Why your local enterprise’s best PR team is unpaid
Sponsored by Semrush, written by Miriam Ellis, edited by Nichola Stott
Each new year, your local enterprise allocates budget towards various forms of PR to boost your business. Press releases, guest articles, influencer content, earned media, and other efforts vie for resources in your annual marketing strategy.
However, these strategies can quickly become costly alongside traditional paid media investments in programs like Google Ads and Local Services Ads. Nonetheless, you dedicate both time and money to each component because you need your locations and branches to be found and chosen by potential customers online.
But what if the most influential PR team for your brand is the one you don’t pay?.
What if you made this the year in which you could rein in spending on other forms of PR because you’re going to experiment with putting maximum focus on user generated content (UGC)?
Sound risky? Organic PR is growing in scope and value. Even though you don’t pay-to-play (and dictate outcomes), there’s tremendous potential for every brand.
The biggest elephant in the marketing room
The above TV ad is now nearly 30 years old, and it remains my favorite example of the problem with what brands say about themselves.
Let’s break it down:
What’s being sold?
According to Kellogg’s: milled corn, sugar, corn syrup, molasses, salt, vegetable oil (hydrogenated coconut, soybean and/or cottonseed), mixed tocopherols (vitamin E) for freshness, annatto extract color, wheat starch.
Vitamins and minerals: Reduced iron, niacinamide, vitamin B6 (pyridoxine hydrochloride), vitamin B2 (riboflavin), vitamin B1 (thiamin hydrochloride), folic acid, vitamin D3 and vitamin B12 in a colorful cardboard box.
In other words, a corn-based sugar cereal.
What is the core message the ad hopes to convey?
The product is so great that people behave as if suffering from an addiction when they can’t access it.
What does this messaging imply about the brand’s dreams and goals?
The brand would like people to behave as if they’re addicted to the product so they’ll have to keep buying it. They would like consumers to think, “I gotta have my Pops.”
What is the reality check?
Setting aside how disturbing it would be to see children actually become addicted to any substance, the reality check here is that what’s being sold is a cold cereal that someone might eat either if they like the taste of it and don’t have time to prepare a cooked breakfast.
Yet, no TV ad in the 1990s or now would present any product so factually or mundanely. Instead, advertising is traditionally employed to build fantasy and flair around its subject, even when what’s being sold is just sweetened corn in a box.
Why is this a problem?
Traditional PR may reveal the dreams of brands, but when it relies on fantastical depictions of life, the elephant enters the room.
Imaginative ads may be memorable, serving one segment of the customer journey or sales funnel because they build brand recognition, but this dynamic depends on the audience setting aside reality and knowing that what’s being presented is for entertainment purposes only.
Decades of “this isn’t real” messaging have culminated in the public coming to understand that when brands present themselves and their products, they can’t really be trusted.
This is a serious problem.
Brand trust by the numbers
Consider the following statistics:
- In a 2024 survey of 548 US business executives and 2,515 consumers, PcW found that 90% of brand executives believe that consumers trust their companies while only 30% of consumers actually do
- The same survey reveals that 42% of executives know that customer engagement is at stake when trust is absent, while 38% understand that profitability suffers without consumer trust
- Since the emergence of online local business reviews, surveys have routinely found that as many as 9 out of 10 consumers trust what customers say about brands more than what brands say about themselves
- In 2024, BrightLocal’s annual survey found that 91% of consumers say online reviews of the local branches of an enterprise impact the trust they feel in the overall brand
- The same survey found that 50% of consumers trust online local business reviews as much as they do personal recommendations from friends and family
Data-based facts like these may be better guideposts for budget allocations than basing goals on the fantasy dynamic inherent in advertising.
Early radio-based marketing claimed that using a particular soap could make people smell better to regain the love of their families, and early television ads tied toothpaste to getting dates. Such messaging either depends on public participation in fiction or leans on the perceived gullibility of consumers to an unflattering degree.
Today’s barrage of AI PR strongly suggests that public credulity is the main thing on which AI shareholders are staking their profit goals, despite multiple surveys finding that humans don’t trust this technology.
The PR road not taken
A significant problem is dreamed into existence when corporate boardrooms become too reliant on unreality. Unless you’re actually selling an addictive substance, it’s a pipe dream to fantasize about the public becoming permanently hooked on your product.
Meanwhile, it’s risky to become too dependent on entertaining customers’ imaginations as a poor substitute for genuinely engaging them by demonstrating awareness of their real lives, needs, and problems.
What if: instead of selling cold cereals as objects of obsession, PR depicted real customers buying them as a backup for mornings when they wake up too late to cook a full breakfast?
What if: instead of suggesting that a lack of soap and toothpaste stand in the way of customers being loved, manufacturers focused on the importance of loving yourself enough to find time in your day for little acts of self-care?
What if: instead of promoting AI on the basis of countless useless use cases, its vendors were more forthcoming about actual instances in which it might solve common problems?
