It’s probably becoming more and more obvious that your company’s development and success is not only decided by the qualitative characteristics or the prices of products and services. It is decided to a large degree by the marketing strategy you apply for your company’s Public Relations. How are things projected to the outside world? What collaborations and relationships with other companies, organizations and societies in general does your company have? Today there are way more channels one can utilize in order to thrive in portraying a company or brand. That might make things a bit more complicated, but at the same time more interesting and fun, as there is much more room for success and growth.

So, how can you utilize all those opportunities and potentialities given by today’s multi-channeled media world?

One Team lists you a few examples of practices that might prove to be the answer on how to further expand and develop your business through PR marketing.

1. Clarify your business’s overall mission, objectives and goals

It makes sense that you shouldn’t invest time, energy and money before getting things clear. Above anything else, is making clear to the PR team what the company’s objectives are. What specifically is it that you want to gain or get from this marketing strategy? You need to be really precise and take everything into account.

Apart from objectives you must also establish a broader mission aligned by the company’s goals. The difference between objectives and goals is in the way they’re measured. There are some criteria based on quality and some other based on quantity. Goals are depended upon the overall marketing and image of a company. They are more aligned to creating a broader picture.

Now, in order to define both objectives and goals you need to be realistic and specific, but also give room for change of ideas if researching something overturning.

2. Review past PR Strategies

Before actually taking any actions and investing, you also need to take into account that your company’s image today is an outcome of past PR activities. So, in a way, today’s marketing strategy should be affected by yesterday’s, no matter if there was positive or negative publicity.

Where was the attention from the media concentrated? What was the impact on your company? What did you then plan to do in order to respond to positivity or negativity? Was there reaction from individual publishers or from large media channels?

These are all questions you need to answer while planning the PR marketing strategy. You can do that by researching the Internet, search engines and social media.

3. Create a list and timetable for every action planned

By listing and recording your company’s actions and tasks you’ll be able to do things more precisely and avoid mistakes along the way. You’ll be able to put the right people and effort for every task and also keep track of everything going on. In order to do all that there many digital tools available.

As your PR marketing strategy works on, you can make adaptations which seem to be more efficient for reaching the objectives. 

4. Your actions should be determined by your Target Audience

Different target audiences have different habits and methods when it comes to looking for something for a specific reason. They should determine the digital channels through which you’ll communicate. Also, by creating profiles and personas of your potential customers you’ll be much more able to understand what they want and need and as a result address them more properly.

Something a little bit disrupting in all this is when you’ll approach traditional media for addressing people. Media which are not controlled by common people but professionals that know how to handle communication. That means you should also focus on doing PR with journalists, newspapers, TV channels and news websites as well. Note that traditional media today are facing a lot of competition. So, in order to get properly covered you should offer something which stands out.

5. Collaborate with Influencers

It’s always positive when someone else is giving you good publicity. The best and most effective way to choose who is going to be your influencer is depended on your target audience and tone of voice. Channels include mainly social media but also traditional media to a lesser degree. There are other things to take into account as well. An important one is the credibility, popularity, reputation and overall image of the influencers as well.

6. Focus on pulling, not pushing

This is where the marketing and advertising world is heading the last few years. Despite the fact that there is advertising through digital and social media, many brands successfully draw consumers through pulling them towards their products or services instead of pushing their products and services towards them.

It is becoming more and more obvious that advertising is shifting from reaching masses to pulling specific types of people. This is because audiences can choose what to see and what not to see while surfing on the Internet. The most popular and effective method of pulling people is through creating content. That isn’t about necessarily selling something, but definitely creating a bond with people through a particular public image.

7. Measure and calculate your progress

As a final step in the whole PR marketing strategy process you should assess how successful or unsuccessful your practices were. You could do minor measurements during the process and not only after your campaign is over. For that there are metrics and KPIs through analytics which give information on specific matters.

Some simple but important questions answered by your assessment should be:

• Did we reach the people targeted?

• To what extent was there engagement?

• Was the brand mentioned enough?

• Were collaborations effective?

• Was there positive or negative feedback?

• What was the image built in the whole process?

Measuring and calculating progress and results will definitely help you during your PR Marketing Strategy, but also give important information for future strategies.

If you want to learn more and successfully adapt these PR techniques feel free to One Team!