Elementary Writing

This is the third article in our online course series on the theory, practice, trends and secrets of New Age Public Relations. Other topics that we cover are:

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The truth of it is – no other initiative will grow your business as quickly or effectively as a strong PR campaign.

The best public issue campaigns are based on hopes and dreams, rather than fears and problems. If you want to involve people you must inspire them and generate enthusiasm for the campaign. Negative approaches that exploit emotions like fear or anger can sometimes mobilize people for a short period, but are much harder to use to build organizations or transform society.

Public Relations Campaign

The ultimate goal of a PR campaign is to receive loads of free publicity about your Company, business, book, product, service, or cause. This type of free publicity most often leads to more sales, brand awareness, strategic alliances, and so on. Making headlines is the greatest and fastest way to make people want to do business with you.

Just like with everything else launching a PR campaign will require planning. If a strategic plan and approach is not put into place the outcome will almost never be positive. First to know is that public relations plan must be the integral part of overall Marketing strategy and marketing plan of the Company.

Every good public relations plan must include a step-by-step plan that outlines the key milestones of your PR effort and fills in the specific details for executing the plan:

What message to Whom – Select your target audience

Every organization has its own challenges in terms of public perception:

• To get more exposure
• To influence or change the public’s pre-existing perceptions
• To highlight recent achievements in order to gain the attention of prospective investors, partners or customers.

You also need to know your audience; who do you want to reach? Your audience can be divided into primary, secondary and tertiary audiences to narrow down specific targets and the appropriate messages. Find out everything there is about your audiences; from demographics to psychographics.

Situation Analysis – Gauge the current public opinion about your organization

One of the most difficult challenges for public relations campaigns is identifying the factors that will really cause people to change their behaviors. The key to influencing people’s behavior with PR lies not so much in the creative execution of a campaign, but in the front-end research to identify the true drivers of behavioral change. Better research, better outcomes.

Some interesting questions (and answers) you define in this stage may influence the whole PR campaign:

• What do members of your key target audience think of you and your operation?
• Notice any negatives?
• Are misconceptions, inaccuracies or rumors becoming evident?
• Any undercurrents surfacing?
• Is there a problem coming down the pike?

Do some homework

Discuss the organization’s history. Your overview should include information pertaining to the organization’s main goal. Also Include a summary of the original campaign. Summarize everything the plan includes.

Outline these important components:

• The goals – list every goal your campaign focuses on achieving. For example, your goal might try for a positive impact on individual perception by explaining your pricing policies, or replacing a damaging rumor with the truth
• The objectives – at least one objective for each goal. The objectives must explain what that portion of the project will focus on. Objectives include increasing awareness, brand differentiation, and more.
• The strategies – how do I get from here to there? Discuss what your organization should do to achieve each particular goal. Your choice will respond to what you turned up during your monitoring phase.
• Evaluation plan- list ways the organization can measure the results for each strategy that is used.

Set a budget

Effective PR can be done cheaply or even for free in some cases. However, as a rule you should anticipate some level of expenditure for your campaign.

If your CEO (or equivalent organizational leader) can be convinced of the potentially wide-ranging financial and reputation-related effects of the issue you are trying to convey to your public, he or she will be much more likely to earmark the appropriate funds for your PR initiative.

Communication Tactics – Decide how you will get the word out

Now we come to those “beasts of burden”: Your delivery system for moving your message to members of your target audience is the Communications Tactic.

A good thing to remember about the media is that they are always short on time and you have only seconds to relate what you have to say. Most importantly always make sure that you communicate your message to the correct media source that would find it newsworthy for their audience.

Luckily, you have a ton at your disposal:

• Emails
• personal meetings
• press releases
• brochures
• radio interviews
• special events
• letters-to-the-editor
• face-to-face meetings
• speeches and open houses
• community briefings

Create a plan of execution, including a detailed timeline

Assign each task to a particular person, along with a deadline. This creates a sense of accountability for each task. Of course, once the execution phase is launched and some time passes, you will likely find yourself needing to adjust your tactics to meet an ever-changing environment.

Whether you conduct your own campaign or entrust your PR campaign to an expert PR firm, your plan – and the thinking you go through to formulate it – will go a long way toward helping you reach your PR objectives. During periods of relative chaos, you will be glad to have a plan to which you can refer in order to keep things on track.

How do you know whether your public relations campaign is working?

Once your communications tactics have had six or seven weeks to make an impact on your target audience, go back out among audience members and ask the same questions all over again. That is time consuming and a powerful lot of work. But it’s worth it!

What you want to question those folks about, of course, is the same topics you raised the first time around. Only now, you’re looking for altered perceptions.

• Does the second set of responses indicate that you were successful in clarifying the misconception?
• Does the inaccurate belief is morphing into your version?
• Does the irritating (and potentially dangerous) rumor has been laid to rest?
• Was your message clear enough?
• Were the best “hot buttons” pressed?
• Did you include the right facts and figures to support your case?

When you gather responses showing a consistently positive pattern, that brief and logical plan of yours is beginning to produce the success promised by the fundamental premise of public relations.

Format of Public Relations Plan

It has been said that public relations is the result of form and substance. How you say it (form) and what you say (substance) will likely determine the success or failure in getting PR campaign proposal accepted.

Bind all work neatly. Personalize the transmittal letters if you know the names of the selection committee members. No typos. Use a computer and laser printer. Meet deadlines. Use an easily readable font typeface (minimum 12-point font). Use good paper, don’t skimp.

There are a number of elements in an effective public relations proposal presentation of which you must be aware. Begin each section with the appropriate subheads;

Quick PR Pilot Programs

Pilot programs are designed to try things we don’t exactly know will work or work as expected.

In the times when environment is changing daily, the effects of the big lumbering PR ventures are more and more liable to the impacts from various undefined variables. Deploying measurable shorter pilot programs first may be an excellent tool in PR toolbar for securing the overall achievement of large PR campaigns.

Requirements of pilots- based planning:

• A simple measurement and reporting model that happens in real-ish time and a decision making process for mid-stream changes (e.g. our outreach to food bloggers isn’t clicking in, let’s expand the incentive or expand our list….)
• Time within an overall campaign. Time to try a few things within a pilot to tweak and find effectiveness before you scale up
• An understanding of how multiple disciplines affect each other – advertising, public relations, search marketing, direct marketing, experience marketing, etc….
• A tolerance of short-term failure. How else do we learn?
• A longer term view. This may seem like a contradiction. To run a pilot, you must be extremely ‘present’ and to judge its usefulness to your business, you must have the capacity to see beyond the immediate results of one pilot.

The Bottom line

What clients really want is to be shown the money. When their most important customers are influenced and their behaviors change in a way that directly affects the company’s ledger, that’s great PR! Increased sales, increased share price, increased membership, increased sponsorship, funding, or other financial criteria are measurable, and depend on strategic business planning and implementation best handled by senior public relations strategists. All these aspects should be considered and appreciated when composing a productive PR Campaign plan.

Tags: Communication Tactics, Media Plan, Media Relations Plan, PR Campaign, PR Course, PR Guide, Public Relations, Public Relations Campaign, Public Relations Plan, Public Relations Plan Format