4 signs your HR tech needs PR in its marketing strategy

While marketing is essential to target and attract key audiences, PR can add a whole new dimension to your marketing strategy - creating long term connections, perceptions and understandings that shift the way people think of and interact with your brand.

Through a constant reiteration of company messages across key media channels, PR can transform the associations people have with your organisation - moulding ideas of you as experts in your field, as market leaders with enormous industry experience, as industry professionals who truly care for their customers or other key images that matter to your brand.

So how do you know if your HR tech needs PR? Here are 4 signs you should incorporate it in your marketing strategy:

1. You need to build trust in your HR tech

It’s clear that tech markets are crowded and HR brands are fighting for visibility. But in such a busy space where audiences have so many options to choose from, brand authority is often a clinching factor. Buyers go to brands they trust.

For organisations that need to build trust in their own tech, PR is a strong way to go. Trust is a long term game that PR can build upon by consistently highlighting brand expertise and thought leadership across various channels. Not least through developing credibility-building client case studies, industry award entries and award wins, PR can reiterate the viability, effectiveness and success of your tech to showcase to potential buyers.

2. You want people to see you as more than tech

Behind great tech is often great people with great intentions and oodles of industry knowledge. Audiences love to see this too - they want to know that while the tech is effective, it’s run by professionals who truly care for their customers and have insights that demonstrate why their brand is going to be so useful to their own strategy. As the saying goes, people buy from people and adding this extra facet to your marketing strategy can be truly engaging.

If you have HR or relevant experts in your organisation, these individuals should be seen, heard and known by target audiences - a good PR strategy can create this exposure for them. 

On top of this, the HR media is often all about issues and solving them, creating the perfect opportunity for your brand’s experts to gain coverage and present the human qualities behind your brand.

3. Your HR technology can aggregate great data

Data is the compelling evidence HR audiences need to convince them of the need for your tech - if, through aggregated data, you can show prominent issues HR are struggling with - say, for example, engagement, wellbeing, retention or any people problems that your tech can help fix - then this can make strong media coverage in the HR space and provides a compelling case for why audiences should work with your brand. 

In marketing campaigns, there isn’t always a place for this data to sit centre stage, but in PR it can be used and reused across channels to really make the most of your tech’s intel and solidify you as an authority.

4. Your SEO strategy needs enhancing

Good PR can assist your SEO in several ways.

Firstly, it can help your organisation gain backlinks through media coverage or content shared on other websites. As well as this, PR teams can create SEO-enhanced content such as press releases or blog articles that appear high in search engine rankings and drive traffic to your site.

If your marketing strategy needs a boost in any of these areas, then PR is for you.

Still, bear in mind that in the HR market, HR media outlets don’t always give away backlinks for free. An HR specific PR strategy can help SEO in other ways: by boosting media coverage (and the opportunity for backlinks) in relevant and high-domain consumer publications, for example.

Still curious about whether PR is right for you? Check out the steps needed to create the perfect news story for your HR tech and see if this could work for you.