The path we’ve chosen in advertising and PR has created a weird dilemma in which both brands and consumers are spending too much energy engaged in make-believe and too little time having authentic and trustworthy communications. We can’t do anything about the past marketing road not taken, but there has to be a better way to go forward.
How to hire your new PR team for free
Traditional PR tactics can support particular segments of the sales funnel, and I’m not in any way suggesting that your local enterprise should fire existing staff or terminate external partnerships if results are being delivered for your brand.
What I am saying is that you won’t find a more trusted PR dream team than the one that’s made up of your happy customers. While it’s true that this undervalued segment of the population will leave online reviews for your brand on your Google Business Profiles, Yelp listings, TripAdvisor listings, and other assets without you ever having to ask them to do so, there’s so much more you can do to turn these trusted volunteers into the best marketers money can’t buy!
What if, instead of spending quite so much time and budget on talking about yourself, you maximized the role of UGC in your marketing strategy via all of the following:
- Be sure to offer a legitimately useful product or service
For any of this to work, the absolute prerequisite to becoming a trusted local enterprise is that you must have a product or service with a genuine use case, and you must clearly identify what this use case is based on reality instead of fantasy
- Be present
Create an accurate listing on all of the relevant local business review platforms for each branch of your enterprise. Fill each listing out fully with correct location and contact information and enhance it with other media such as images and videos to signify the legitimacy of each business location.
- Be proactive
Kick off a guideline-compliant review acquisition campaign for each branch of your business using all of the following methodologies:
- Where possible, collect both email addresses and SMS numbers at the time of transaction
- Be sure you’re requesting reviews via both email and SMS, as studies have shown that a combined approach yields a higher volume of reviews than either approach taken alone
- Put review requests on your website, store signage, company vehicles, and across print marketing assets, including menus, brochures, mailers, and flyers
- Respond promptly to every review each branch of your enterprise receives to impactfully demonstrate to all potential customers that your business is not only appreciative of UGC, but both responsive and expert at resolving complaints when negative reviews arise. Hire new staff to accomplish review response management if you’re falling behind on this core marketing task. Invest in reputation management software to ease scaling.
- Don’t only focus on third-party reviews. Acquire first-party reviews and testimonials that belong to you instead of to third-party platforms.
- Don’t only focus on text-based reviews. Do everything you can to acquire both audio and video-based testimonials from your most engaged customers.
- Put UGC at the center of your marketing strategy
Don’t think of local business reviews as only living on your local business profiles. Take all of the laudatory UGC you’ve painstakingly acquired and put it at the center of your marketing strategy in the following ways:
- Publish this content on your website, including on your home page, reviews/testimonials pages, about pages, relevant product/service landing pages, relevant location landing pages, and on your blog
- Publish this content across your social media profiles for each branch of your enterprise
- Publish both text and video-based UGC as Google Business Profile Updates that convince searchers on the verge of a transaction to choose your business
- Publish video-based UGC as video content in the image/video section of your Google Business Profile
- Publish audio-based UGC as audio files on your website, podcast, and as the basis of podcast and radio paid advertising
- If you’re engaged in local or national television advertising, showcase customers’ sentiments about your business more than your own messaging
While you’ll never have to pay a customer to talk about your business (and incentivizing reviews is prohibited by both platform guidelines and the laws of multiple nations), the above strategy makes it clear that a serious investment of time will be essential.
Acquiring and managing UGC in the form of local business reviews and testimonials necessitates sufficient staffing, creative strategy planning, asset development, and formal campaigning, just like every other form of PR. The key differentiator is that the focus must be shifted from the business to the words of consumers, knowing that fellow consumers will trust them most.
How to turn a brand around that has become lost in fantasy land
It may be just this week that you were sitting in an all-hands meeting, listening to C-suites and co-workers strategizing a campaign based on puffed-up messaging about a product or service that’s rather simple or even broken. While some degree of lily-gilding is part and parcel of all marketing, brands who go too far down this road are at risk.
The best thing you can do to bring a team back to earth is to ask the following questions:
- How do customers use our product?
- What do customers say they like about our product?
- What do customers say they don’t like about our product and how can we fix this?
- What can we do to improve our product based on what customers say they need and are having trouble finding elsewhere?
- How long will it take until we can improve our product to the point that we can begin using our happy customers’ words to promote it?
If you have the courage to ask these questions, it could steer your brand away from “I gotta have my Pops” territory and back into the lives of the people you want to engage and serve.
There’s a literal host of evangelists in every town and city where your enterprise is located—lucky for you, they’d be glad to provide voluntary PR for your company if you take the time to value and engage them.
When we look at the history of advertising, missteps begin to glare across decades of screens. From soap as a dating hack to AI ads so problematic that brands have to turn off their YouTube comments, relatable use cases are missing from the mix.
The more credibility suffers, the more a good dose of reality could be your brand’s competitive difference-maker. With so much trust on the line, it’s well past time to start getting real with consumers.
Whether paid or organic, figure out next steps for your brand to gain influence using Semrush’s Social Media Toolkit.