Every PR needs planning. You need to ask youself the question what do you want to accomplish. Here are the things you need:
Research
What should the public know, who do you send your message to, who do you want to influence and inform about your product and service?
In this first step you gather information in questionnaires, interviews, telephone interviews, surveys etc.
Do you know if your competition has been in the media with the very same subject. (product or service) lately? Where do your customers getting their information from? Magazines, newspapers, blogs, newsletter?
Analysis
After the research is completed, a better understanding of what your customers are interested in, where they get their information (and base their decsions on to purchase). You can conduct a SWOT analysis to examine Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of your company, product or service.
Objective
Now that you have a better understanding of the market and your goals you can define the objectives of the campaign. The objectives are what is hoped to be the end result of the PR activity. Each objective must be SMART.
Specific: Are they clearly defined and comprehensible?
Measurable: Can each objective be measured in the evaluation?
Achievable: Considering other factors (e.g. budget and timescale) are they achievable?
Realistic: Are you being realistic given the resources you have?
Time: When do you want to achieve the set objectives?
Depending on the situation, sometimes the objectives set can initially be before the research has been undertaken.
Targeted Media
Who do you want to talk to? Based on the pr research each public relevant to the campaign should be identified. This is important to ensure your key messages are communicated efficiently. Here are some of the groups that want to included into the target:
* Employees
* Identified publics
* Suppliers
* Investors
Key Messages
Once you know what information you want to release and to whom you can define your key messages that form the main thrust of the communication. These messages need to be clear, concise and readily understood.
Strategy and Tactic
A strategy is the theory of how you want to deliver your pr message and the tactic determines which media you are going to use for it such as events, interviews, blogger relations, presentations, newsletters, podcasts, websites, conferences, news releases.
Schedule
A schedule allows co-ordinate your tactics and to keep deadlines. Your pr campaign could be scheduled for a specific event (e.g you release a heart rate monitor during Heart Smart Week.
Budget
I like to ask my clients what their pr budget is in order to determine the strategy, tactic and duration of a pr campaign. Running the pr in a medium is opposed to advertising free, the operating costs are not.
Here are some of the costs that are included in the budget:
Time spent for research, strategy, tactic, execution (writing press releases, creating media planners, contacting edtiors, distributing media material (press releases), follow up calls, fees for long-distance calls and travel.
Measurement
The end review will take place after all PR activity has finished and where the final results will be compared against the campaign objectives. To do this, the tactics for each objective will be analysed. Follow-up calls are important to
In today's market the flood of information each editor is getting sent is overwhelming. In order to build trust and recognition, we contact editors throughout the pr campaign process.
Our company does follow up calls for various reasons:
a) to check if and when a press release is going to be published
b) to thank the editor for the mention
Thanks for reading. Check out our website for more information: http://www.pr-online.com/
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