Running Effective PR Campaigns: 6 Simple Tips
An effective PR campaign can have a long-lasting effect on a brand’s public image and reputation. If well-planned, a PR campaign can boost sales and attract media attention (positive and national). Further, it can foster positive relationships between a brand and the public over the years to come.
What are the six simple but effective tips to ensure success in PR? Here are the steps a brand should follow.
#1. Specify Your Goal and Metric of Success
Before starting a campaign, it’s important to specify what a brand seeks to achieve. Typical objectives include: boosting sales, reaching a new audience or building positive relationships.
After specifying a brand’s goal, narrowing it further based on the products is essential. This helps to identify metrics of success in a campaign.
#2. Specify Your Audience
Identifying a suitable client persona is also important in running a successful campaign. To illustrate, when targeting the youth, it’s effective to create a campaign that addresses the youths’ pain points.
With a message tailored to a brand’s audience, an organization can create meaningful relationships or increase sales of a target product.
#3. Choose a Suitable Platform
Choosing the right platform for public relations is essential. While popular campaigns in an industry may prefer digital marketing, a specific campaign may be more suited to the print medium. That said, PR pros should always evaluate infomercial placement to reach a target audience.
Oftentimes, a mismatch between an audience and the communication platform chosen can cause PR campaigns to perform poorly.
#4. Adopt an Angle that’s Unique to an Audience
Successful PR campaigns employ unique angles to reach a target audience. To create the right hook for a target audience, asking the right questions is key. Top among the questions asked is: why should the audience care?
At the same time, reviewing questions asked by members of a brand, studying the buzz in trade publications and developments in a specific field can help create a unique angle.
#5. Craft an Exceptional Message
Upon selecting an angle and the most suitable PR platform, a campaign must create a message that suits the audience and platform. When press releases are preferred, it’s essential to craft a press release that has a news-like angle and uses storytelling to convey the message. This prevents a press release from passing for any other advert.
When working with journalists,story-based press releases help to create content on the message. This furthers a campaign’s reach.
Upon releasing a message, a brand should implement the following step to enhance success.
#6. Boost Social Media Reach
Once media outlets publish articles on a brand, PR pros should reach out to these media outlets and request them to share the content on different social media platforms. Since media outlets have numerous followers on social media, such social shares can boost the success of a campaign.
