As a seven-figure business owner, you’ve probably realized by now how important marketing is for increasing public awareness of your business and the products or services you offer. However, what business owners often don’t realize is that business PR (public relations) can be an excellent companion to digital marketing efforts.
This week’s guest on the Elite Entrepreneurs podcast is Gretchen TeBockhorst, founder and owner of Prim + Co. Prim is an acronym that stands for public relations and integrated marketing, and the firm specializes in helping business owners use PR opportunities to build credibility and awareness of their brands.
Gretchen believes that PR goes hand-in-hand with marketing to help raise an organization’s profile, establish expertise and credibility, and generate organic (read: free) media attention. Gretchen also believes that it’s never too early to start using the power of business PR for your business. According to Gretchen, it’s worth looking into PR even before you’ve established your organization!
Business PR’s Purpose
One of the ways that Gretchen and her team help business owners put public relations to work is through thought leadership: this could be anything from speaking opportunities to relationship-building to generating media coverage by reputable news organizations. This can be a powerful growth strategy because it puts a brand’s name in the mind of potential customers and establishes that the brand is credible and trustworthy.
Gretchen gave an example of how this works: imagine you’re a restaurant owner in Cincinnati. By utilizing business PR strategies, Gretchen and her team could help you get covered in a local news outlet, establishing your business as “the real deal” and putting your name in the minds of a large audience. Even if they don’t remember where they saw your restaurant’s name, they will likely remember hearing it in a positive context, and this can help you generate new business you might not have had access to before.
Prim + Co’s Growth Journey
Having worked with many other PR firms all around the world early in her career gave Gretchen powerful insights into the client side of the client-PR firm relationship, which she uses today to better meet her clients’ needs. And one of the key pillars of Prim + Co’s growth strategy has been attracting and retaining top talent. Early in the life of the business, Gretchen realized that she had to make the transition from working in the business to working on the business, and she knew the only way she would be able to do that would be to bring in the right team members and ensure that they wanted to stay and continue to be a part of the firm.
This was such an important choice that Gretchen even paid her first core team member more than she was paying herself. Gretchen knew that the growth of her business could only be possible if the team was working toward shared goals and had shared Values to steer them. And this deliberate strategy has proven to be wildly successful: Prim + Co has grown from an idea to an award-winning firm that has worked with high profile clients like SoulCycle, Floyd’s 99 Barbershops, Kimpton Hotels, Visit Anaheim and Sweetgreen.
If you’d like to learn more about Gretchen TeBockhorst and Prim + Co or if you’d like to find out how the team can put the power of PR to work for you, you can visit their website at https://primtheagency.com/.
