PR crisis is an entrepreneur’s biggest nightmare. Negative stories can damage your brand reputation, negatively affect your customers’ trust and lead to declining sales. You need a crisis management plan with specific actions to undertake a challenging situation. Your brand’s crisis response should be on different communication channels.
With their public reach and compelling content, influencers can help in your attempts to regain public trust. Here’s how influencer marketing can help you in a PR crisis.
Shifts the Conversation
Be part of your PR crisis management plan. Customers want brands to acknowledge the situation and ask for honest answers without corporate jargon. Your influencer partners should do the same. After you’ve recognized the issue, you can utilize influencer marketing to focus on something else.
Improves Brand Image
Influencers are trusted authorities in their respective niches. They have loyal communities, which are affected significantly by the influencers’ words and actions. Thus, you can leverage their reach and expertise in your PR crisis management campaign to shift the conversation, eliminate doubts, and build brand credibility. Since influencers may be perceived as trustworthy sources by the audiences, their endorsements can improve your brand image and alter public opinion to your side.
Drives Engagement With the Brand
In social media, commonly, trending conversations and false gossip can easily be labeled as ‘news’ about your brand. As a consequence, brands might face criticism from social media users. Influencers can intervene by filtering this news and ensuring you get positive engagement on your social media channels. They can act as social listeners and gatekeepers that help to shed positive light during a social crisis.
Enhances Google Search Results
When negative news bursts, the first thing people do is search on Google. Some say that all press is good press; nevertheless, you don’t want a Google search of your brand to yield crisis-related results. Influencer marketing can help you fill Google result pages with positive content. If the audience likes the created content, the SEO ranking will improve, and the negative content will be pushed down.
Ensures You Regain Customer Trust
You gain immediate access to your target audiences when incorporating influencer marketing into your PR crisis campaign. Influencer marketing is built firmly on social proof theory – people take action accordingly only if they value the influencer. By associating with your brand, influencers cultivate trust and credibility in their followers’ perceptions of your company. You should consider authenticity and audience trust more than the number of followers when collaborating with influencers to resolve a crisis.
Influencer Marketing – A Powerful Component of a PR Management Crisis Plan
A bad interaction can go viral instantly and have detrimental consequences in today’s fast-paced world of social media communication. It is impossible to avoid a PR crisis, but you can efficiently manage it if you apply influencer marketing in your PR crisis management plan.
Influencers are valuable assets due to their emotional connection to their audiences, enabling them to manage evolving situations and shift the conversation. Their unique voice can help you improve your brand image, decrease reputational damage, and rebuild trust.
