According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly one-fifth of all new businesses close within the first year. While one of the major reasons contributing to this failure is the lack of capital or product-market fit, there are other reasons that contribute to failure too.
Poor marketing – that includes poor PR – is a reason for 14% of all failures.
As a small business, it can be an overwhelming experience facing your first PR crisis. Knowing how to navigate one, or more importantly. how to avoid such crises in the first place. can go a long way in ensuring your business maintains good reputation and branding.
What causes poor PR
It is a common misconception that a PR crisis only refers to major scandals or controversies related to your product. This is indeed a possible scenario, even for small businesses. But in most cases, a PR crisis is a steady erosion of brand value and trust, contributed by poor response to user feedback.
As a small business or a bootstrapped startup, you do not have a lot of wiggle room when it comes to your marketing budget. This forces business owners to find shortcuts or creative ways to execute their business ideas.
For instance, your business cannot afford sophisticated market research for your product launch. You may instead choose to go with your gut feel about what your product should be.
Similarly, you may not have the budget to invest in a marketing vision document, or positioning strategy – the alternative is to copy your competitor and beat them on price.
As you can see, at every step of the way, small businesses tend to opt for a cheaper workaround that can be as good as the real thing. The result is that while you can still find success through persistence, a wrong bet at any point could bring about the downfall of the business.
As mentioned before, this does not have to be through major scandals or controversies. More often than not, it happens because of poor customer experience, and when that goes unattended, it results in negative word of mouth eventually contributing to churn.
Left unattended, your business may wake up one day to realize that you have a PR crisis.
Avoiding a PR crisis
PR crises are not always because of poor marketing or business practices. In the age of Google Reviews and social media, any business could see a PR crisis at any point of time.
Do you run a restaurant? You could wake up to a Facebook post from a disgruntled customer who had a dead fly in their food. Can you be sure it really happened? Or, did the customer post this because you denied them complimentary drinks? Worse, are you even sure it is not a wicked competitor trying to bring you down?
It doesn’t matter. A solid PR strategy should ensure that you deal with every negative comment about your business with the same level of earnestness – and not wait for things to go really wrong.
To mitigate a PR crisis, your business needs to do 4 things:
- Protect
- Promote
- Perform
- Prove
These are the four core tenets of a PR campaign. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to go about this.
Empathize
The first step to handling any negative PR is to empathize. While it is always possible that this is a smear campaign from a competitor or a disgruntled customer, that speculation is for another day.
Any negative news related to your business or product has to be an immediate cause for concern. Respond to the concern right away in the most empathetic manner. This includes acknowledging your business’ lapse of judgment, and promise to act on it immediately.
Quick point to note here – as much as your response is targeted at the one individual with a negative experience, your response is also going to impact how new customers perceive your brand.
Avoid templated responses. When a potential new customer checks negative reviews and sees the same templated ‘empathetic response’ pasted on each of your negative reviews, they are going to assume that the apology is insincere.
Negative PR can also come from media outlets. Similar to fake reviews, such PR articles could be ‘hit pieces’ from people with vested interests. But again, this is speculation for another day. As a business owner, your first job is to adhere to the four core tenets of PR and address the concern with empathy.
Protect your brand
The next step in addressing a brewing PR crisis is to protect your brand. Most businesses wrongly assume that this entails bottling the publicity damage and stop it from proliferating further.
They do it by threatening media outlets and social media posters who try to highlight the issue. In certain jurisdictions, negative social media reviews are considered defamation, and businesses try to take advantage of this.
While protecting your brand is the goal, it may not always happen thanks to social media and the internet. Trying to contain the spread of your crisis by force is always going to backfire on your business. The Streisand effect is real.
Instead, this is how you protect your brand:
Become more open
Customers appreciate businesses that are open about their ways of working. If the PR crisis involves a product quality issue, then the only way to address this is by being public about how you build your product and how you handle quality control. Video tours of your facility or QC operations help skeptical outsiders gain greater insights into what goes on behind the scenes and appreciate your earnestness in resolving the issue.
