For business owners who strive to maintain low overhead, marketing and PR are often among the first services to get the proverbial budget cut. It’s understandable that entrepreneurs want to save money by taking on tasks they can do themselves, rather than outsourcing them at a cost – but in some cases, doing your own PR can be just as costly.
A great example of this is crisis management. At some point, every business experiences a crisis that may affect its brand image. Some of the most common examples include:
- Disgruntled clients taking their case to the media
- Activism groups attacking a business to draw attention to their cause
- Unfortunate or tragic accidents at a business becoming local or national news
- Poor online reviews via Yelp, Google or other review outlets
- Negative buzz on Facebook or Twitter
In any of these scenarios, crisis management must be implemented immediately in order to mitigate the situation and minimize the damage; depending on the type of crisis at hand, there are very specific tactics that should be carried out right away.
Meanwhile, the show must go on in terms of the business’s daily operations. In most cases, it just isn’t possible for the ownership to take on both at the same time. Either the operations side or the PR side will suffer, and the result will typically be a profit loss. By getting a PR team on board to tackle the crisis, the business owner can turn his or her focus back to running the business so that sales, production and revenue flow can continue uninterrupted.
Crisis management is just one of the many reasons why doing your own PR is rarely a good idea. When your business experiences a brand crisis, the best way to proceed is to contact a PR firm that has crisis management in its wheelhouse – the sooner the better.