An effective PR campaign can increase brand awareness or sales for your brand for years after the campaign's completion. And that's probably why you're reading this blog, right? You want to execute a PR campaign that captures the attention of your target audience.
Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create a PR campaign with winning results:
What is a PR Campaign?
What are Common PR Campaign Objectives?
How to Create a PR Campaign
Creating Public Relations Campaigns: Key Takeaways
What is a PR Campaign?
A PR campaign involves the production and release of strategically planned content designed around any number of business goals. These could include, but are not limited to: promoting a product release, announcing a new executive hire or reorg, announcing a merger or acquisition, damage control during or after a crisis, or creating buzz prior to a big reveal.
What are Common PR Campaign Objectives?
Public relations (PR) is a powerful way to connect with your audience and creating the ideal campaign and implementing it properly, has never been more important.
The goal of a public relations campaign is to create a media narrative and control the spread of information about your business to attract customers. It can also be used as a tactic to generate awareness about a specific event or business venture. Oftentimes, marketing and advertising campaigns are focused on driving sales, whereas public relations teams usually have set different PR KPIs:
- Attract media attention
- Generate awareness
- Inform the public about the latest company news
- Enhance your brand reputation
- Build stakeholder relations
Many PR experts choose to use the SMART method as a template when coming up with the goals for their PR campaign:
- Specific: What is the desired outcome?
- Measurable: How will success be measured?
- Achievable: How will the campaign achieve its goals considering outside influences?
- Realistic: Is your campaign goal realistic for the bandwidth of your campaign?
- Time-based: How long do you have to meet these goals?
How to Create a PR Campaign
Now that you know a bit more about what a PR campaign is, let's discuss how to create a pr campaign.
1. Determine what you want to accomplish
2. Select your target audience
3. Brainstorm
4. Gather market intelligence
5. Choose your channels
6. Sense check your idea
7. Execute your PR campaign
8. Follow up
9. Measurement
1. Determine what you want to accomplish
Before you start planning your public relations campaign, you need to decide what the desired outcome is. Are you looking to increase sales and leads? To increase brand recognition, brand value and brand valuation? Or is partner engagement and recruiting your focus?
Deciding what objective you want to achieve first helps determine the PR strategy you should use. In the section above, we outlined several objectives that you may want to consider setting as your goal.
When setting your PR goals, remember to thinking about how you will measure success during your campaign planning. Your leadership team doesn’t want a list of links to PR clips and some social media snapshots; they want to understand how the promotion supported the business's objectives.
Wondering how to measure PR ROI? To make sure you are on the right path, we’ve identified 14 proven PR KPIs you’ll want to consider tracking.
2. Select your target audience
If your goal is to increase brand awareness around your new product line of diapers, you probably aren't going to be marketing them to single men in their early twenties. Reaching your goals requires reaching the correct audience.
So, when mapping out your communications plan and public relations strategy, think about who you want to target. Your PR team will likely have to adjust its tactics based on the audience the team decides to target.
3. Brainstorm
Once you know what you want to accomplish, you can begin thinking about the best way to achieve your set of goals.
Brainstorming is an important part of developing and creating a PR campaign. To hold an effective brainstorming session, bring in different people from various backgrounds and relay what you are trying to achieve.
Conduct thorough brainstorming by asking for lots of ideas and seeing how they correlate with each other. Then, give it a day or so to settle before re-approaching with anything you may have missed.
Consider these questions
- What is the message?
- Who is the message for?
- What platforms will share the message?
- What topic is the message and how will you get it across?
In addition to holding a brainstorming session, you may also want to collect market intelligence about your target audience or competitors. Try using a survey to sample how your audience is feeling or consult a subject matter expert.
4. Gather market intelligence
During these early stages of the campaign, it is a good idea to collect industry research and market intelligence. This information can be used to determine how your story fits into broader industry trends, what aspects of the story to embrace or not, and how to counter any potential negative backlash. It is also a good idea to take note of what the media is interested in.
Conducting research like a social media analysis, competitive analysis, or digital media analysis could be beneficial to the campaign and marketing efforts.
Tip: When crafting a press release, frame the announcement as a news story. If you want journalists to pick up your company's news, then help them to understand why it's newsworthy by creating a headline for your press release. It should read like a story that would be interesting to the public, not just a company news bulletin post.
🤖 AI can help! Use Meltwater's PR Assistant to strengthen your press release and increase the chances it's picked up. The ChatGPT-powered AI PR assistant is also able to suggest relevant journalists from the Meltwater database, which will greatly focus and streamline your pitching process.
Other things to research
- Competitors websites
- Competitor campaigns (SEO, social media, and PPC)
- Competitor LinkedIn pages
- Your competitors on Google and set up Google alerts
To collect all of this information, you may have to involve stakeholders from other departments, like marketing and sales. These stakeholders could help inform and vet the key messages and campaign plan. Get the Data Driven PR Playbook for more tips on using data to craft better PR campaigns.
