PR Campaign Planning Articles

Phase one:
The Messaging Lab

The tangible outcome of the Messaging Lab is a fully-validated communication strategy which is aligned to your sales requirements including: a value proposition, segment prioritisation, target personas, positioning statements and messaging.

The Messaging Lab comprises a series of structured workshops and consultancy engagements that deliver actionable insights comprising:

Messaging Lab1

– focuses on developing and evidencing your value proposition, segmentation priorities and target personas.

This process hones your understanding of potential target segments in order to decide which ones to proactively address. It ensures we know who we are engaging with and why; better targeting reduces waste and promotes marketing/sales collaboration.

Messaging Lab2

– concentrates on forming and refining your positioning statements and messaging.

This helps you to save time and money by providing focus and specificity, rigour protects reputation against false or loose claims and elevates the communication.

It ensures that compelling messaging is developed for every stage of the buying cycle for each persona with whom you wish to engage.

Validation

– Comms strategy research with external stakeholders

This ensures the strategy is the best it can be, peer feedback is considered and on-boarded or actively rejected. Several iterations of the comms strategy may follow to ensure the strategy fits and resonates both with external stakeholders and sales and marketing stakeholders.

Phase three:
The Bee Hive

The Bee Hive is all about creativity and delivery, intelligently and proactively performing. There are no new whiz bang tools – just careful, consistent and disciplined delivery, including:

1. Brilliant Ideas Bank – we create an engaging, on-strategy content calendar, ideas for thought leadership, white papers, comment & insights
2. Media relations – we build relationships on your behalf to identify, develop and place your stories
3. Event support – we deliver a structured package of activities to make your 2-day event last six months
4. Technical authorship – our writing is second to none. We will develop, place, interview experts, draft and gain approvals as part of the deal.
5. Press interviews – we develop, secure, brief experts, facilitate and follow up opportunities
6. All editorial writing – whether it’s releases, features, white papers, blogs or ad hoc content, we’ve got it covered.
7. Project management – meetings, admin, monthly ROI reporting. We’re methodical and love a good project report!
8. Evaluation – in order to improve campaign design and performance.

We take great pride in delivering CEOs and CMOs of tech companies with certainty through accountable, effective and thought-provoking PR consultancy, underpinned by a proven phased approach and a performance guarantee. Let’s engage.

Phase two:
The Forge

Once you have your strategy, we need to activate it by introducing it to the wider team, embedding it amongst stakeholders and making sure the available Marcomms tools are updated and aligned. There are six key tools in The Forge, which can be selected according to individual client needs:

1. An engagement programme ensures internal stakeholders understand and buy-in to new comms strategy by demonstrating how it will make their jobs easier/better/more productive
2. An audit of all Marcomms materials to make sure all the tools required to communicate with your target personas are updated or created and fully aligned.
3. Develop a messaging matrix to ensure that all Personas have collateral serving appropriate messages at each stages of the buying cycle.
4. Collaborate to design individual campaigns to achieve specific business objectives amongst target personas such as cross-sell, upsell, customer acquisition etc.
5. PESO modelling delivers integrated marcomms, extends reach and optimises investment. This helps to determine internal marketing team and external agency campaign deliverables.
6. Tailored media training ensures your spokespeople are equipped to engage effectively with the media and conduct themselves with confidence.

…and to complete the package here’s a summary of our PR delivery process – The Bee Hive.