How to Recover from a Brand PR Crisis with Effective Marketing
Key Takeaways
- A PR crisis might seem like the end of the world, but brand reputation is a resilient thing.
- During a PR crisis, you need to demonstrate a genuine desire to make amends and be transparent about what happened.
- The many branches of marketing can help recover your brand from its lowest point – from SEO, social media, influencer collaborations, and more.
A brand’s reputation is one of its most valuable assets. It’s the precursor to customer trust and loyalty, and it significantly influences a company’s success. As a result, it can be disastrous when a brand’s reputation is threatened by a public relations crisis.
Even the most esteemed brands have occasional missteps and crises. When these incidents occur, the way a brand responds can make all the difference.
Speed is of the essence when tackling a public relations crisis. A rapid response can help mitigate damage, control the narrative, and start the process of rebuilding trust. However, after handling the immediate reaction, strategic use of marketing will help stabilise your business in the eye of a PR storm.
In this context, marketing isn’t about promoting your products or services. Instead, it’s a method of re-establishing a positive brand image and reconnecting with your audience. By using thoughtful campaigns and clear messaging, you’ll be able to take back control of your brand’s reputation.
Keep reading to learn how you can reshape public perception and reinforce your business’s values. Not only can marketing be a rescue mission, but it can tell the world that your brand doesn’t give up in the face of adversity. Let’s dive in:
Understanding PR catastrophes
Navigating a public relations crisis requires a clear understanding of what’s gone on. A PR crisis could be a negative review gone viral, a misinterpreted campaign, or a company scandal. It could shake the confidence of customers, investors, or the general public. Essentially, a PR crisis is any event or piece of information that threatens the brand’s integrity or reputation.
PR crises can have far-reaching effects. After the initial backlash, customers may lose trust long-term, and investors could pull out. In severe crises, companies may lose market share or face legal challenges.
Though this all sounds very scary, your brand’s PR crisis won’t necessarily be so bad. You can mitigate against these consequences by responding appropriately and promptly.
A swift and strategic response is crucial. The longer you put off responding, the longer public speculation can endure. Though your response must be thoughtful, time isn’t a luxury you have in this case.
One of the first steps of crisis management is gauging the extent of your issue. There are many ways you can do this; some investigative methods will take longer than others, so you won’t be able to do everything before breaking your silence.
Before making your initial statement, you’ll likely have time to do the following:
- Analyse how the crisis is being reported in the media.
- Monitor mentions, comments, hashtags, and social media posts that relate to the crisis.
- Ask employees and stakeholders for their insights on why the crisis occurred and what can be changed.
Once you’ve made an initial statement, you’ll have time to investigate the crisis further. You might like to say in your statement that you’ll be looking into what went wrong to buy you more time. To understand more about the crisis, you can:
- Conduct sentiment analysis to understand how people are perceiving your brand post-crisis.
- Investigate KPIs and SEO performance to see how the crisis is impacting business performance.
- Check out how your competitors are faring – are they having a similar issue or are they capitalising on your crisis?
These investigative approaches will help you gain a better understanding of what went wrong. However, you don’t want to waste too much time – it’s crucial that your response is timely.
How to respond to a PR crisis immediately
When a PR crisis hits, your initial response can set the tone for the whole road of recovery. Consider the following when a crisis kicks off:
1. Craft your official response
When crafting your official first response, remember to apologise. Your message should take responsibility and be honest and transparent. Though your business may not be at fault, it’s crucial that you convey genuine regret for the incident.
Make sure you communicate your unequivocal commitment to resolving the issue and that you understand exactly what peoples’ concerns are.
2. Use social media and press releases
Social media channels and press releases are your direct lines of communication with the public. They offer a platform to address the issue head-on and in real time. Utilising these tools effectively means providing consistent updates, being accessible for inquiries, and maintaining a tone that reflects the brand’s core values and commitment to its stakeholders and customers.
3. Contact your stakeholders
Engaging with investors, customers, employees, and partners can offer diverse perspectives on the crisis. This engagement can reveal insights into the broader impact and help tailor the recovery approach to address the concerns of all parties involved.
4. Create your marketing recovery plan
With the information you’ve gathered, you can begin to develop a marketing plan aimed at recovery. Your marketing plan should be multifaceted, address immediate concerns, and lay out a roadmap for rebuilding trust over time.
Your strategy might involve community engagement efforts, policy changes, or targeted campaigns. Whatever commitments your brand wants to make, we’ll delve into marketing strategies in the next section.
How marketing can help your brand recover from a PR crisis
With the right marketing strategy, you can restore your brand’s reputation and potentially strengthen it from where it was before. When the time comes to start your recovery process, you may want to use one of the following approaches:
1. Be transparent
It will be important for your brand to be transparent as time goes on. Instead of getting on with new projects and pretending nothing ever happened, make sure you update audiences on how you’re resolving things.
