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A successful public relations (PR) campaign should be a consistent, audience-building machine that helps you reach your target audience while sharing a positive message about your brand. Getting media attention is a great way to increase awareness of your business and can help you attract new investors or customers. Before you start sending out press releases and pitching story ideas to reporters, it’s essential to take a step back and define what success looks like for your campaign.
Many entrepreneurs feel that their business idea is so good that it should be in every media outlet. However, this is not an achievable or realistic goal. To have a successful PR campaign, you need to start with a strategy and be realistic about what you can achieve. You need to have posts that go beyond describing what problems your company solves. You have to explain why it matters. In addition, you must determine how you will measure success.
The best way to ensure a successful PR campaign is to engage a trusted PR agency or PR expert to advise your business on the best steps to take. Starting with a solid strategy, a PR consultant can map out realistic benchmarks and expectations and has solid media connections to ensure a successful campaign.
Related: 4 guiding principles for building and implementing a great PR strategy
Contents
Strategy
When starting a new PR campaign, your company needs to reach the right audience and determine what action that audience will take upon hearing your message. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Driving traffic to your website? Stimulate the sale of a specific product or service? Once you’ve set your goal, you can start thinking about how best to measure success.
Identifying your target audience is another crucial step. After all, there’s no point in reaching out to people who aren’t interested in what you do. If you know who you’re trying to reach, you can craft messages that resonate with them and pitch story ideas that will grab their attention. You should also have a good idea of ​​which media channels will reach the greatest number of people in your target audience. A solid PR agency can help determine which publications will be the best and will likely have affiliations with them that will ensure that the timing of your message reaching readers aligns with your goals and overall strategy.
Your PR strategy should focus on which journalists and media outlets are most likely to be interested in your story and reach your target audience. Remember PR is a long game – it’s not just about getting one story in a top publication. A well-executed PR campaign will drive multiple placements in targeted media channels over time. This increases your chances of reaching your target audience and achieving your desired business objectives.
Messages
Second, what is the best approach for the story? In addition to describing the problems your company solves, do you have posts explaining why it matters? Your message should be clear, concise, and compelling enough that someone who knows nothing about your business will want to read more.
Your posts should also answer the following questions:
- Who are you trying to reach?
- How are you going to help them?
- Why should they care?
Answering these questions will help you better target your PR efforts and ensure that your message resonates with your target audience. Creating targeted posts for different audiences makes it easier for reporters and editors to understand how your business can fit into their stories.
Related: Why a Good Digital PR Strategy Is So Important
Evaluation
How do you determine success? Review your goals from the beginning of planning your PR campaign. Have you and your PR team or company set goals or benchmarks for the number of media outlets that will distribute your story? Or the quality of articles written about your company? While coverage in high-profile publications is always fun, it’s not necessarily indicative of a successful PR campaign. Keep your overall strategy in mind and look to it to determine success.
You can use different metrics, but the important thing is to choose the ones that align with your overall goal. Let’s say you’re trying to increase brand awareness. In that case, you can track social media mentions or the number of people who visit your website after seeing an article about your business. Or if boosting sales is your primary goal, then conversion rate tracking is more appropriate. Once you’ve selected the metrics you’ll be using, make sure you establish baseline numbers so you can track progress over time.
A more effective way to measure success is to see if your PR efforts are helping you achieve specific business objectives, such as generating leads, increasing web traffic, or driving sales. Track metrics such as web traffic referrals from media placements and conversion rates from press mentions to better understand how your PR campaigns are performing. This data can then be used to tailor future campaigns accordingly. If you don’t have specific objectives before launching a PR campaign, it will be difficult to measure its success.
A successful PR campaign requires strategy, targeted messaging and evaluation based on specific objectives to be truly effective. A successful PR campaign depends on having clear goals, knowing your target audience and choosing success measures that align with those goals. By planning your campaign strategy and predetermining what a successful campaign looks like, you are much better placed to achieve the results you want.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.