PR Strategy 101: A Comprehensive Guide
You have a new business, product, idea, or initiative and you want to spread the word about it, but how do you cut through all the noise? If I had to boil that answer down to just one word it would be this: strategize. A good PR strategy starts with four basic steps. As with anything, you can be as general or as detailed as you want with these steps but following them at even the most basic level will result in more focused, targeted, and effective PR efforts.
1. Determine your message.
What do you want people to know? For some, this will be as straightforward as “buy our product or service.” For others, it will be a more detailed message such as, “women of childbearing age who may become pregnant should consume at least 400mcgs of folic acid daily to prevent potential neural tube defects in developing babies.” Either way, you need to determine as succinctly as possible the message you want to convey.
2. Determine your audience.
Knowing who you’re trying to reach with your message allows you to target your efforts to mediums your audience members are most likely to frequent. For instance, if a residential pest control company wants to convey the “buy our service” message, the audience is likely to be homeowners generally. Whereas the message about folic acid is geared toward women in a specific age range. Either way, knowing who you’re trying to talk to helps you identify how to best to reach them.
3. Choose your mediums or tactics.
Now that you know who you want to reach with your message, you need to determine which mediums or tactics will most effectively reach that audience within your available budget.
At this point, it’s important to delineate the difference between marketing and public relations. Simply put, marketing tends to deal with the paid advertising side of things, while public relations tends to deal with earned or unpaid publicity. So, if you’re looking to create a paid prime-time television commercial campaign for your residential pest control business, that would fall on the marketing side of things and it would require a fairly large budget. If you’d like to write an article in which you offer expert advice on things homeowners can do to discourage ants, and if you’d like to place that article in a local homeowners’ association newsletter, that will fall on the side of earned publicity or public relations, and it would require a smaller budget.
Public relations tactics include a wide array of options like social media posts, articles and news coverage (think press releases), brochures and collateral materials, podcast and television show appearances, newsletters, videos, events, and flyers.
A seasoned public relations or marketing professional can help you understand which tactics will be most effective in reaching your target audience.
4. Set a schedule.
Now that you know what you want to say, who you want to say it to, and how you intend to say it, the only thing left is to map out when you’re going to say it. Like most things in life, a key to a good public relations plan is consistency. I typically suggest my clients look at a calendar and, assuming they’re using multiple tactics, plan out when they want their various tactics to go live so that they overlap one another and so they can continue for as long as possible (or as frequently as possible depending on the goal) for maximum effect. Whatever you do, you need to be intentional about ensuring all parts work together and are coordinated to reach your audience. A reactionary, inconsistent, and irregular effort will have diminished impact.
Of course, these steps are easier said than done, and even if you have a good idea of how you would go about them, the real-life implementation is never as easy as it sounds. That’s where professional support can become a game changer. Working with someone who can walk you through these steps, guiding and advising you along the way, is a surefire way to remove a lot of the pressure and confusion that comes with developing and implementing a winning public relations strategy.
Mandy Minick is the principal and founder of Minick Public Relations, LLC. She has more than 20 years of public relations and entrepreneurial experience in government, association, and private sector communications. Find Minick Public Relations on LinkedIn.