How to Run a PR Campaign That Makes Journalists Actually Care
It is often a great challenge to know if your PR campaign is as effective as it deserves to be. There are thousands of different approaches to public relations that all work with specific situations, none of which are guaranteed to be completely analogous to what your company is facing. Here are some things that are common to many PR plans that you should incorporate when developing your custom solution.
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Keep to a Steady Schedule That Mirrors Your Readership Rates
According to FastCompany, it is vital to time the publications to when your steady readership browses your company’s blog or social media pages. Take the time to analyze when you have spikes and strive to upload your new posts shortly before these events. Doing so will guarantee that your readers find the fresh content they are looking, enticing them to visit again in the future. Big days for posting are traditionally Mondays and Wednesday, though your experiences may vary.
Always Direct People to Your Site
A modern PR campaign leverages a wide variety of social media platforms to reach the largest percentage of your target demographic possible. Utilize these platforms to direct new and previous viewers to your main site, where you have complete editorial control over the content and its means of presentation. This is especially true when working with press releases, due to it being vastly easier to simply publish updates on your personal blog than to have to issue corrections for releases crafted weeks, if not months, prior.
Plan Your Campaign with the Target Demographic in Mind
Your PR campaign should be focused on obtaining maximum exposure to your target audience while minimizing the overall expense. It is important to bear in mind that you are building new business relationships with a wide variety of people, making knowing what they want in advance vital to success. According to Chron, this research can take the form of everything from emails and calls to online surveys of in-store customers. Just remember to compare the data before and after the campaign to ensure that you are making the right impression.
Always Be Ready for the Next News Cycle
The media, be it social or professional, has a very short attention span. As your competitors craft and post new content, yours will inevitably fall in the rankings. There is only one way to counter this — make certain to create and publish new content on a regular basis. If you need proof of this simply create a Google Alert for every time the search engine indexes new material with your target keywords. You may be amazed to discover how frequently your competitor down the street is updating his blog!
Know Your Platforms
Creating the best content that will bring in new customers is only half of the challenge. The other half is getting it in front of them, according to Reputation Today. This is a part of demographic research most companies fail to handle during their initial attempts at developing an effective campaign. Always ask your customers what social media they use the most, and what they use it for. With this information, you will be able to custom-tailor your media campaign to directly target these clients in a manner that they will find appealing.
Accept Failure
A PR campaign is a constant experiment in which you are trying new things to see how well your target audience responds. Remember that there is no such thing as a perfect project and each failure points a finger in the direction of how to most effectively reach your clients. Try multiple approaches at once, curtail those that do not work and expand those that do. Never be afraid to try something new, who knows — it may be the fresh approach needed to help you obtain the best quarter your company has ever seen.
