What is Energy Public Relations?
Public relations for energy companies, in its essence, is the art of creation and management of brand/company awareness, demand generation and brand interest among the audiences that have an impact on an energy company’s success or failure — whether those be investors, customers, B2B partners, intermediary consultants, social media influencers, industry media channels and leading publications.
The PR strategy (channel) for audience engagement varies with a company’s goals: press releases, social media campaigns, public speeches, thought leadership pieces, earned media features and testimonials, and influencer outreach. At Mount Spiral as in other Marketing and PR firms, energy public relations presents a unique challenge: in other forms of PR the fundamental terms of a communications campaign are often understood by laypeople before the campaign ever begins. In the energy environment this is often not the case. If your business has a highly specialized terminology build, application or product, communicating its advantage and quality from a mass of esoteric information, without making your audience confused or giving them too little to work with on the other, can be tough.
Is Public Relations for energy companies worth it?
The gains of PR from even a limited approach can be manifold. Your company would absolutely benefit from some kind of PR presence. You can shape a positive image for your business, get ahead of setbacks or negative events, create buzz on social media or in traditional media outlets about your company’s specialized work, generate leads, and create demand for new technology solutions that prospective customers would not be aware of otherwise.
Reputation Management
The importance of reputation management in an energy PR strategy is often more obvious than in other sectors. A PR partner for your energy company should have the skill to highlight your expertise, in the clearest, most striking way possible, and get that message to the people you most want to hear it (niche audience). Your credentials may speak for themselves, but that won’t do you any good if you aren’t invited into the conversation.
Media relations is a key component of tech PR. Persuading media entities of your business’s status as a thought leader can trigger a positive feedback loop: when you or your company receives attention as an expert in a specialty, your reputation solidifies, which makes it more likely you’ll be treated as an expert in future articles or broadcasts, which further solidifies your reputation, and so on. Energy is intertwined with our everyday lives, and thus with our everyday news, so media figures need sources they can rely on for trustworthy, succinct supplements to the energy stories they put out. With a winning energy PR strategy, your business can position itself to supply this need.
Energy PR may not lend itself to the free-wheeling social media banter businesses can get away with in other industries, but it still leaves lots of room for testimonials, word-of-mouth excitement, and influencer plugs on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. A well rounded approach to public relations for technology companies takes advantage of these benefits. With the rising importance of earned media in marketing, you should at least consider incorporating more social media activity in your business’ PR strategy.
How to improve your EnergyCompany’s PR Strategy and Tactics
- Newsjacking: Is the practice of injecting your company’s solutions, innovations, etc. into the news that is circulating among the public on a given day. The reach of information in the digital age creates an opportunity, or perhaps imposes a requirement, for companies to jump on stories that are likely or have already begun to spread at exponential rates. Is there a way to include a trending hashtag in your company’s latest Tweet? How can you catch some of the news coverage bound to accompany a major upcoming technology summit? Thinking in terms of these short term news bursts can help you harness the modern flood of digital information in your tech public relations campaigns.
- Make Your Message Simple, relatableand Customer-centric: When you’ve created a solution or innovation you are proud of, it can be tempting to share all the details. However, in the context of PR for energy firms this can be overwhelming for people unfamiliar with the concepts underlying your work. Focus on taking out unnecessary information, no matter how interesting you find that information, to keep your message accessible to as wide an audience as possible and also to the journalists who may act as intermediaries in your PR plan.
Also, try to connect your energy PR to human values, ideas with emotional weight, whenever possible. If you can show that your company activities holds promise to remove hardship from people’s lives or help them in an area they care deeply about, they will absorb your message much more deeply. - Use Data to Strengthen Your Story to Secure Media Coverage: The concise use of data can strengthen your energy PR strategy in this aspect. Pitching stories to journalists with hard numbers attached to them tends to be more persuasive, and consumers like data as a show of authority and rigor. Be as concise and well explained as possible without losing your main points. Public relations for your technology company can take your business to new heights.
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