Vikki Millichamp, Consultancy Director of Edgewords, explains why all businesses, small medium and large, can benefit from professional PR advice.

The term public relations is well known today, but all too often for the wrong reasons, many people when they hear the phrase PR think of the spin doctors in Whitehall, or think back to the incredibly popular Edina and Patsy who were Absolutely Fabulous!

Despite the term public relations now being well known, many people still do not understand exactly what PR is.

Public relations is the communication between an organisation and its stakeholders - the groups of people who either affect the running of the company, or are effected by the company. For example, most businesses have stakeholders in the form of customers, potential customers, employees, potential employees. If the business is one that requires heavy traffic to go through a town, then that business also has the town's local residents as a stakeholder, as the traffic coming in and out ultimately affects the people who live there.

All businesses need to communicate with their stakeholders. How can potential customers give you their business if you haven't told them what your company does? How can you recruit the best employees without first letting them know why your company is a good company to work for, and that there are positions available?

Good public relations is more than just the simple process of telling group A about product B; a good PR practitioner will help its client identify all the different groups that it should be communicating with, but most importantly will help to define the messages that it should be giving and identify the media which should be used.

Before creating Edgewords PR consultancy, Vikki Millichamp managed one of Siemens' PR departments. The technology created by Roke Manor Research, Siemens' R&D company, was incredibly complex. The people that Roke Manor Research needed to communicate with needed to know that the new technology was available and how it would benefit their own products and business; on the whole, they did not need to know and did not want to know the complex workings of the technology, or exactly how the engineers had developed it.

Often companies get too internalised and forget to always look at their communications from the stakeholders point of view. Customers want to know why your product or service is the best one for them, and how it will benefit their own business. They are less interested in how long it took you to develop it, or who in the company was responsible for that particular project.

It is also important to remember that the key messages must be tailored for each specific group. For example, a company that has launched a new product needs to tell customers, potential customers and employees.

These three groups all need to be considered individually, although you are telling them all about the same new product, the message will be different for each. Customers want to know how it will complement the product they have already been buying, employees will want to know how it is effect them, what implications the production of this product will have on their jobs.

The mediums by which you communicate with these different groups also varies; if the company produces a customer newsletter, you can inform current customers via this, similarly, you can tell employees using internal newsletters or intranets, to reach potential clients you need to use other mediums which this target audience will see. For example, if the business operates in a business-to-business market, it can place press releases in suitable trade magazines, if you want to target consumers, press releases and articles need to placed in consumer interest magazines and or regional and national newspapers, TV etc.

A good public relations consultant will be able to advise you who the groups are that your company should be communicating with; the messages you should be telling them; the means by which you can reach them, whether that is using newsletters, websites, trade publications, consumer publications, the consultant will also produce the required written material.

Rather than small and medium sized organisations believing they are too small to employ a PR professional, they should be thinking, how can I grow the business and tell people what we are doing if we don't implement sound public relations? Employing the services of a reliable PR consultant means that the company gets all the skills of a highly trained professional, without incurring full time employment costs. There are many excellent PR professionals offering consultancy services to small and medium sized organisations, most charge a daily rate so the business only pays for days when work is required.

For advice and contact details about PR consultants, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations has a comprehensive database of registered PR professionals.

For more information about the benefits of PR, and how a clear communication plan can benefit you company contact
Vikki Millichamp.

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Vikki is a PR Consultant with Edgewords PR. This article is free to republished provided the hyperlinks are left working.