Public Relations Plans & Planning
While planning is important for any business (or non-business) venture to succeed, it is crucial in regards to PR planning. Defining and establishing your PR strategies and tactics ought to be directly related to your overall business/company goals. To ensure that the goals of your PR plans do good for the overall company, establish the overall company goals first, and then see how the PR plan can help accomplish the company objectives. Your company goals can include becoming a leader in your industry, gaining more market share, or generating more hype for the overall industry or category in which your company does business.
Once you’ve established these goals, decide what strategies you will use to accomplish them. I was referred to a great article by Amy Mengel that talks about tactics and strategies. She writes,
“A strategy starts with business goals. Are you trying to sell more product? Reduce costs? Attract more members? Repair a damaged brand reputation? Your marketing and social media activities should match up with these business goals. What does success look like and how do you measure it?” (To read the rest of her article, click here.)
After defining your strategies, define the tactics you will use to make those strategies work and to reach your company’s goals. Will you use social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, direct mail, or media advertising? In order to choose which one is appropriate for your plan, know who your target market/audience is. Then, and only then, can you have a successful PR plan. A plan of any kind with no target market or goals is aimless and can almost be pointless; though you may have some mild success, the publicity and any hype or buzz created by your random PR tactics will slowly die down. Sending out a press release just for the sake of sending on out, with no audience in mind or reason for doing so, will only work for so long.
Once you’ve created a PR plan and have defined the tactics and strategies your plan intents to use, reevaluate where your target is communicating online; if your target market evolves because you follow a specific generation (regardless of their age now and in 20 years), know where they spend their time. While most college students can be found on Facebook, ensure that you keep up to date with the changing trends; are these college students moving to LinkedIn after graduating? Did they move from MySpace to Facebook once they hit college age? Read about the changes your target market experiences, and know how to change and evolve your PR plan to keep up.
With the changes in technology, accessibility each consumer has to information, other consumers, and products, as well as the ability to come to you as the provider, advertising is no longer successful. Reevaluate your plan to ensure that it is still successful and timely; as with most things in life, some tactics and strategies are only relevant for a specific amount of time and need to be revamped and changed to be the most effective now. Doing so will help to ensure that your PR plans stay relevant, effective, and meaningful. Companies pump millions of dollars into advertising campaigns, without ever really evaluating the effectiveness of their money, time, and efforts. Let PR help your company, and redirect your advertising budgets to PR.
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