In order to effectively manage your brand’s reputation and credibility, you’ll definitely need a Public Relation strategy. And you can either work to improve it from within your company or you can hire a PR agency that can control this information.
A PR strategy isn’t just about controlling and distributing information but also deals with negative impressions, comments, press releases and others.
As it is very important to stop negative rumors from affecting your brand and give prompt explanations about any issue that might have affected your good image.
However, building a good reputation takes time. And you can lose it or damage it in a couple of seconds. So how can one create a PR strategy?
1. Set Your PR Goals and Review Them On A Regular Basis
Depending on what you want to achieve, you must be clear and consistent on the goals you want to establish.
For instance, you can aspire for goals such as:
- Improving one’s brand image
- Reach new audiences
- Enhance relationship with customers
- Boost in sales
It’s actually better to go from global aims in order to arrive to more specific goals. But establishing your goals is the key in order to have a successful strategy but it doesn’t mean it’s already set in stone.
2. Research Your Audience For A Better Targeting
After setting your objective, you need to decide and work on your buyer personas. Think of it as a well-research or an educated guess on who your ideas clients are.
You are tasked to find out some information about who you want to reach and address your messages to. It may be difficult to create buyer personas but it is much better than speaking into public channels without a good idea of who you are trying to reach.
3. Check Which Platform Works Best For You!
After analyzing your audience, you will need to decide which platform you are going to use to send your messages. The channel must deliver information in the channel that your audience prefers so that they’ll feel more comfortable.
4. Tell Your Story With A Press Release
If you want your press release to perform well, release it with a story. Media outlets aren’t just after your brands and products, they also want to know about who you are and what you are doing.
If you want journalists to choose your press release, you need to make it interesting, newsworthy and include some quotes that they could elaborate on.
5. Make Contacts With Your Outlet and Contact List
Just as there are different industries, there are also different writers and journalists that have audiences that best fit your brand.
And it would be a good idea to build relationships with those who are writing about your industry on a regular basis. Engaging with them might even prove good for you. In the end, it’s really about who can help you get your message across to as many people as you possibly can.
6. Create A Budget
When everything is ready, you will need to check your limitations. And start considering just how much you are willing to spend for your PR strategy.
There are a lot of expenses to think about such as staff time, images, materials, distribution, and other unexpected expenses.
7. Test The Effectiveness of Your PR
Finally, when you have implemented your strategy. You will need to check if its working. Are your strategies helping you achieve your goal? Or should you try a different tactic?
Always check the successes of your strategy at least once a month. Although some campaigns will last longer than others, you definitely need an expert to make changes to adapt to the situation.
Public Relation Strategies
Check out these Public Relation strategies that you might want to consider employing for your own business.
1. Do Your Research
A good PR campaign needs research. Strive to fully understand your audience in order to increase your chance to appeal your products and services to your customers.
And if you need to, you can even segment the information that you’ve gathered about them. This can help you create content that they will likely enjoy.
You can also check out your competition. What strategies are they using and how can you use their outputs to inspire your own future campaigns?
2. Create Compelling Content
Public relations are about sharing the right information with the right channels and people. Doing this can help you build your reputation.
But to truly succeed, your content must have the element of curiosity, relevancy, urgency, value and emotion.
Understand what resonates with your audience and learn the language that they use. Especially the things they like and don’t like.
Taking the time to understand your audience and using that information can help you create compelling contents that’ll increase impact that your readers will share with others.
3. Collaborate With Influencers
What’s a good way to earn credibility for your target audience? The key is to collaborate with influencers who share interests, appreciation and service of your products.
Thanks to the internet and social media platforms, brands can easily collaborate with their influencers quite easily. You can also check out popular bloggers who carry enormous clout and niche audiences and other online publishers who have a large email list and far reach.
4. Communicate Your Core Values
Your customers will always scrutinize your brand. And that’s a good thing, especially since you can use this to your advantage.
So whenever you create content for your PR campaigns, you can take the time to establish your “why”. And if your company has a purpose that’s beyond just earning income, you can use that to strongly appeal to the public.
5. Take Advantage of Traditional Press
Everything might have gone digital but this doesn’t mean people are no longer listening to radios, reading the morning newspaper or looking at billboards during their commute.
Although it won’t always be sensational or guarantee a national headline. But you can use these methods to find a more direct way to tell your brand’s story. And once you’ve identified what those are, you can check your local media outlets for exclusive access to your story.
6. Focus On Storytelling
Your business and brand needs to be clever if you ever want to capture the attention of your audiences especially when consumers choose what content they want to engage with. Making understanding your audiences very important.
If you are deciding on the type of ad that you want to create for your campaign, you will also need to consider how you would be able to create a better experience for your consumers and relate to them by telling a relevant story.
7. Use Your Customer’s Voice
There is no better way to improve your company’s reputation than a customer who is singing praises with their experience with you. So try to collect as much customer testimonials and case studies in order to feature them on your website, blog, and social media networks.
It would also be a good idea to include snippets of these testimonials into your marketing materials as well.
PR Tactics vs. PR Strategy
A strategy is a series of maneuvers that you use to reach the goals of your PR campaigns. But the tactics are the actions that you do within that strategy.
For example, if you want to use storytelling in order to humanize your company’s message. You may start by sharing behind-the-scenes photos of your staff. That’s your strategy.
While the tactic is using social media platforms, email marketing or video marketing in order to get your audience to take the action that you want.
PR Tactics You Should Be Using
So what are these tactics that you can use? Check these PR tactics if you can use them with your next campaigns.
1. Tell Your Story With A Video
A picture is worth a thousand words so this means a video is worth a lot more. Instead of using a traditional press release, you might want to consider grabbing a journalist’s attention by including some compelling videos along with your press release. This can help your recipient better understand your Press Release without even having to read the full story.
2. Create A Drip Marketing Campaign
A drip marketing campaign is about sending marketing information to people on your email list repeatedly over a long period of time in order to encourage them to take action.
For this campaign to work, you will need an attention-grabbing headline and keep the email themselves short and to the point. Lastly, never forget to include your call-to-actions in order to spur your reader to take action.
3. Find A Hook
Plenty of PR fail because they simply aren’t newsworthy. So an important thing to keep in mind when you want the media to write something about your company is that you need something to hook them with.
For example, if you want to honor someone in the community with a special award or hold an event for your business’s milestone. You might want to brainstorm with your team to find something that will make a good hook for your business.
4. Network
Networking is often an under-utilized PR tactic and it’s such a waste since it’s a highly effective tactic. If you think about it, who is better at telling your story? You or someone else?
If you want someone to know all about your business, you might want to personally network your services either virtually or personally.
So whenever you are meeting someone in person, exchange cards so that you can follow up with them and possibly refer businesses their way. And if you are meeting online, try to join in the conversation and contribute as much value as possible.
The best part of this tactic is that it won’t cost you anything but your time.
5. Always Send Pictures With Your Press Releases
If you don’t want to send a video with your press release, you should still take a time to take that high-resolution photo that you media outlets, influencers and others can use to give your story context and emotion.
6. Industry Podcasts
Did you know that podcasting has become a popular medium for reaching targeted audiences? They are easy to consume and relatively cheap.
You don’t need to create a podcast channel of your own but tap current podcasters to include your content, news and updates.
7. Create How-To Content
Ultimately, public relations is about creating a connection between your brand and target audience to build trust. And sometimes, creating a how-to content that can help your target audience solve a problem or improve something in their lives can help them build what you have to say and create loyalty towards your brand.
So how can your product or service help your customers? Assist them and show your specialties through an article, making an infographic, or an instructional video that can answer frequently or potential questions someone has about a topic.
