What makes a good PR campaign?
Good PR campaigns take a lot of time and effort! When done right, running a successful PR campaign can be game-changing for any business – they can attract positive media attention and create a positive relationship with your target audience. When done badly they can negatively affect your brand and company reputation – this is usually as a result of not understanding your target audience or not thinking the campaign through enough!
But we’re not here to talk about when it all goes wrong! With these quick fire top tips you can ensure a hugely successful PR Campaign every time …
- What are your objectives and goals?
Firstly, think about the big picture. A good PR campaign has a clear objective. What do you want to achieve? Are you looking to improve your relationship with your existing audience or reach a new one? Are you trying to improve your brand’s reputation, or raise market awareness for your new product or service?
Next, consider your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). What does a successful campaign look like – will it be measured on the increase of traffic to your website, social media reach and engagement, or how much coverage you receive in the media? Perhaps success is seeing an increase in sales, or keyword rankings in search engines?
- Be crystal clear on your target audience
Who is your target audience and what do they value most? Everything you do during your campaign should be focussed on addressing their wants, needs and values. When you are crystal clear on understanding your target audience, you can make decisions about the messaging of your campaign, together with the timing and channels to use.
- Identify the right channels
Think carefully about the channels you’ll be using to run your PR campaign. Are you looking to engage influencers, or target the media with a news release, press conference or event; or perhaps your owned channels (social media, blog etc)? What channels do your target audience pay the most attention to and where do they spend most of their time? This should be a key consideration when planning your PR campaign.
- Find creative angles
The key to a successful PR campaign is for your messaging to be creative and newsworthy. Take the time to research industry trends and how your campaign may fit in to any media agendas to ensure your messaging is appropriate. Most importantly make sure your campaign is purpose-led and not just a gimmick.
- Think everything through
Despite your best efforts, there may always be some unexpected difficulties when designing your PR campaign, so take the time to consider every possible outcome. Present your ideas to people not involved in the project to make sure you’re not overlooking anything.
- Evaluate your internal talent to identify outsource areas
Now you have your PR campaign planned, look at the skills and capabilities of your team and assign roles and responsibilities. This will help you establish where each of the team can contribute to the campaign or determine if you need to hire a PR professional/ agency to ensure the successful execution of your campaign.
- Analyse and review the results
Measure the success of your PR campaign based on your planned KPIs. Keeping track of progress is vital to understand what is and isn’t working. Remember your leadership team don’t want to just see links to media cuttings and snapshots from social media – they want to understand how the PR campaign supported the company’s overall objectives.
Running a successful PR campaign will take a lot of effort and research, but when carefully planned, they can change the direction of your business.
What a good PR campaign looks like:
Imagine a World…
CPB London for International Women’s Day
We were blown away with the ‘Imagine a World …’ campaign from creative agency, CPB London, surrounding the notion of ‘unconscious bias’ around International Women’s Day. The eye-catching campaign confronted people with their biases in a bid to rebrand gender diversity to ensure these biases are not passed on to the next generation.
We talk about the campaign in detail and why it was so successful in S4. Ep 9 of the Revitalise & Grow podcast. Listen here!
We also unpick some not-so-great campaigns in Season 6, Episode 10 of the Revitalise & Grow podcast – listen now for insight on how NOT to run a campaign!
For marketers seeking the winning edge, we unlock the secrets to crafting award-winning PR campaigns in this episode of the Revitalise & Grow podcast using an example of one of our own award-winning campaigns: Helly Hansen ‘Lifejacket Stories’.
If you’d like to talk to us about any of your campaign ideas or how we might be able to support you in making them happen, drop us an email: hello@adpr.co.uk or request a call back.