Apparently, PR is having a bit of a moment.

No, journalists haven’t suddenly become more influential and brands haven’t just discovered thought leadership.

It’s because the likes of ChatGPT, Claude and their increasingly numerous cousins have helped marketers cotton on to the fact that good PR has a genuine influence on the way buyers view your business. In fact, I bet there’s a good chance you’ve even been served this slice of LS gold following a bit of a back and forth with Google.

Welcome to the party anyway … we’ve been here a while.

So what’s changed?

Well, LLM’s (large language models) have made brand visibility feel tangible in an entirely new way. For those of us who have been working in the industry since the mid-90’s, it’s quite a welcome change, actually. Suddenly all of those touch points that PR helps amplify – coverage in respected industry titles, thought leadership, expert commentary etc – are the lead things AI chooses to cite when recommending a brand as an answer to all of the searcher’s questions.

The amusing thing is, this isn’t new at all.

PR done properly keeps your brand front of mind. Especially when delivered consistently, creating a drumbeat that steadily builds – so your brand frequently shows up on the feeds, platforms and media that your customers are actually reading and engaging with. It’s always been that way – AI is just writing it in a slightly prettier font.

Why wasn’t it always this clear?

Put it simply, PR has been misunderstood and miscategorised.

PR has been traditionally categorised in marketing as a ‘comms’ overhead rather than the brand building tool it always has been.

And for many that’s where the problem starts.

Tangent here, but I dread to think how many great businesses and products have been lost in bygone eras to marketing that didn’t leverage as the true lead generation tool it’s always been.

Every piece of coverage, every expert opinion, every conversation you create is another opportunity to build familiarity, credibility and association around your brand. And those things matter long before your buyer fills in a form or picks up the phone.

Why PR is so good at brand building.

It gets your brand seen where your potential customers are already looking for answers. In publications, conversations and channels they value and trust.

In fact, 6sense data shows B2B buyers are typically 70% through their decision-making process before they engage directly with a vendor. So, by the time your sales team is in the conversation, most of the real work has already been done. That’s an opportunity missed to upsell, turn one-off purchases into a strategic relationship – or worse, be considered against your competitors all together!

So, what does get you considered?

Do the customers you want to deal with even know who you are? And do they trust what you stand for? 

Well, your chances of getting on the ‘day one’ shortlist are considerably higher if your brand has a sustained presence in the right places, with something genuinely worth reading. 

The kind of thought leadership that really drives awareness, is the kind that doesn’t appear safe on the surface. It’s the kind that tackles the topics your competitors are too afraid to touch on, whether they’re afraid of stakeholder disquiet, or that provokes discussion. 

And the stakes are getting higher. 

Since large language models AI overviews changed search behaviour, brands are no longer fighting for a ranking on a results page; they’re competing to be the answer itself. Large language models synthesise patterns from content that is repeatedly cited, discussed and referenced in publications and content that the algorithm thinks is an authority. And you simply can’t become one of those authorities without sustained, credible PR. More on that here.

How marketers are doing PR wrong

To my dismay, some clients still ask for AVEs (advertising value equivalency) in monthly reports. A metric that’s been discredited by the industry’s own bodies is still being used by some agencies 🤯

Clients accept it because they don’t know any better. 

PR should, instead, be measured the same way brand awareness, recall and reputation are. It should also be budgeted in terms of brand spend and resourced and measured accordingly.

So perhaps the better question isn’t “how much coverage did we get?” but “is our business better understood by the people who matter than it was 12 months ago?”

Has our share of voice grown across the industry, or around the topics we want to own? Are we increasingly associated with the expertise and issues that matter to our growth? And in B2B, are we seeing the commercial signals that come with that; better qualified inbound enquiries, more approaches from the right people, more recommendations or specifications from advisors and consultants? 

None of these can be attributed to PR in isolation (which led to the misrepresentation in the first place). But taken together, and tracked over time, they can show how a sustained PR programme can generate leads.

This means that the businesses who cut brand investment in a downturn will find themselves invisible when the market recovers. We must protect PR like the strategic asset it is, or you’ll need to spend double the amount to rebuild the brand reputation and equity.

What AI has done here is expose this way of thinking to buyers in a way that lays bare just how good your PR strategy really is. In order to recommend you, AI must be able to put a tick in every box we’ve mentioned here.

So, don’t worry if this late revelation has left you feeling a little red in the face. We’ll just consider you fashionably late – but thank fuck you’ve finally shown up!

It’s great you’ve taken the first steps, but there’s further to go, so let’s talk.