Tips For Delivering An Effective PR Campaign

Within your PR campaign, there are several areas we consider crucial if you want to ensure your campaign is effective and always driving you closer to your goals.

At EC-PR, we emphasise the development of a powerful communication strategy and a considered campaign plan. These stages are the core of your campaign planning process and the work we put in is what makes our client campaigns so effective.

Here are our top tips for delivering an effective PR campaign.

Define Goals & Objectives

Before you start your PR journey, you need to pin down what your goals are. What do you want to achieve? There are no right or wrong answers – your objective could be short or long term, and could be to launch a new product, or to change perceptions around your brand.

Which of these goals do you want your PR campaign to support? Having strong objectives is the only way you will ever be able to tell how effective a campaign is.

Develop A Communication Strategy 

Every effective PR campaign is underpinned by a great communication strategy. Your communication strategy will define what you’re going to say, to whom and when you’re going to say it. Most importantly, it needs to be supported by robust evidence.

Skipping these vital steps will result in a poorly targeted campaign. A strong communication strategy needs to include your value proposition – why you exist and why anyone should care, in-depth persona development exploring pain points, aspirations etc, strong messaging for each stage of the buying cycle, and customer validation or research to ensure your strategy hasn’t missed anything and is aligned with reality.

Sounds like a lot of work? It is, but you will be thankful later! You can read more about developing an effective B2B communication strategy here.

Pull Together Your Campaign Plan 

The hard work isn’t over yet, but we are on the home stretch. Your campaign plan will establish what you should be talking about and where you should be talking about it. Start with a marketing asset audit to establish what resources you already have, if they are serving up the messages identified in your communication strategy, and what you’re missing. We suggest using a media lens model at this stage to identify your sphere of maximum potential influence.

Next, you will need to develop your editorial calendar – who is planning to write on what topics? Come up with topics, synopses, ideas for thought leadership pieces, and blogs that perfectly align with your communication strategy. Do you see why we place so much emphasis on developing a strong comms strategy? If you are stuck on ideas, simply refer to your strategy and think about how you can solve a problem, who has that problem, and how you communicate your solution. What you need to talk about should be very clear.

Here at EC-PR, we work with clients to develop what we call a Brilliant Ideas Bank – a suite of strategically aligned ideas to form the basis of editorial articles and help showcase your company’s knowledge and insights.  

Choose Tactics & Tools Carefully 

Choosing the right activities and channels to deliver your campaign is the key to success. Your communications should be based on everything you discovered during your research period. Don’t feel tempted to veer off course and try anything you can’t reasonably justify. If you’ve identified your target audience and hold industry insights, use them to your advantage and choose tactics and tools that have a strong chance of being successful. We use the PESO model to assist with tactical selection and prioritisation of the right PR tools.

Measure Your Success 

Finally, and it’s an obvious one…you need to measure your success. This is also why it’s so crucial to set clear goals right from the start. By measuring your successes, you can see how far you’ve come and how close you are to reaching your objectives.