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Forbes
15-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
3 PR Moves To Make You Irreplaceable In Your Industry
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?


Forbes
23-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
3 PR Strategies To Help You Build Brand Equity At Every Milestone
Danielle Sabrina is a celebrity publicist and CEO of Society22 PR, an award-winning hybrid digital PR agency based in Los Angeles and NYC. getty No founder would ever object to hyper-growth, but there are plenty who underestimate the scrutiny that tags along. When revenue races ahead of your systems, it also puts your unfinished corners under a spotlight. The moment sales surge, customers ask whether you can still deliver on time with the same quality, employees look for cracks in the culture, and reporters (and the top candidates reading their stories) search for evidence that the company will be just as strong the following year. Public relations is the only lever that lets you respond at scale, on your terms, before someone else supplies a less flattering answer. Over a decade with early-stage teams taught me that the story you share outside the building can shift everything inside it. In my experience, founders who make PR their core strategy see the payoff twice—first in a reputation strong enough to hold under scrutiny, then in softer term-sheet language when investors run their own Google test. Build Your Reputation Reserve Before You Actually Need It When revenue pours in, it's tempting to believe the goodwill will last forever. While growth looks good on the surface, each period of rapid expansion creates hidden pressures that can weaken important internal structures like communication, workflows and company culture. Those onboarding shortcuts, service slowdowns and culture gaps that no one has time to keep an eye on are costing you money. Inevitably, a frustrated customer or a burned-out employee takes the grievance online. One scathing post on G2 or Reddit can outrank your homepage within hours, and once that narrative hardens, it's hard to pry loose. Even reporters may refuse to cover a company whose first search result is a one-star rating. My safety net is keeping a living record of proof online so nobody has to take the brand on faith. When I have availability on the calendar, I write a short founder's note for an industry outlet our customers already read and anchor it with one fresh metric from last week's dashboard. That article goes straight into the publication, so search engines can index it in real time. My team reviews new client wins every week, chooses one story worth telling and lines up applications for awards or certifications that matter in their spaces. Those independent awards speak for our clients' organizations even when we're not in the room. Because we update each asset as soon as the numbers move, the first page of Google always shows something current. Building a stable public image requires consistent effort, especially during the slow days. Think of it like building a reserve; this steady accumulation of positive press adds up. Then, when fast growth brings increased attention and scrutiny, that reserve helps keep the company's narrative consistent and controlled. Make Your Company Bragworthy With Proof A rock star hire can bend a growth curve, but they join only if the role feels bragworthy at family dinners. Glassdoor notes that 86% of job seekers actively research company reviews and ratings online. The evaluation process for these talents is typically fast and unforgiving. A rumor or a quick scan of first-page Google results for your company name is often enough. They'll make a rapid judgment based on that initial impression and decide whether to engage further or look elsewhere. That's why press hits and credible accolades must be a part of every recruiting tool kit. A fresh interview in a trusted industry outlet and a spot on a 'Best Places to Work' list will show that the market already believes in the story you're telling—and you will never have to oversell the offer. Own The Conversation Around Your Breakout News When your company crosses a threshold, probably from a new product launch or closing a funding round, your competitors' curiosity spikes (as does your customers'). Questions will swirl about valuation, strategy and stability. And if you leave even the smallest blank space in that conversation, speculations will occupy it. Effective PR closes that space in real time. Begin by distilling the news into three essential points: • What's happening • Who it helps • Why the timing matters Share these points internally first so every voice inside the company sings from the same sheet, then offer them to the public with the figures and context you're comfortable seeing in print. Transparency here acts as a clever positioning that guides reporters toward accurate angles, reassures customers that changes are happening on purpose and gives employees a clear picture of when friends or family ask, 'What's going on over there?' Shaping Narrative, Building Value Public relations is often miscast as a megaphone reserved for only the splashy moments. In hypergrowth, it functions more like enterprise software—an underlying system that protects operational scale. Proactive storytelling cushions crises, steady visibility magnetizes top talent, and timed launches lock critical facts in place before outside voices can distort them. None of these practices requires a Fortune 500-level budget. These only demand a founder's willingness to consider public perception as an asset with compounding value. You cannot accelerate without drawing eyes, and you should not want to. Attention is leveraged when the story is precisely what you intended to tell. Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?