Creating a Successful PR Strategy
The key to a successful PR campaign is creating long-term results. A PR strategy is the most effective way to organize public relations activities and determine the best way to communicate. This helps people in charge of PR to look at the big picture of the company in order to utilize the stories in the business to reach the target audience.
A company can have a brilliant story highlighting what they do in a heartwarming way. But if that message doesn’t reach consumers who care because they are the wrong age or location, it can fall short of achieving anything. A good PR strategy will help target the communication to the right publications and correct audience at the right time.
Goals and Objectives
The first step in creating a PR strategy is to determine the goals and objectives. This is vitally important as a measure of determining the success of the strategy. Since multiple public relations campaigns can happen simultaneously, the need for a clear objective of each is important. A company can be promoting a new blog section of its website and want to promote a specific product to gain sales.
Remember the acronym SMART when establishing these goals: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely is the best way to approach these factors. Using the company above as an example, a goal for promoting a new blog could be gaining one hundred new followers to their blog in one month. This gives the company a concrete goal to reach and hard data to use for future strategies if it is not reached.
Target Audience
Think about who would be interested in hearing about the company, who will have the most influence over the outcome of the PR campaign, and who will ultimately take action and purchase the products or services. Don’t limit the audience to only current or potential customers, however. Think about investors, analysts, vendors, suppliers, government regulators, employees, and all media such as trade and consumer in addition to news media.
By targeting specific segments of your audience for campaigns, a company can focus messages on those platforms that reach those consumers. This increases their effectiveness and the chance for a PR campaign to meet its goals.
Key Messages
This might be the most important part of all PR strategies. Key messages are the core messages you want consumers to hear and remember. They are important because they can communicate a unified message and shape your content. Key messages can be designed to educate and inform, but also can change people’s perceptions or compel them to take action. Consumers are inundated with information now, so telling a story is a great way to get the key message to the target audience while breaking through the noise.
Once a company has created SMART goals and objectives, figured out the target audience for their campaign, and decided the key messages they want to share, a successful PR strategy has been formed.
