Public Relations (PR) campaigns are a must if you want to thrive in this ruthlessly competitive business world. A successful PR campaign should consistently build your audience and improve your brand reputation.
History has it that successful companies use PR to make a memorable difference. For instance, Sue Stanford was any other realtor until her PR move as the Ghost Realtor made her one of the most sought-after realtors.
Running a successful PR campaign can be easy if you understand the underlying principles of success. Here are 3 critical ingredients that will make all your PR campaigns successful.
1. Strategy
Start with a strategy that outlines realistic goals that you want to achieve. Creating a PR strategy can be complex since you need to consider various factors including the timing, your audience, your goals and expectations, and your competitors.
A digital PR agency can help you create a strategy that considers all the relevant factors to ensure the success of your campaign.
Here are four major things to consider when creating a PR campaign strategy:
- Your Audience
As a business, you have many potential publics. These include investors, employees, customers, vendors, and the community. Rarely do all these audiences have similar needs, wants, and interests. You need to align your goals with the competing wants of each of these groups and create custom PR campaigns for the group where you want to direct your PR efforts.
Another important aspect of specific audience targeting is understanding the best channel to use to reach your audience. Identify media outlets and journalists that are most likely to be interested in your story and secure multiple placements in these outlets to increase your chances of reaching your target audience. A PR firm can help you determine which outlet will reach the highest or most significant number of people as well as the best timing for your message.
- Your Goals And Objectives
Goals and objectives are not the same. Goals state what you want to achieve while objectives detail how you’ll achieve your goals.
Goals are general and mon-measured and focus on your business. Objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound) and focus on meeting your customers’ needs.
Some ageless PR goals include promoting goodwill, generating interest, creating demand, and reinforcing brand image.
Objectives involve specific steps to achieve your goal. For a goal like promoting goodwill, for instance, your objective would be to sponsor your local sports team every year or participate in at least two fundraising programs every year.
- Audience Actions In Line With Your PR Goals/Metrics
Decide on the right metrics to measure success. Examples of metrics or audience actions you can look out for are the number of shares, engagement levels on social media, number of website visits, and purchases made within a specified period.
- Analysis Of Your Competitors
Consider your competitors’ PR strategies before creating your own campaign. Conducting an analysis of your competitors’ campaigns and identifying their strengths and weaknesses can reveal a gap that will help you create a more robust campaign. Here are a few steps to get your competitor analysis right:
- Write down a list of 5-10 competitors in terms of revenue and marketing strengths and future potential
- Assess their website content to catch the value proposition in their messages
- Identify media coverage and how relevant it is to the company’s goals by looking at factors such as audience and media relevance
- Check the companies’ socials for content types and update frequency
Use all the information collected as meaningful data to shape your strategy.
2. Messaging
Your brand needs a distinct voice. The best brand messaging is a moving story that wins customers’ hearts, by getting them excited about your company, products, or services. An experienced PR professional can analyze your organization, find your positive messages, and turn those messages into positive stories.
Your message should clearly show:
- Who you are trying to reach, (You can define different audience categories)
- How you are going to help them ((If you have different audiences, develop messages that show how your brand fits into each of their stories)
- Why your audience should sit up and care
Check your brand messaging against the following criteria:
- Does your core message offer anything different from your competitors?
- Is your messaging simple and easy to understand? (The best messaging is brief and oversimplifies complex messaging so that it sticks in your audience’s minds)
- Are your claims realistic and plausible?
- Does your messaging resonate with your audience, is it interesting and compelling?
3. Goal Evaluation
Evaluation is the process by which you determine to what extent your PR campaign has achieved set goals.
You can either do a formative evaluation where you check how your PR campaign is performing as you go or summative, where you measure success at the end of the campaign. It’s always best to measure success as you go and make changes along the way for better success.
You start the evaluation process by reviewing your goals and objectives and evaluating them against relevant metrics. Have your base figures (what the numbers looked like at the beginning of your campaign) for comparison purposes.
For instance, if your goal was to increase brand awareness, some of the metrics to measure are:
- Social media mentions
- Number of website visits from people who’ve read an article about your company
- Surveys to gauge how much the public knows about your business and their attitude towards it
- Media content analysis, which includes volume of press coverage and brand mentions
Start Creating Successful PR Campaigns With Restart Marketing LLC
A digital PR campaign is one of the most powerful marketing strategies. Done right, it can result in increased audience and sales, improved brand reputation, and increased SEO rankings and brand awareness.
But creating a successful campaign, let alone maintaining consistency in your campaign journey is not easy. You have to master all the critical aspects of creating a successful PR campaign including strategizing, creating compelling and targeted messaging that sets your brand apart, and evaluating your results for success.
Restart Marketing LLCis a Digital Marketing Agency that has over 30 years of experience in creating PR campaigns that drive business success. We make it easy for you to create PR campaigns from strategy to evaluation. Get in touch with us to start creating exceptional PR campaigns that help grow your business today.
