PR can improve a business in countless ways. Whether your business is a small start-up or an established brand, a quality PR campaign can take your business to the next level.
Although the most effective PR strategies are always tailored to your bespoke requirements, all good PR campaigns consider the following components. Read on to learn more about the key elements you need when creating a PR strategy.
A Powerful Brand Story
Before you embark on a tactical PR campaign, it is important to understand who you are as a brand. What makes you unique and special – and why should people care? What is your vision, your mission, your values? What drives you? What is your ‘why’, the reason you exist?
Once you have mapped out your brand story and narrative and got your whole team on point; you can begin to work out where you want to go as a business and what you want to achieve.
Realistic Goals and Objectives
Setting goals is a hugely important aspect of any business planning, and this includes PR strategy. You should have a clear vision of what you hope to achieve, and a solid action plan that will help you get there.
Whether you want PR exposure in newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets, digital PR to gain increased visibility on search engines or an improved social media presence, it’s important that you set objectives. These should be SMART- specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.
Describe specifically what you wish to achieve, the more detail the better. Make sure your goals are measurable and that they are achievable and realistic.
Create goals that are timely or time-bound, enabling you to meet deadlines or key milestones. This can be motivating and push your team to reach these goals.
Having a clear end date in mind can let you know when you’ve met the goals. Depending on the campaign, the deadline can be adjusted. Some campaigns don’t need an end date, as they are part of an ongoing strategy.
Many PR campaigns have a mixture of short-term goals and long-term goals. Short-term goals can be stand-alone goals or be ‘stepping stones’ as part of the ongoing brand and reputation building that can span across months and even years.
Knowledge of The Target Audience
After considering your goals and objectives, you should define who your plan is aimed at and who you want your PR strategy to impact.
You may aim your campaign at a variety of audience demographics and each aspect of the campaign should be tailored to them.
Be tactical when establishing your target audience – simply aiming a campaign at anybody and everybody will not be effective. Key messages, content and channels will all be dependent on the most effective way to reach those particular audiences.
Key Messages
You want the message to resonate with your target audience – what are they missing? How can you fill a gap in the marketplace with your products or services? Your message should outline exactly how your brand can improve their lives.
As well as considering the message itself, it’s important to decide which channels will be used to portray the message.
Some messages work better through social media, whereas others will resonate more through traditional PR messages such as television, news reports, or radio.
It all depends on where your target audience ‘hangs out’. Do they consume weekend broadsheet newspapers for example? Or are they likely to be found on TikTok?
Knowledge Of The Competition
It isn’t always enough to identify and research your target audience – for your PR plan to be effective, it’s important to research your competitors too. If you want to stay ahead, you need to know what you’re dealing with.
First of all, you need to understand exactly who your competition is, by undertaking competitor analysis.
Monitor their behaviours, their online presence, and of course, their PR activities. Make note of what they’re doing right and what they are doing wrong – and learn from their mistakes.
However, it’s important that your PR campaign is unique. Come up with your own creative ideas that will speak directly to your target audience.
A Way of Measuring Success
No campaign is complete without an effective way of measuring success. After all, you need to know what you’re doing right, and you need to be able to identify areas of improvement.
Consider metrics and KPIs. A good success measurement system involves statistics – although some areas of success may be more difficult to measure.
Some common KPIs that PR professionals often use to measure success include:
- Press articles and coverage acquired
- Prominence of coverage
- Brand mentions
- Website backlinks
- Website traffic
- Social media engagement and overall reach
- Media content analysis e.g. for positive sentiment, the inclusion of key messages
At Tuesday Media, we can create the right PR campaign for your business. With years of experience in the industry, we know what it takes to succeed.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your brand grow, and to get the ball rolling on a quality PR strategy.
