in play – and marketing is always the first thing to suffer.
This second scenario is not new to us at Catapult PR. In 26 years, we’ve seen many downtimes, recession, Brexit and, of course, the pandemic. However, we’ve always kept our clients on the front foot through all of these and the results have been phenomenal. Rather than cutting back, we’ve gone full throttle to push our clients’ brands during such times, because we know the rewards of doing so can be phenomenal. Marketing is actually the last thing you should cut in an economic crisis.
We’ve seen this time and again, with a really marked example being for one of our tourism PR and travel PR clients – a hotel for which we handle PR and content – during lockdown. Our tourism PR initiatives were so bold and full of thought leadership, amidst a huge hospitality crisis, that they were even scraped and used by the Government, as part of its official tourism and travel staycation PR, advertorial and media relations campaign.
Keep calm and carry on marketing in 2025!
The need to stay calm and not cut back is the underlying topic of our latest video, Is PR the Gamechanger Your 2025 Business Marketing Needs, in which we discuss why it’s vital to ‘carry on marketing’ (https://youtu.be/2F9iffas4EM?si=aVToDt5O1ClGnX56
However, the other topic of this video is PR. We’re in panto season and there’s no doubt that PR is still regarded as the Cinderella of marketing. Anyone who is adopting that viewpoint needs to wise up fast. PR has become more fundamental to businesses than possibly at any other time, fitting all that the digital world and SEO actually require. Its become a chameleon, with traditional PR techniques dovetailing with digital requirements and suiting them to a tee.
We raised an eyebrow the other day, when a business said they had “no need of PR”. If you want to know why they should rethink that, do watch the video.
PR – the marketing multi-tool all businesses need in 2025
Jane brands PR in a very different way from usual. She explains that it is a multi-tool and that’s why it becomes so relevant to any business that wants to extract every bit of value out of their marketing in 2025. There’s always a lot of noise from certain parts of the marketing world, especially those that seem ‘current’. Jane’s words should make marketers really think if they’re being swayed by that noise and not actually investing in the right thing.
Jane also argues that PR should be the driver of the rest of the marketing mix and shows how, in actual fact, PR is doing itself a bit of a disservice by sitting under a label that people associate just with media relations, without appreciating how fundamental a good PR person now is, to virtually every aspect of marketing. PR is truly a secret weapon, whose light has been hidden under a bushel for too long.
The insurance industry’s marketing wake-up call
This new video follows on from another one that we recorded, in November. The topic of that one was ‘Why Are Businesses Not Reaching Out to Customers’. That drew on our own research and the viewpoints of consumers with regard to insurance companies and their communications performance. This is part of our insurance PR thought leadership, which we have built over more than 30 years. You can watch this video here – https://youtu.be/UlLM2q9zzjA?si=b71-BbgDDdmDfqB6
Then, if you want to know more about the insurance research we conducted, you can download our booklet – ‘Your Insurance Marketing Wake-up Call’. There is lots of food for thought in there, if you are in the insurance world. It should, again, make you appreciate that the services of an insurance PR specialist are absolutely key to relationship building with insurance customers.
PR and SEO
But just going back to PR. One of the key things it can do is provide dual purpose and help get a business up the keyword rankings, through the content it can contribute and the human voice communications that can be utilised in blogs and news areas.
If you don’t think this works, let us leave you with this little gem. Catapult PR counts one of its specialisms as tourism PR, hence this credentials booklet. Yet, an agency in our location and of our size would ordinarily struggle to rank for that word – and we do not engage in Google Adwords, which merely gobble up the budget.
So how is it that, in the past month, we have twice been on page 1 of Google for the term ‘tourism PR’ ? The secret has been that of practising what we preach and creating vital content.
Not a bad way to demonstrate the power of PR and content and its compelling symbiotic relationship.
If you could do with a form of marketing in 2025 that can really work, when you place it in the right hands and are prepared to do your bit, (informing your PR agency of what’s going on and then signing off materials when produced), do get in touch.
Together, you and Catapult PR could really smash your marketing goals in 2025. Just email jane@catapultpr.co.uk to start the journey that has catapulted so many of our clients towards phenomenal growth, footfall, profitability, industry awards and thought leader status, not to mention early retirement, in some cases!
