August 2nd, 2025
Does My Business Need PR? A Key Question
“Does my business need PR?” That’s a question you may have asked yourself previously. In the past, you may have thought PR wasn’t for you and your business’s marketing. After all, everyone’s on social media, aren’t they? Isn’t PR all a bit traditional?
We’re not blinkered here at multi-award-winning Catapult PR. In our latest video, we even concede that many people ask the ‘does my business need PR?’ question.
After all, why would you need to build awareness of your business through PR, or persuade people that you can be trusted?
Does it really matter if others think your brand is good, if you can just shout about it on Facebook? Isn’t that exactly the same when it comes to reputation building?
What value is there in having media talk about you? That’s all a PR agency does isn’t it? If not, what does a PR agency do? What can PR and a PR agency do for your business?
Why your business needs PR: AI search
These questions about PR may have floated around, in the past. As of this week, however, all of your queries about PR – or public relations as it is also known – need to be satisfied quickly. The reason? AI search has arrived here in the UK. People will no longer be searching for you in the way they have done for many years. Instead, an AI bot will gather information together, crawling through various sources, to assess what the best answer it can give to a web user will be, given the question that the person asks.
The thing you need to ponder is whether or not your business will you be part of that answer. Or, could it be that your lack of PR and online content constitutes a very big problem, with which you are going to be faced going forward?
What is EEAT?
To answer that question, you probably need to ask yourself another. How much attention have you paid to communicating EEAT over the past few years? If you don’t know what EEAT is, that could be a stumbling block. EEAT stands for:
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authority
- Trust
and Google has wanted to see businesses communicating this for a few years now.
Those businesses that have been doing so have managed to ride high in the web rankings, because EEAT implies that you will be a good asset for an enquirer. That could be a customer, a visitor, a patient, a diner, or absolutely any type of person asking questions that relate to your topic. In an ideal world, you should be able to help them, in a satisfying way, which delivers a good customer experience, both online and offline. And Google is all about helping people.
Lack of EEAT issue for many businesses
But, if all you have done is post pictures on Instagram and not built your profile in the media, or communicated thought leadership or expertise through a blog or news section on your website, or collateral such as online case studies, it’s going to be tough. Why? Because, in an era of search, Google doesn’t just now want EEAT, but EEAT 2.0. You actually need to upgrade your existing EEAT and super-charge it.
This could be a tough learning curve for many companies. In our experience, PR and online articles and blogs have been dismissed and regarded as poor relations to both social media and e-newsletters. And, the harsh fact is that much of the social media collateral that is out there is really poor and simply shoved up online as something to post.
Do you need PR in your business right now?
So, in the words of ghostbusters, “who you gonna call?” to help you out of this mess? If online search matters to you, as a means of being found, you absolutely need to do something and you need to put together a holistic strategy. That should be one that will help the bots find you, retrieve mentions of you, access articles and authoritative material written by you and about you, and a whole lot more.
You require consistent messaging. You also need third party media endorsement. You should value great copy and online content (blogs and downloads but also your web pages) that meets the standards that Google expects.
Why a specialist PR agency is your best AI search ally
The best-placed resource to help you is probably a specialist PR agency. It has to be one that has earned its stripes, as Catapult PR has. We have spent decade after decade creating award-winning PR campaigns, building client authority, developing consumer trust for brands and communicating expertise through compelling thought-leadership campaigns.
All we are doing in an AI search world is more of the same but using different channels. Our skills are absolutely what a business needs right now.
But you also need an agency that thinks broadly about PR and carries its principles into copywriting, blogs, content downloads, podcasts, videos, white papers, research surveys and social media. You need a mix of the traditional with the bang up to date.
You also need to have PR driving your messaging and keeping it consistent, so your expert voice never waivers.
Why choose Catapult PR as your AI search booster?
A good PR agency like Catapult, which has won awards for ‘integrated PR campaigns’ is doing so much more than just traditional media campaigns. You need that ability to give PR an excitingly wide approach that will get you noticed everywhere. Because, if you do, the bots will notice you too.
It’s safe to say that, even 27 years ago, when we first established this PR agency, we never just did the stereotypical public relations work. We lit up the world with exciting campaigns that encompassed publications, research, direct mail and more. That was in a pre-Internet world, so imagine how much more has become possible since!
So, it’s time to throw away your misconceptions about PR and recognise that your business absolutely needs PR and this form of marketing. Understand that your business probably needs PR fast, in a time of AI search. Public relations is the new marketing must-have.
Check out our video, to hear more about why businesses need PR and then call us on 0333 2424062 or email jane@catapultpr.co.uk
Biography
Article by Jane Hunt, Managing Director of Catapult PR and a PR and content specialist with 69 awards at Catapult PR alone. Jane is a two-time winner of the national CIPR Excellence Award for Outstanding Independent Consultant and has also judged this award and others. Prior to founding Catapult PR, she won industry awards for other agencies, whilst in her earlier PR career, in which she was an editor of various internal and staff newsletters and magazines, she was awarded an accolade from the British Association of Industrial Editors.