This doesn’t mean bringing up the past when it’s all been forgotten. We just mean that you should be transparent about any changes you’re making. Taking accountability can really build trust and over time you can move on.
2. Use content marketing to reframe the narrative
Content can tell the story of your brand’s values and mission. If you want to share what you’ve learned from the PR crisis, this can show that you care and demonstrate how you’re improving.
Social media posts, blogs, infographics, and videos can be really compelling for audiences, so don’t be afraid to get your content out there.
3. Restore trust with collaborations and endorsements
Partnering with credible figures can do wonders for endorsing your brand post-crisis. They could be industry experts, influencers, or celebrities whose values align with yours, but make sure they’re going to resonate with your audience.
Make sure you choose your collaborations wisely as this kind of vote of confidence can be powerful or out-of-place.
4. Offer greater value
Giving customers special discounts in the wake of a PR crisis can demonstrate your commitment to making amends. It may be that you make a contribution to a relevant cause or make shop-wide discounts for a short period of time.
Whichever way you choose to give more value, it can be a powerful apology.
5. Use SEO to spread a positive message
When people search for your brand post-crisis, you don’t want past mistakes to appear at the top of the search results. Instead, you want users to find positive stories and helpful content.
So, start creating new content that shows your brand in a positive light. You may want to address the crisis in a constructive way or just post the latest news.
To combat a crisis with SEO, you may want to enlist the help of a strategist who can use keyword research to magically overtake the negative press.
6. Get social
Social media platforms can be a great place to engage in honest and transparent conversations with your audience. If you’re going to use this approach, make sure you’re proactive in responding to concerns.
Your social media account will also be a great place to tell positive brand stories and give updates about how you’re handling the crisis.
7. Email your way to change
Among blogs and social media posts, email is another form of content that can help after a PR crisis.
An email campaign can speak directly to your customers about how you’re dealing with the crisis. You may want to reiterate your initial statement, apologise, or list the steps you’re taking to make amends.
In your new email campaign, make sure you personalise the messaging.
8. Involve customers
Involving your customers is a great way of showing them that you value their input. After the crisis, you may want to create easier and more responsive feedback systems to deal with customer reviews or questions.
This will demonstrate how much you value your customers, your commitment to doing better, and it will provide better intel on any potential crises in the future.
9. Show your care for the community
A popular crisis recovery technique is giving back. It may be that your brand gets involved in charity work or starts an initiative for those affected by whatever caused your PR crisis.
It may seem tacky, but getting involved in a community or charitable initiative really does demonstrate your business’s dedication to the public. It shows that your brand isn’t just for profit.
Managing brand reputation long-term
In the aftermath of a PR crisis, recovery won’t be immediate. Instead, it will require a sustained effort over time to redeem your brand’s reputation. To manage this long-term, consider doing the following:
1. Learn from feedback
After a crisis, it’s crucial to listen to what customers, employees, and the market have said about your brand. This feedback is invaluable for understanding the impact of the crisis and identifying where you can improve.
Learning from the crisis will be key to preventing it from occurring in the future. Using feedback to implement changes will tell your audience that you’re proactive, adaptable, and that you care about what they think.
2. Consistency builds trust
A PR crisis can shatter the trust people previously had for your brand. Now things have changed, you need to do everything you can to rebuild that trust.
One way you can do so is to be consistent in your brand messaging. Keeping everything uniform across platforms will breed familiarity and therefore trust.
3. Monitor things closely
Now that you’ve gone through a PR crisis, you’ll probably be more vigilant in the future. It’s crucial that you keep up to date with brand sentiment so that you can address any negativity before it goes viral.
You may want to use tools that track mentions of your brand across different media channels. This will include reviews, social media, and press coverage. Google Alerts offers this, as well as Hootsuite and SEMrush.
4. Make a plan for next time
There’s no doubt that you will have learned a lot from going through a PR crisis. You’ve probably already thought something like “Why didn’t we do this originally?” Now that you know what it was like, you can make a contingency plan in case it happens again.
Your plan should detail steps for communication, the roles and responsibilities of your crisis management team, and protocols for decision-making. This will ensure you are equipped to deal with any future crises and not be caught off guard.
Final thoughts
Brand reputation can be extremely resilient. Even when your PR crisis seems to be the worst of the worst, you can still bounce back. As long as your recovery efforts are handled with care and you show a genuine desire to make amends, your brand’s reputation can be healed.
Overcoming a crisis is a testament to a brand’s values and dedication to its customers. So, have faith that things can get better. As an opportunity to improve, this could be a pivotal chapter in your business’s story.