The hidden costs of cutting corners in PR

When budgets tighten, it’s tempting to prioritise short-term savings over long-term strategy. But in PR, cutting corners can cost you more than you save, especially when B2B buyers spend just 17% of their time with suppliers, relying instead on digital research and peer insights.

With 61% preferring a rep-free buying experience, trust-building through quality content is essential. 75% of decision-makers say thought leadership can spark interest in solutions they hadn’t considered, making visibility and credibility non-negotiable.

In the third blog in our lean tech PR series, Senior Account Manager, Aleix Gwilliam, explores the false economies that damage your brand’s reputation, diminish your media presence, and ultimately hinder your growth.

Read on to discover what you should avoid and why.

Years of work, destroyed in days

When facing tight budgets, you might be tempted to divert resources towards actions with more immediate results than reputation management. This short-sighted decision exposes your brand to misinformation and erodes customer trust.

Remember: Your brand reputation is your most valuable asset – once you neglect it, rebuilding it to its former strength may prove impossible.

No clear strategy? A recipe for chaos

How can your brand succeed without a clear direction for communication? Without a communication strategy, you’re forced to react instead of lead. Clear messaging and target personas enable you to align and amplify compelling content and campaigns. When these elements disappear, you create inconsistencies, your diluted messages confuse stakeholders, and your hard-earned trust diminishes. Without a communication strategy, you rely on random, unfocused efforts that yield little to no impact for your brand.

Over-automation of relationships

Nurturing relationships with journalists is vital to the success of your media strategy. When pitching, thank journalists for previous coverage or highlight how your pitch aligns with their current editorial line to show genuine engagement. This personalised approach strengthens your rapport, demonstrating that you value their work and are not just looking for a free favour.

Investing time in these connections rather than sending bulk emails or using a newswire service, you develop better long-term relationships and as a result, enhanced media coverage. 

Neglecting media monitoring

Media-monitoring tools are a necessary expense if you want to understand your PR performance. These tools provide you with real-time insights, allowing you to measure sentiment, spot trends, monitor competitor mentions and adjust strategies effectively. Without them, you waste time with inefficient manual searches for coverage and miss key analytics that impact your brand. 

Generic content destroys credibility

Your brand communications serve as the point of entry to your customers, so ensure they make you stand out. Speedy, cost-cutting measures like unedited Gen AI content may seem efficient, but risks delivering generic, impersonal messaging that lacks authenticity. When you invest time to create high-quality, thoughtful content and campaigns, you differentiate your brand, build trust and maintain a strong reputation. 

Junior vs senior talent

Senior PR professionals bring strategic thinking, industry knowledge and strong media relationships that drive more effective campaigns for you. Saving on payroll by assigning inexperienced account managers to execute your PR strategy means sacrificing or delaying the advantages that experienced professionals deliver to your brand. 

What in-house teams can’t replace

While in-house marketing teams have brand-specific knowledge, they lack the extensive PR expertise, industry know-how and media relationships that agencies offer you. Without these advantages, your in-house team will struggle or work slower to secure high-quality media coverage, craft effective strategies or adapt to changing industry trends. 

While these pitfalls may seem like isolated tactical mistakes, their impact creates substantial hidden costs that can multiply over time. 

Calculating your reputation’s true value

The true costs of your budget-driven PR decisions extend far beyond immediate savings. These costs manifest in three critical areas: your brand reputation, crisis preparedness and missed opportunities. These actions also lead to more severe repercussions, such as credibility damage. A short-sighted focus on saving money can result in a series of consequences:

• Brand reputation damage: This represents your most alarming hidden cost. Your short-term savings, like ignoring customer feedback or delaying responses to damaging news, erode trust and tarnish your brand’s image. A single misstep, such as an ill-judged social media post or poorly handled product recall, can undo years of reputation-building, requiring costly rebranding and extensive efforts to regain lost consumer confidence. This fallout serves as a powerful reminder that investing in proactive, high-quality PR costs far less than rebuilding after a crisis.
• Lost media opportunities: A lack of consistent exposure in relevant media channels results in missed opportunities to strengthen audience connections and leave a lasting impression. Through consistent media exposure, you build your brand awareness and subsequently, customer loyalty. Skimping on the costs that drive media opportunities risks your brand being overlooked and forgotten in favour of your competitors.
• Increased marketing costs: Without a strong PR foundation, you must spend more on paid advertising and promotions to compensate for the lack of organic brand visibility that media coverage brings you. This drains your marketing budget and limits the effectiveness of your campaigns, as paid efforts can never replace the trust built through earned media.

Building a sustainable PR strategy

PR is not a quick win for you. It represents a long-term investment that builds your visibility, trust and credibility, assets that compound over time and protect your brand through both growth and challenges. While short-term cost-cutting might provide temporary relief, the long-term consequences can be significantly more expensive.

Invest wisely, monitor consistently and never lose sight of the bigger picture: your reputation, visibility and long-term success depend on it.

Ready to transform your approach with these actionable strategies? Download our comprehensive “PR that packs a punch: 50 tips to maximise awareness” today and turn these insights into a tailored roadmap for your organisation.