The role of public relations in startup growth

Building a manufacturing company from the ground up involves crafting your image with the same care as your products. Startups live or die on the ability to get their brand and products out in front of investors and decision-makers.

The best manufacturing public relations strategies are built on three foundations. Let’s talk about them.

Building Visibility

Gaining the attention of potential investors and customers means getting the attention of media outlets and trade publications. Consistently distributing news releases and pitching bylined articles from your company leaders and experts will begin building name recognition.

Meanwhile, executing a social media strategy tailored to the dominant social-media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can help build relationships with the public and decision-makers.

Building Content

Producing a steady stream of useful and informative online content such as blogs, infographics, and social media posts can help gain attention for your manufacturing business while increasing its online visibility through search engines.

Writing in Forbes, Jason DeMers emphasizes that each piece of content produced by your company is a building block for visibility:

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable pieces of content, whether they’re for information or entertainment value, for the purposes of growing an audience. Over time, your website will rank higher in search engines, you’ll build a better reputation with readers, you’ll retain traffic for longer periods of time, and you’ll even see higher conversion rates and sales.

Blogs should be tailored to appeal to your audience. White papers, focusing on the applications of your products, can provide just enough technical information to inform decision-makers while being accessible to a wider audience. Online webinars can be used to educate potential customers and emphasize your company’s manufacturing expertise.

Building Up Your Reputation

Not all visibility is good visibility. The fortunes of your manufacturing company depend on its good name, and protecting its reputation in the pressure-cooker world of social media and 24/7 news coverage can be challenging.

Quoted in an Industry Week article, Daniel Diermeier, now provost of the University of Chicago, spoke about the destructive nature of bad publicity and the need for proactive reputation management:

The lesson you want to draw is that at this point, absolutely every aspect of your business model can get you into trouble and can lead to a reputational crisis… And that makes it really critical to develop reputation-management capabilities.

Reputation management requires monitoring social media and online news, being able to respond quickly and truthfully to issues, and being savvy enough to know the right balance of transparency and discretion. When it comes time to Always have a plan in place for responding to a potential PR crisis.

Need Help?

The manufacturing public relations team at Ripley PR has years of experience in developing and implementing the right PR strategies to protect and grow your company’s brand. Your management team can deal with the important work of building your company while we handle the details of growing your visibility. Contact us today and let us help you develop and implement the perfect manufacturing public relations strategy.