3 PR Moves To Make You Irreplaceable In Your Industry

Forbes

15-07-2025

Danielle Sabrina is a celebrity publicist and CEO of Society22 PR, an award-winning hybrid digital PR agency based in Los Angeles and NYC.
Paid ads might spike your metrics overnight, but the moment you stop spending, it's like flipping a switch. Visibility disappears overnight. Public relations builds momentum that compounds over time. It nudges reporters to repeat your insights, convinces algorithms to rank you higher and, most importantly, hardens buyer trust so whatever happens in the future doesn't erase the momentum you've built today.
But where do you start? With these three PR moves:
1. Claim The Expert Seat In Your Niche
Relevance starts the moment third parties describe your company in the same way you do. That consistent story doesn't happen accidentally; it's the product of a steady drip of earned media. When reporters cite you as a source who clarifies a confusing trend or punctures hype with up-to-date data, prospects arrive already convinced that you know the ins and outs—and competitors have to explain why they should be heard instead, which is very challenging.
If you're moving fast—and you often are—credibility becomes your insurance policy when things inevitably go wrong. Code will break, shipments will lag, and a former employee will air a grievance. And when that headline hits, you cannot backdate trust. You either have a press trail that shows the market you solve real problems, or you scramble to establish one under duress.
For founders who want to plan for the inevitable, invest early. Volunteer proprietary data to journalists, supply pithy quotes on tight deadlines, and make yourself available when a story is still forming. Every mention is another tile in a mosaic that eventually makes you an industry authority.
2. Be Consistent
Nothing erodes authority faster than whiplash messaging. One week, your website highlights cost savings; the next, your CEO's podcast celebrates premium service. This inconsistency creates immediate distrust among your audiences. Potential buyers—especially other founders—notice that tiny wobble and begin to wonder which version of your company will show up after the invoice clears. This erosion of trust isn't limited to customers. If your story changes every quarter, reporters will stop listening. Inconsistency isn't just confusing—it signals you can't be trusted.
Create a message spine that anyone in the company can recite by heart: the problem you eliminate, the stakes of inaction, the proof you deliver and the future you're building. It should fit on a single page, live in every pitch deck and underpin every social media post. This way, the messaging remains the same when the marketing team riffs on it for a webinar and the product team tweaks it for release notes.
You know your messaging is effective when you hear investors and analysts echoing your own phrasing. This is when simple brand awareness solidifies into true memorability—a valuable asset that compounds over time.
3. Create Signature Content
You build trust when people outside your company can point to proof, not just promises. That could be from an annual benchmark, a proprietary framework or a methodology deck—anything that proves you do the work and don't just talk about it.
Choose a flagship format that only your firm could produce. Let's say you're a cybersecurity startup. You might want to collate breach statistics across your client base and publish a quarterly risk index. Or if you're a logistics founder, you could release a 'state of supply chains' playbook drawn from millions of routing miles. The key here is repetition: Release on a predictable cadence so journalists and customers mark their calendars accordingly. Each edition becomes a news peg; coverage drives fresh traffic to the asset, and that traffic feeds the next round of interviews. Soon, the report is cited in investor memos and analyst notes—proof that your fingerprint sits on every serious conversation in the field.
Signature content further provides you with reach that is independent of your marketing spend. Unlike paid ads, which disappear when a budget is cut, a respected benchmark report continues to generate backlinks and podcast invites long after its release, all at no extra cost.
Such an asset also equips your sales team for success. They will enter discovery calls with a document the prospect already knows and trusts. Ultimately, close rates will rise not because you shout louder, but because the market itself decides you are a teacher worth learning from.
Build Authority, Not Just Buzz
Most brands are stuck chasing attention. The ones that win? They invest in authority—because that's what drives long-term growth. You can achieve this through consistently engaging with the press, maintaining a uniform messaging across all platforms and creating definitive content that only you can produce. However, this requires commitment. It means making time for media interviews and ensuring your core content is released on time. When you do this, you fundamentally make your business independent of paid ads just to be seen and heard.
Market shifts, budget changes and noisy competitors will matter less because you will have built real, verifiable trust that's more valuable. That's what makes a founder and their business both impossible to ignore and difficult to replace in the market.
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?