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.