How to take a planned approach to PR

If you want results, you shouldn’t just jump into PR with both feet. To ensure success, you need to take a planned approach. The following process should help get you started.

Set your campaign objectives

What do you want your campaign to achieve? And what does success look like? Setting clear communications objectives will help you to shape a successful campaign.

Define your target audiences

Your campaign may involve you engaging more than one target audience. You should state who each audience is and define what they’re interested in.

Decide on your communications strategy

Your positioning and objectives will help to inform your strategy and identify the most appropriate media for your campaign. Deciding upfront on your positioning will help you to create a strong, integrated campaign.

Create your messaging

To ensure consistency in your campaign you need to draft a series of key messages that you will thread throughout all of your communications. Your messaging should cover your company, products/services and the market, and be appropriate for each target audience.

Choose your media

Not every medium will be appropriate for all of your target audiences, so you may want to think about the most appropriate tactics to engage each audience. For example, a technical audience may appreciate a detailed white paper, but an executive audience may prefer a high-level case study that outlines the key business benefits of your product or service.

Outline some story ideas

With the skeleton of your plan complete, it’s time to flesh it out. Brainstorm some story ideas that you could use in press releases, articles, whitepapers, webinars, and so on. Then decide on the stories that are viable. Highlight those you can get started on straight away, those requiring third party input, and those that are time-sensitive. Be sure to incorporate your messages into your stories.

Schedule of activities

The final stage is to schedule each task. Some stories may be time-sensitive (e.g. a product launch) and can be scheduled easily, while others can be performed at any time. It’s important to balance the schedule so you’re issuing a steady stream of interesting news and valuable information.

Need some help?

We’ve created successful PR campaigns for many companies. If you would like a copy of our PR planning guide, why not contact us? We’d love to hear from you.

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