How to Craft a Winning PR Plan
Public relations, or PR, is all about communicating with the public and building a positive reputation for your business.
Fostering a good relationship with the public and wider stakeholders is vital for organisations of all sizes, meaning that PR should always be a part of your wider marketing strategy.
It can sometimes be tricky knowing where to start when it comes to the world of public relations, so this blog covers the basics of creating a PR strategy and plan.
What is PR and Why is it Important?
“Public Relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.” – Chartered Institute of Public Relations
Unlike advertising, PR is about telling your organisation’s story through unpaid or earned media. This can include press releases, media outreach, social media and even event appearances and speaking engagements.
It is about sharing important information about the organisation with the wider public, which is useful for raising brand awareness and generating new business. It is also useful for the public too, as it may reach someone that requires your product or services.
PR can also be used to mitigate any damage to an organisation’s reputation. This can include crisis communications, damage control and releasing responses or apologies.
How you respond in a crisis is crucial as it massively affects public perception. If you respond well, you can even turn a crisis into a positive for the organisation or at the very least, you reduce the impact as much as possible.
Building a PR Strategy
Before building a PR plan you need to come up with a clear PR strategy, this includes elements that will ensure your PR activity remains consistent.
The main things to consider are:
- Goals / objectives
- Key messages
- Target audience
These should also fit into the organisation’s wider marketing strategy and plan. Once you’ve decided on these elements, ensure that all your PR activity in your plan is aligned with these, for example look for media outlets most suited to your target audience, ensure your key messages remain consistent throughout your news releases or expert comments and most importantly align any activity with your objectives.
PR Planning
In the world of PR, it can sometimes be useful to be reactive and jump on current events or trends. However, having a robust PR plan in place year-round can actually help to make this easier, and allows you to keep on top of PR regardless of the current trends in media.
Here are some tips that can help you develop a PR plan for your organisation:
- Company News
When it comes to planning PR a good place to start is company news or events. This may include planned product launches, a company anniversary or even an annual charity event that takes place every year. Make sure to add things like this to the PR plan and you can begin preparing well in advance.
- Annual Events / Awareness Days
Another great way to plan your PR activity is to look for relevant awareness days or annual events and map these out for the whole year. This can be things relevant to your industry such as National Manufacturing Day or Careers Week or even a holiday such as Christmas or Hallowe’en if relevant to your organisation. For example, if you’re a hospitality business Valentines Day might be the perfect time for you to run a competition or offer a promotion. Again, being aware of these dates can allow you to start preparing well in advance and ensures you don’t miss out on a good opportunity to talk about your organisation.
- Expert Comments
Expert comments are a great way to get PR coverage and should definitely be included in any PR plan. By keeping abreast of the news, you can spot opportunities to make a contribution and showcase your knowledge and expertise. For instance, if you’re a pensions expert and the government bring in some new legislation which will affect pensioners, your knowledge and insights will be useful for any journalist trying to write a story and make sense of the subject.
It’s important to be ready to respond to any enquiry or opportunity and to make yourself available, either by drafting a written comment or by giving an interview.
- Features
A big part of PR planning is identifying key publications you’d like your organisation to appear in, such as relevant trade magazines. Most of these publications will have a forward features list, which tells you about its focus for each month of the year. For example, if you’re a housebuilder, many general construction publications are likely to have specific housebuilding features throughout the year. You can then use this list in your PR plan and create relevant content for a specific feature.
Measuring PR Success
So, you’ve created and executed your PR strategy and plan, but how do you measure the impact?
Measuring the results of PR can sometimes be tricky, especially when you’re aiming for intangible results such as brand awareness. However, there are plenty of metrics available that can help you measure success; here are some we’d recommend tracking:
- Media Coverage
One of the easiest and most common ways to track PR is by monitoring the amount of media coverage you receive. You can use a media monitoring agency for this, but that can be quite expensive, so Google Alerts will pick up a lot of the online coverage.
- Website Traffic
Measuring website traffic is a great way to monitor the impact of your PR campaign. Ideally, you’d see an overall spike in website traffic for a successful campaign, but you can also monitor by traffic sources and see how many people visited because of PR.
- Social Media Engagement
Track social media engagement related to PR activity. This could be your company page sharing the news article or images from a speaking engagement. It’s likely that news outlets may even share your company’s stories on social media as well.
These tips and tricks will hopefully give you a good starting point to create a PR plan and strategy for your organisation – and don’t forget to track the results!
If you’d like any PR support, including strategy, planning and content creation please get in touch with our expert team.
PR is about managing public perceptions and the reputation of an organisation while marketing is more focused on promoting products/services to drive sales.
If your organisation wants to improve brand awareness, enhance its reputation or handle a crisis, PR is essential.
PR plans and strategies should be reviewed and updated regularly – we’d recommend every six months, and this should be based on your results.
Failing to define clear objectives, not appealing to your target audience and sending out poorly timed or irrelevant press releases are common PR mistakes.
LB
