“How soon can you see results from PR?”

Our views on what builds steadily and what can happen quickly.

PR doesn’t work like other forms of marketing. Instead of creating content that directly reaches your audiences, PR creates content for market influencers to love first so they spread your messages themselves. 

And though this process may take a bit longer, the opinions of market influencers are increasingly trusted as their messages are seen as more legitimate. This means, if you can get journalists, market leaders and even search engines to like or recommend your products or services, you can get  high returns on engagement, web traffic and even business leads.

But, if the PR process is longer, how quickly should you expect results?

Realistically, the answer depends on a few things

There’s a lot of variables at play when it comes to PR so realistically, your answer to the question will depend on several factors:

• Your PR aims

• Your PR strategies

• The time and efforts put into PR

Your PR aims

You want to make sure that your business objectives are being enabled by your PR strategy. But different objectives take different lengths of time to meet.

Increasing company visibility, for example, is an aim that is more quickly achieved than the goal of building a well-respected reputation. Whilst the former requires content to strategically target audiences and raise their awareness of your company, the latter requires trust to be built. 

Trust takes time - after all, you must do more than raise brand awareness. You must show solidity, reassurance, and a great understanding and care for customers - you build a connection with your audience and resonate with their values. This is not built overnight and requires nurturing - it’s something we care about wholeheartedly.

Therefore, depending on your goals, you can expect different time frames.

Your PR strategies

Once you have your aims, you can create a strategy to achieve them. PR strategies can include many elements including media relations, SEO enhancements, content creation and award wins - but, it’s key to note that these different components take different lengths of time to successfully implement.

Media coverage

Gaining media coverage, for example, requires not only establishing key media messages, but building relationships with key journalists, pitching article ideas, writing press releases as well as finding and responding to feature opportunities and journalist requests. 

Beyond this, we’re not just working with our own timelines but journalist’s. In the end, they decide what makes the final cut and when an article will be published. 

Because of this, it can take a few months to see increased web traffic and brand awareness levels. 

Saying this, a strong news release can get instant pick up from online publications that will help increase visibility and raise awareness. We see this firsthand for our clients in publications like People Management, HR Magazine, Yahoo!Finance, Forbes, Employer News, Fresh Business Thinking and Occupational Health and Wellbeing. You can see what one of our customers said in the ‘Need it quickly?’ section below.

SEO

An article from Forbes states that, on average, SEO strategies can take around 4-6 months before outcomes begin to appear. But remember, these results are only the beginning - though SEO strategies take longer to successfully implement, results should continue to grow overtime. 

This longer time frame is expected because of the number of variables that go into enhancing your SEO. Improving site speed, optimising website content and gaining backlinks to improve your website authority are just part of the SEO enhancement process. 

From this, search engines then must work out how relevant your site is for certain search terms and how useful your content is for their users according to their own algorithms. All this requires some time and persistence to get right.

Content marketing

The results of your content marketing will also vary in time. It’s worth remembering that this is not a quick fix to increase traffic and leads. On average, you can start seeing results from content marketing within 6-9 months.

This takes time to yield results because you must build up a steady portfolio of quality content that creates interest and provides true value to your audiences. Not only this but you have to successfully target this content at the right people. Often, this requires combining your content marketing with your SEO efforts so that your work starts to rank highly in organic search results.

To add another element to the mix, your SEO and content marketing strategies will also depend on the levels of competition out there. For example, if you have 20 companies vying for the top space on a search engine results page for ‘HR tech’, it will be much easier (and take less time) to achieve than if there are 1000 companies also vying for this space.

Likewise, there are more companies seeking coverage in national newspapers than in niche industry publications. So if your PR strategy is aiming for the big publications, this can increase the difficulty and speed of gaining media coverage results. Evidently, how you define your targets and PR strategies will implicate the length of time you should expect results.

Your time and investment into PR

The timing of your results also depends on the time and energy you invest into your PR. 

How persistent, consistent and dedicated you are will have an impact.

This will decide, for example, how many press releases and pitches will be created and sent to journalists each month, affecting your chances of gaining coverage and highlighting key messages.

Or for content creation, the more time and energy spent creating increases the quality and quantity of the content you can put out there, ultimately impacting how quickly you can effectively reach your audiences.

Beyond this, combining media relations, SEO and content creation will provide quicker outcomes than implementing these techniques separately. Therefore, the more you can invest in creating a well-rounded and complementary strategy, the faster you will boost successful outcomes.

Need it quickly?

Yet having said this, PR isn’t always slow. It really does depend on the topics you’re talking about, the niche you’re in as well as the audiences, search terms and publications you’re targeting. For example, online publications enable a very quick turnaround of coverage, as opposed to a printed publication that may have a lot of kudos but can take weeks for an article to appear.

Your business can actually get some very quick results from PR. Take our client, Inpulse, for example. After their first month of PR activity, they said this...

“Within the first month... our web stats went through the roof. What we normally achieve in a month in terms of site visitors, we achieved in the first week. Our Domain Authority has increased from 25 to 29, and we've achieved coverage in Forbes, Yahoo Finance and HR media to date…”

Now, we’re not just saying this to toot our own horn but to show that though you may not see the full effects of your PR for a few months, you can still see really nice, positive effects quickly which we build on together to reiterate key messages.

We know that PR can create solid and steady improvements to your business reputation and lead generation. We are, without doubt, fans. Are you yet?

If you want to understand how PR can specifically help your business, get in touch - we’re happy to help.