Discovering Your Public Relations Strategy?

Part of your business marketing plan may have a public relations strategy. You need to have a strategy for two reasons.

• First of all, you do not have unlimited resources or time. You will need to focus PR efforts.
• Secondly, good PR takes consistency and persistence. If you keep changing the way you are directing your PR, you stand the chance of not achieving as much as if your PR was focused.

How then do you choose the best public strategy for your organization?

A good strategy starts with identifying your goals and clearly stating your objectives. To say that the goal of you PR campaign is to increase awareness of your comapny is not enough. You must be as specific as possible.

The first question you need to ask is - What are the goals and objectives behind the public relations strategy of my organization?

The answers to this question will vary depending on what point of your business cycle you are in.

For example: are you a new business just starting up, an established company that is launching a new product or division, is your company in an industry that has had negative PR and now you seek to mitigate the influence on your specific brand?

By answering this question, you will then be able to figure out who your target audience will be. Again, some examples; if you are new business in town, your target audience might be the existing customers of a competitor; if you a larger business launching a new product, maybe your target audience would be your own existing customers.

The PR campaign strategy to reach a competitor's customers would be widely different than one that is designed to reach your own customers.

The next step after finding your target audience, would be - How do I effectively reach my target audience?

You can then start to think about where to place your PR efforts. Can your target audience best be reached through press releases, newspaper articles, tv spots, publicity stunts, celebrity endorsements, etc?

By determining who your target audience is, you can then find a way to best communicate to them why they should use your product or service. It will also help you be consistent and focused in your targeting.

In fact, before any advertising is done, not just public relations, the answers to these questions should be determined by your organization.

As you can see, there can be many different goals of a PR campaign. Take it one stap at time and follow the logical course of questions and answers, getting more detailed with each level. Once you have determined the objective of your public relations campaign, only then can you start to think about what the best way would be to promote that strategy.