5. Choose your channels
Your carefully crafted message will be meaningless if nobody hears it.
Will you be sending out a press release or holding a press conference? Do you want to use influencers to help spread your message or only your company's branded social media profiles?
The channels that your target audience pays the most attention to, should be a key consideration in the campaign planning process.
Again, if you are marketing your company's new line of diapers, then you could consider leveraging a marketing mix of online and offline tactics to reach people before they go shopping and when they are out shopping.
When developing the strategy, your public relations team may want to think about how the campaign relates to the marketing team's SEO strategy, social media strategy, and other digital marketing channels.
Perhaps surprisingly, many press releases aren’t SEO-friendly. 😬
You don’t have to be a search engine specialist to understand SEO’s impact on your PR campaign. With the help of semantic SEO boosting your PR campaign, research-driven link building, and AI assistance for public relations, you will be able to increase your brand’s reach, drive more organic traffic, and increase your site’s (and brand’s) authority.
Tip: Learn how to optimize a press release for SEO and take a look at our free PR in the Age of Influence Report
6. Sense check your idea
Before jumping into the public relations campaign execution and launch, present the ideas to people not involved in the project. How many times have you seen an ad and thought "how did someone approve that?" Well, chances are, not many people were involved in the approval process.
To avoid a PR crisis, consider finding out what your journalist friends and influencers think. Influencers have great insight into how the social media world will receive your message.
💡Most importantly, get feedback early in the process. Doing this can help catch something obvious or prevent something you didn't realize was tone-death. Be sure every part of the campaign aligns with brand and company values.
Think about your target audience and ask yourself:
- What is important to them?
- How will this campaign make them feel?
- What are their pain points and how can you solve them?
7. Execute your PR campaign
Before your public relations team presses "go", double-check that every detail is correct and all of the assets are on-brand, don't contain typos, or other mistakes. Be sure that every piece of data or set of facts included is accurate. This is the time to make any changes — before officially launching.
Now it's time for tactical execution. Give yourself a minimum of 10 days, or even longer for some public relations campaigns. Consider current events, competitor news, and even holidays. Expect that things may happen that are out of your control and give yourself some wiggle room. This space to make any last-minute changes is crucial to campaign success.
Be sure to have any additional information ready to go, and the authority to send it. It is imperative to capitalize on every single call, so have communication channels open and be ready to respond to every inquiry.
Real time updates
As your campaign gains traction, you can set up alerts to be notified of mention spikes or sudden shifts in sentiment around your brand. Coupled with AI analysis and topic summaries to help you see whats driving the mentions at a glance, you can quickly asses if a response is needed. These insights also serve as important color and context for your PR reporting.
8. Follow up
Have a follow-up plan for journalists. If you notice that your story has been bumped or not covered yet, be ready to explain how the content is still newsworthy, and how it will continue to be newsworthy in the days and even weeks to come. It is common for journalists to have their inboxes full of pitches, so be sure that yours stands out.
Plan to send a follow-up email 3-4 days after the initial communication. Include a link to a customer review, or a link to data or research showing its continued value. Or if it was an event, include some photos. No campaign is ever one-and-done, so create a follow-up plan for added coverage.
Tip: Learn how to pitch your press release to journalists and look at these examples of well-performing press releases. Meltwater provides a press release distribution service to help you automate the process.
9. Measurement
After your PR campaign has concluded, it's time to package your success and report on all your KPIs and metrics. Write up a narrative of what happened and take a victory lap with a blog celebrating the coverage. Take your time writing up every detail and outlining the success of the campaign.
Make note of metrics such as:
- Sales numbers
- Media inquiries
- Changes in social media
- Attendance numbers
Also, be sure to create a mass report with demonstrated KPIs, objectives, and opportunities for improvement. Look for anecdotes that made the campaign important and write an award entry.
Related resources: Modernize your PR reporting. Learn how to measure and analyze your media coverage, how to create media monitoring analysis reports, and how to conduct a media impact analysis.
Meltwater's PR Reporting capabilities will also help you automate that process.
Creating Public Relations Campaigns: Key Takeaways
The key to a successful PR campaign is to not only have a Plan A, and a Plan B, but a C and a D as well. Considering every single possibility will set you apart. Get feedback from outside sources like a journalist, but also consult people that are not in the business. Look out for anything that could be considered offensive or tone-death.
Data is also an incredibly important element. Use compelling and interesting data to make the case for your story, and above all else, be sure it is accurate and backed up with credible evidence.
However, the most important thing is to give yourself the time to fail and to succeed. Many great PR campaigns have failed because of small details and little time for adjustments. Time is the key to an effective public relations campaign.
For more information on strategy and planning, watch our free on-demand webinar about how to launch a successful pr campaign.
For getting a free consultation about how Meltwater can help you plan, execute, and measure your next PR campaign, fill out the form below.
