How to develop your PR strategy

With PR budgets coming under pressure, there is a risk of overlooking PR strategy development in a rush to implement tactics. Yet given the current financial constraints, crafting an effective communications plan is now more important than ever. Without a thought-out strategy, your PR tactics may not deliver the outcomes you expected.

A good PR strategy should map where you currently are, where you want to be and how you aim to get there. It is based on extensive competitor and market research that provides actionable insights to achieve your goals. It ensures that your efforts and budget are put in the right places, and sets you in the right direction to build a strong connection with your audience.

A good communications strategy aimed at helping you gain a competitive advantage should have the following elements:

• Objective

What are your overall business and communications objectives? These should be broad goals, such as more sales, improve brand reputation or employee engagement.

Specific goals such as increasing sales by a specific percentage will come at a later stage once you have a clearer idea of your business, your audience, your competitors, and the markets. It will help you set realistic goals.

• Competitor research

Who are your top three competitors and how do they position themselves? How do their audiences differ from each other?

A lot of the success of communications campaigns depend on clear differentiation and a unique proposition.

Michael Porter’s Five Forces

Michael Porter’s Five Forces Framework helps analyse your competition in terms of its competitiveness and profitability.

Doing this for your own business will help you learn and understand your weaknesses and strengths.

• SWOT analysis

SWOT analysis is short for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Carrying out a SWOT analysis is a useful exercise to do before the start of any project. It will help you exploit your strengths, identify opportunities and deal with the threats.

Good knowledge of one’s business and industry coupled with a competitor analysis will show you where your strengths and weaknesses lie.

• PESTLE analysis

PESTLE is short for Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental issues influencing your company. These are mainly external factors that may affect a particular entity. It is quite different from a SWOT analysis.

Reading current affairs and industry news and talking to experts in your field will help you analyse the PESTLE factors. This is an important exercise to future-proof your business.

• Stakeholder mapping

Who are your internal and external audiences? For example, they could be employees, investors, customers, journalists and influencers.

This is important to know, as it enables you to ensure that you engage all the stakeholders that might help you achieve your goals. For example, if you have sales-oriented goals, the use of employee advocacy programmes could help influence potential customers.

• Target audience

Once you have completed your stakeholder mapping exercise, select specific stakeholders you want to engage with, then create a buyer persona or customer avatar.

Define their goals, values, challenges, interests and demographics. You can do this by interviewing your current or potential audience over the phone or through online questionnaires. Carrying out a data analysis of your current social channels may also provide some useful data about your audiences’ interests.

Going even deeper, you could set up focus groups of 5-7 people who fit your target audience profile, then engage them to understand their pain points, goals and challenges. This provides very comprehensive market research that will help you develop key communication messages.

• Key messages

Having completed the above steps, you should have a clear idea of the messages that would resonate with your audience.

Here, there should be a balance between what your target audience wants to hear and what is important for you to communicate, such as your values or purpose. Ideally, what you want to communicate and what your audience wants to hear should align closely.

Now, note down the three key things that you would like to feature in all your messaging, for instance in a media pitch or interview.

• Channels

What channels would you use to reach your target audience? Your target audience research should give you an idea of what communication channels they prefer.

For example, do they listen to podcasts? If so, how often would they like to hear from you (frequency) and for how long (length of a podcast episode)? You may also have different channels with different frequency for different audiences and different messages.

• SMART goals

Now convert the objectives you set in the first step into SMART goals, i.e. Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Timely.

You should use a combination of industry benchmarks and your past performance data (if available) to set realistic goals – neither too high nor too low. Look at your best-case scenario and worst-case scenario and aim for somewhere in between. If you can reach 100% of your goals, it means they were too easy. A good goal is one where you can reach 70% of the target.

Add in goals for output as well as input. For example, if you are trying to increase website traffic, set SMART goals for the number of blog posts you would like to publish each month as well as the amount of website traffic you would like them to generate.

To come up with these numbers, you can reverse engineer your goals. So, if you want a certain number of new followers per month on Twitter, look at how many tweets you would need to post to achieve this.

This is the nitty-gritty of what you have to do, how you should do it and how often it needs to be done to reach each goal. It is informed by all the market research that you carried out. Once completed, you can move to the tactical phase of strategy execution.

• Cost

What budget would you need to execute this strategy? You currently have a roadmap – to implement it, you will need C-suite buy-in.

Conclusion

It is only after developing a strategy that we can start to get down to the actual work. Going through the above steps ensures you are focusing on realistic goals and spending your budgets on the things that will enable you to achieve them. If you have the right tactics and messaging your audience will be left with a clear, unique impression about you in their mind.

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Curzon PR is a London-based PR firm working with clients globally. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Business Development Team [email protected]