PR Tips for Strategic Communications in the Information Age

In the Information Age, a good public relations campaign will include a solid strategic communications plan. This plan should include information about all of the ways that your business interacts with the public. When your company reaches out to your customers, you want to make sure that you are creating, strengthening or preserving a positive impression with them.

To do this, it is important that you relay a consistent message that is in sync with your public image. Your website, your radio spots, your mission statement all should have a consistent feel to them. If the public perceives that your business says one thing, yet does another, they will not believe either thing fully. This sort of inconsistency can ultimately wind up costing you business.

A good, solid strategic communications plan will provide your business with the opportunity to portray itself in the best possible light, which will in turn attract further business. Your plan should include information about what type of public image you want your business to have. Once you have developed this plan and image, it is important that all of your public relations activities are consistent. If they are not, you risk losing credibility with your current and potential customers. A company that promotes itself as being family friendly would lose consumer confidence if they suddenly started marketing on only dating websites!

Developing a strategic communications plan may require enlisting the help of a public relations firm. A good firm can properly advise your business on how to translate what you do and who you aim to do it for into a public image that will help sell consumers on your company. The plan can include everything from what the graphics in your logo should look like, to what kind of music hold music your customers should hear when they call your business. Though these things may not seem important by themselves, when put together, they are important components of your public image.

Consumers today try to be much more aware of the corporate culture of the companies with whom they do business. They want to do business with companies that have the same ideals as they do. Consumers want to be able to relate to the businesses that they use. Having a strategic communications plan in place can only help ensure that you are portraying a consistently positive public image, one that will inspire confidence and loyalty in your customers.

Virgil W. Magee is the Deputy Director of Media Analysis for Strategic Communications for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, Afghanistan. In his position he is responsible for the identification and analysis of local, regional and global media trends pertaining to multinational ISAF and North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) alliance missions and strategic objectives for 42 partner nation defense and foreign affairs ministerial-level organizations, NATO and United Nations mandated missions.

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Tags: communications, information, public relations, pr, strategic