The benefits of PR are often confused with deliverables such as press releases and earned media coverage. The true value of PR is how it can influence business goals and positively impact a company’s bottom line.
While business goals may vary from company to company, though, the telltale signs that a PR program isn’t working are more universal.
The first, and what’s often the most obvious sign, is that PR efforts aren’t driving results—whether those are in the form of media coverage, thought leadership opportunities, or a general return on investment. An effective PR program should always prioritize results, whether a company has news or not.
On the flip side, concerns can also arise when PR puts a disproportionate focus on driving results and loses sight of telling stories that actually move the needle. For example, you can get mentioned in the media every week, but if the surrounding messages about your company don’t accurately illustrate your value, driving readers to seek out your services—or if those mentions aren’t getting your name in front of the right readership at all—companies will see very little return.
Companies can additionally encounter issues of outgrowing their PR program, in which case they may be looking to reach new audiences as they eye an IPO, or expand their visibility into international markets as they grow their client roster. While a PR strategy should evolve alongside your brand, that’s not always the case, and could be a sign that it’s time to switch things up.
4 Tips to Improve Your PR:
1. Have a Plan
To know that their PR efforts are successful, companies need to first identify what they want to achieve. This can include asking questions such as, ‘what stories do we want to tell?’; ‘what publications do we want to be in?’; and, ‘what audiences do we want to reach?’. Then, they can measure against how well they’ve delivered on those achievements.
It’s equally important to determine where company priorities lie in terms of enhancing brand awareness, managing potential crises, or establishing executive visibility through thought leadership. Laying these goals out with self-awareness and transparency enables companies—and their PR teams— to create bespoke, tailored PR strategies that match each of these goals. And, as a company’s goals change, their PR plan should, too.
2. Identify the Gaps your Company Fills in the Market
One of the best ways for a company to break into a market is to showcase how it’s different from other industry participants that, to the general public, look and sound the same. If a company feels that its PR program is falling flat, it’s often because they aren’t effectively communicating these differentiators to the market.
To improve their PR strategy, companies should reverse engineer their key differentiators by first identifying where the gaps are in the market, and then determining how their brand, service, product or other offering fills those gaps. From there, they’ll be in a better position to communicate with the media and other target audiences about their importance.
3. Rework your Core Messaging
…Or build it from scratch, if you haven’t yet.
Once companies have identified their key differentiators, they should form those into a few central, overarching messages that tell their story best. Every conversation with a journalist, analyst, influencer or other audience should point back to those messages to ensure that they make their way into the larger market.
At CVM, we take a narrative-driven approach to identifying and communicating the top messages that the market needs to hear about a company in order to drive the behaviors that company needs from the market. Our narratives are consistent, relevant, and further at least one marketing goal.
Different audiences and business goals may require different narratives—which is why it’s so important to think through these, and revisit them regularly. Thinking in narratives ensures that all content is created with the narratives in mind, also that the strategy is aligned with the goals of the business.
With narratives at the heart of a PR strategy, every piece of media coverage or published content about will include these narratives, and ultimately influence companies’ bottom line.
4. Interweave Marketing Campaigns with PR
Amplifying marketing campaigns, such as product launches, case studies, or data reports, with PR provides an opportunity to enhance visibility of content that has already been created. This means that PR teams will not only have new content to communicate to the market, but will attract new eyes, on new channels, to material that is already being pushed out through marketing efforts.
In addition to keeping PR teams in the loop on marketing initiatives, by running marketing ideas through PR teams before implementing, companies can gather a unique perspective on how they might be able to make an even bigger splash by integrating their communication efforts.
