How Do You Approach A PR Strategy? Tips & Insights

Opening a PR campaign without researching and building a strategy beforehand is similar to telling yourself to stop procrastinating. Probably not gonna work. A clear PR strategy should include the following:

• Your company’s features and offers, how it differentiates from the rest of the market, the message it conveys, and the reasons why it should be covered by the media;
• Who your clients are and how they discover your products or services;
• The starting date and overall length of your PR campaign;
• Ways to measure your campaign’s success on the market.

Once you have something to promise to your customers – and the means to deliver it – consider yourself ready to take the next step. To back it up: brands that have a clear strategy stating their purpose expand 69% faster than their competitors, as stated by Unilever.

The next step after forming a strategy is making sure everyone involved in the campaign works in sync with your mutual goal. Start off with a group meeting to clarify the strategy, respond to comments and concerns, and align each team member’s understanding of the operation. As you continue to work on the PR campaign, we suggest checking in with the team on a regular basis – there’s always space for improvement and new suggestions. This also prevents you from misunderstandings and missing out on the details that may get lost in the process.

An underlying message is what creates a bond between the brand and the consumer. As stated by SPRD, 92% of customers want brands to tell them a story in the first place instead of trying to sell right away. To create a successful story, follow these tips:

• Determine the message that lies at the heart of your product or service. What is the problem it solves? How does it make the world – or one’s life – better, more convenient, or more fun?
• Get a thorough understanding of your audience and its needs to see the areas you need to aim at.
• Based on this, formulate a story that demonstrates your brand’s capability of solving the audience’s problem and its importance within the market. Be as specific as possible so that the person reading your statement does not hesitate to feel convinced.
• Provide details to receive follow-up messages once your story captivates those you pitch it to.

Public relations are still relations, and it’s the element that helps your story become visible to the world. Aside from focusing on campaign pitching, the bonds you make with influencers, bloggers, and media editors may evolve into cooperation for years to come. However, how do you find the right PR connections to push your idea forward?

• Create a list of contacts to share your idea with. Conduct detailed research on each of them to see if your story fits in their area of interest and personalize your pitch once you’ve sorted out your target recipients.
• Arrange all of the information into an organized package so that its recipients can navigate the content better. Make sure you don’t go overboard with introductions – be polite and get straight to the point.
• Strive to create a real connection. Networking isn’t about frantically hoarding relevant contacts. At the end of the day, it might not even be about your pitch. Having a reflective conversation to share your project’s value can lead to others sharing your passion and passing it on to another person that offers help. Either way, you’ll get valuable feedback in exchange.
• Bring tools into play. Try using Similarweb to find sources you can reach out to with a pitch in fitting niches. You can also use SEMrush to get a picture of how well your rivals do by seeing their backlink strength and traffic.
• Try networking at events. In certain cases, industry-related events can be a great opportunity to connect with the minds you’re looking for. Such events usually gather niche-specific individuals, so you’ll save time on researching whether that journalist is a good fit for your matter.

After your campaign is thought-out, formulated, pitched, and received by the media, the next step is to measure how successful your efforts were. In PR, there’s more to consider than just media coverage. For instance, you could take these points into account:

• Mentions. This refers to the number of press sources that mention your business or the idea you’ve reached out with. More coverage means more public awareness, which directly impacts your campaign’s success. However, remember that not all views are equal – some readers may not engage with your campaign or be meaningful for your business objectives.
• Website traffic. Compare how your website traffic changed before and after running a PR campaign. Call-to-action elements are the main way for leads to reach you, and increased activity from website visitors is a direct indicator of your efforts’ effectiveness. Evaluate which media mention led to an increase in engagement, and build your future PR endeavors with this in mind.
• Social media. If your campaign was received well, it’s likely to be a subject of interest online. In terms of social media, center on the conversations your campaign triggered, discussions in online communities, and overall social media mentions. You can benefit from analyzing the audience’s response by taking note of the points that earned the most favor or caused misinterpretations.
• The initial plan. Even with other metrics noted, the best indicator of your PR campaign’s success lies within the plan you formed in the first place. Go back to the objectives you set while developing the campaign and compare the outcomes with what you strived for.

PR is tricky in its own way: it relies more on the human factor and is quite complex in terms of results tracking – at the very least, they’re not as tangible when compared to PPC ads performance and take time to come into play. But if you stick to the rules of the game, stay patient, and hold on tight to your goals, media relations will pay off better than expected.