Set up direct lines of communication
Oftentimes, a scathing review or media interview is the last resort for an unhappy customer. This is something they decide to do after their regular channels of communication fail.
As a business owner, your first responsibility is to this customer. Set up a direct line of communication between them and someone in the leadership.
If you do not want to share personal numbers of your employees directly to a customer, you could use call forwarding tools like Unitel Voice that generate virtual phone numbers that forward to your employees’ personal numbers.
This strategy empowers your customers and they are more likely to withdraw their negative review or update it with a positive story about their communication with you.
Address in public
Sometimes, PR crises come not from one customer, but because of a faulty product, a joke gone wrong, or because of an employee misrepresenting your business.
In such cases, it may seem like your business nothing you do can help reinstate your brand reputation. This is because even if you do act on the complaints (like remove the offending ad, or firing the employee in question), you are going to face further backlash from other customers who may accuse you of giving in, or trampling on employee rights.
The best way to address such situations is by addressing the issues in public. Use your social media channels to explain why the issue occurred, and how you are addressing them.
More importantly, if this is an issue that impacts your existing customers, then proactively reach out to them over email tools like Mailchimp with rationale on how you plan to address these issues.
Your communication should carry these elements:
- Address the issue directly without sugarcoating it
- Explain how the issue occurred
- Describe your company’s stance on such an issue
- In detail, explain how you plan to avoid a similar mistake in future
- Provide contact lines for aggrieved customers to reach out to you
Comprehensively addressing the issue head on helps your business set the narrative and ensure that the PR crisis does not blow out of proportion.
Having said that, one common mistake that many organizations do is to expect your well-written press release to do all the heavy-lifting. While this does help setting the record straight, it does not provide your organization with the levers to set the narrative.
According to Harsh Zavery, Growth Specialist at Kommunicate, the key idea here is to set up an omnichannel strategy so that customers and stakeholders hear your side of the story regardless of which marketing medium they use.
How to handle PR crisis legally
A lot of what we have discussed so far pertains to PR disasters arising from poor communication, marketing, or user experience. However, a faulty product or service could make your business liable legally as well.
Today, online platforms make it easy for aggrieved customers to file product liability lawsuits against faulty products. As a business, it is important to navigate these issues legally without impacting your case further.
When you have a legal PR crisis in the making, it is important to know what to do, and what not to do.
First off, get in a huddle. What you communicate to the world at this point is not just going to impact your revenues, but could cost you your case as well. So it is important to make sure that nothing that your business communicates in email, social media, or print gets published without a legal approval.
Hire an attorney. They are not just responsible for fighting your case, but will also play an advisory role in your communications strategy.
And lastly, continue to ensure top quality service for your customers. While legal issues are part of running any business, the longevity of your brand depends on how happy your customers are.
Keep your customers happy and your legal troubles may remain just that – and not spill into your marketing plans.
Setting up a proactive PR crisis strategy
When a PR crisis is underway, it is natural for business leaders to lose rational thought and make things worse with their act. For this reason, it is important to have a cohesive PR crisis strategy regardless of how big your business is.
Begin by addressing your customers periodically. Christopher Vasiliou from Woorise recommends reaching out to them with surveys about the different aspects of your business. This gives you the chance to understand potential points of frustration that could blow up in future as a PR crisis.
Next, prepare the various scenarios for your business’ PR to go wrong – social media goof ups, bad reviews, faulty products are some of the major scenarios. Build a plan of action for each of these scenarios and enact it to test your execution strategy.
This will ensure your business does not derail or do things that can backfire when you are in a crisis situation.
Like always, news is a 24/7 cycle and what’s trending today may not be relevant in a few days. However, how you act in those few days decides how your business is going to be seen by your customers in the aftermath of your PR disaster.
