How To Create a PR Campaign: Examples & Strategy

Understand the goals and examples of a PR campaign before creating your own.

For small to midsize businesses, word-of-mouth and positive recommendations are among the oldest and most effective growth strategies. For modern companies, public relations campaigns are the solution to a strong brand reputation and perception. PR campaigns help raise awareness about products and services through planned activities designed to give a business positive publicity, and they're often part of a larger, holistic PR strategy.

In this article, we'll explain what goes into a PR campaign, examples of successful PR campaigns, and how your business can craft one to meet specific objectives.

A PR campaign is designed to introduce your company, share your story, and build positive relationships with different publics—whether that's internal company employees, media journalists, or customers. Typically, PR campaigns are composed of goals, strategies, and individual tactics.

For small businesses, PR campaigns are essential for standing out in competitive markets, capturing the attention of your target audience, and increasing awareness within your customer base. PR campaigns are excellent internal strategies that allow all teams to rally around a common goal and execute a series of activities over a specific period. Well-executed PR campaigns can support many small business goals like increasing awareness, building credibility, differentiating yourself, and even attracting investors and strategic partners.

What are the goals of successful PR campaigns?

Often, the main goal of a successful PR campaign is to sway public opinion. Whether that's championing and shading a specific brand value, like sustainability, or repairing your company's reputation after a crisis, successful PR campaigns can have a variety of different goals.

Improving brand reputation

A common goal of successful PR campaigns is to improve brand reputation. Especially for new and emerging businesses that are not well known within their target audience, PR campaigns help generate interest and establish a positive brand reputation. 

Components of PR campaigns like press releases, media coverage, interviews, and third-party endorsements can establish credibility, generate interest, and build positive relationships with different audiences. In fact, an "always-on" reputational form of management is the foundation of a modern PR approach that drives results.^[1]

Increasing revenue

While PR campaigns focus heavily on metrics like impressions, engagement, website traffic, medium mentions, search engine optimization increases, and more, great PR campaigns can also increase revenue. By capturing attention, building relationships with your target audiences, and increasing awareness, your brand's visibility should increase, and more sales should follow. Trust and credibility go a long way in influencing a consumer's purchasing decision, so having your brand frequently mentioned in a positive light by trusted experts is important.

Building a competitive edge

PR campaigns are designed to be eye-catching, visually engaging, emotional, or persuasive. These are highly creative campaigns that might have a quirky tagline or catchy headline. PR campaigns help you stand out, creating a clear distinction between your brand and others. Not only are PR campaigns fun and engaging, but they're also meant to win over the hearts and minds of your target customers. The next time your customer thinks about purchasing your product or service, you want to be immediately top of mind ahead of competing brands.

Types of PR campaigns

There are several types of PR campaigns, and all of them can be utilized for specific goals. 

Crisis management

While every business hopes to avoid a crisis management PR campaign, they're also one of the most popular and common strategies. In a crisis management PR campaign, your organization works to change public perception of a potentially damaging situation that opposes a threat to your reputation.

Product launch

Another popular PR campaign type is the product or service launch. For bringing a new product to market, a product launch PR campaign helps generate positive media coverage, create social media buzz, and catch consumers' attention. Ideally, about six months out from product launches, your business starts crafting key messaging, press releases, collateral, and visual imagery. PR teams might reach out to the media for exclusive opportunities or popular influencers in the space to promote the new product.

Corporate messaging

Another popular type of public relations campaign is the corporate messaging push. For key brand values and narratives, your organization might want to launch a campaign sharing that vision with different communities.

Steps for creating a PR campaign

PR campaigns take several months to plan and execute, so it's important to follow a step-by-step process for creating a well-executed campaign from start to finish.

Set campaign goals

First, it's important to set PR campaign goals. These can be anything from medium mentions to website traffic to sales or increased brand reputation. Some metrics might be harder to measure than others, and you'll want to analyze a handful of top-of-funnel metrics like awareness or impressions and bottom-funnel metrics like sales or conversions.

Research and understand your target audience

Before creating any messaging or deliverables, research and deeply understand your target audience. Depending on whether you're running the campaign to the media, customers, strategic partners, or your local community, it's critical to understand the demographics and psychographics of your audience. Audience demographics will include gender, age, location, household income, or job, and psychographics will include details on purchasing behavior, interests, media preferences, and more. You can obtain this information by looking at customer data in your customer relationship management (CRM) system, performing market research surveys, or pulling your audience on social media.

Craft your message

Once you know your PR campaign goals and how your target audience will respond, it's time to craft your message. A PR campaign should inform, persuade, or entertain, and depending on your goal, you'll want to create key messaging that shares your brand story.

Choose your PR tactics

Now that your message is finalized, choose how you'll distribute your narrative. If you have a budget, you might explore paid ads on social media or in key publications. Without a budget, you might focus on your organic channels, like your company website and blog. 

You can also explore pitching to the media and starting to build relationships with reporters in your industry to see if your PR campaign is something they would want to cover. Research shows that a PR-earned media strategy should be integrated with a brand's content marketing efforts to maximize brand impact.^[2] Consider how your PR campaign will integrate with the marketing your brand is already doing.

Choose the channel or platform

There are four primary PR mediums: traditional media, community relationships, owned media, and social media. A well-executed PR campaign utilizes a combination of all channels and platforms to create a distributed message strategy. For example, for a product launch, you might want to announce the new product on your own media and social media, but have influential community relationships boost and amplify your news. Then, offer an interview or quote to a media reporter who can include your business's new product in an upcoming article. All of these PR tactics work together to amplify your message.

Measure results

A PR campaign might last several weeks or months, and media monitoring software can help keep track of results and buzz in real time. Keep in mind the existing goals you established at the beginning, and assess whether you saw an uptick in media mentions, impressions, social media engagement, website traffic, or whatever you were tracking. Measuring results allows you to refine and polish your messaging and distribution strategy for future PR campaigns.

Ways to measure the success of your PR campaign

Whatever your unique goal is, there are different ways to measure the success and outcome of your PR campaign.

Software tools like social media monitoring platforms and online listening tools can measure top-of-funnel metrics like awareness, brand mentions, and chatter online. These tools pull in people who are talking about you from around the web, including social media, forums, local media, and traditional media. Web-analytics marketing software can analyze increased traffic and activity on your website, showcasing any optics in visitors and engagement. Instead of manually aggregating campaign data into reports, these different tools make it incredibly easy to discover exactly what your PR campaign did.

Examples of successful public relations campaigns

The best PR campaigns are highly memorable, so take a look at several PR campaign examples below that you might be familiar with.

Apple's product launch

A popular example of product launch campaigns is Apple's annual launches of new iPhone models, Mac products, and more. Apple is known for its splashy launch events, dramatically unveiling innovative products like the Vision Pro virtual reality headset.

BP's crisis management campaign

In 2010, BP's offshore drilling unit exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest marine oil spill in history and killing and injuring several people. Not only was it a natural disaster, but it was an incredibly damaging reputational situation for BP post-oil spill. BP launched a PR campaign to repair the company's image. This campaign included paid advertisement, community relationship building through grants, and more.^[3]

Create a PR campaign to raise awareness about your products or services 

A PR campaign is an effective way to improve brand reputation, increase revenue, and build a competitive edge. Give yourself plenty of time to plan and craft a solid PR campaign, and start by establishing goals and researching and understanding your target audience. After that, craft your message and establish how you'll distribute your PR campaign once your work is complete, measure your results, and devise any key takeaways and learnings for your next PR campaign.