Learn how to enhance your brand with a public relations strategy.
An effective public relations strategy builds positive brand sentiment and perception in the minds of your target audience. For small to midsize business leaders, a PR strategy is meant to inform, educate, and entertain the public and garner traction within your target audience.
Depending on your specific goals, well-executed public relations enhances your brand and helps you build relationships with the media and your target audience.
In this article, we'll explain what a PR strategy is and how to enhance your brand through creative, engaging PR tactics.
What is a PR strategy?
A PR strategy is a comprehensive plan that manages, shapes, and maintains the public perception of your business and often incorporates PR campaigns. A typical PR campaign is centered around a newsworthy event like a company growth story, leadership change, new product or business, seasonal trends and holidays, or a key messaging pillar.
Public relations efforts work to establish a positive relationship between your organization — whoever that specific "public" might be. You might want to build deeper and more positive relationships with any kind of "public" which can be the following:
Internal public. This can be employees, leadership, or internal stakeholders.
Media. Think journalists or editors at significant publications.
External public. This can be customers, stakeholders, investors, or any strategic partner.
Why is a public relations strategy important?
A proactive public relations strategy is vital, especially for small businesses looking to maintain a competitive edge and increase their share of voice in the market. According to Gartner's research, "Modernize Your PR Approach to Drive Brand and Reputation Impact," modern PR is more than a one-off campaign. Instead, small business leaders should approach it as an independent, long-term strategic business objective that is always on.[1]
Public relations strategies and initiatives are sometimes evergreen and ongoing or one-off and time-sensitive, such as during a crisis. 81% of companies surveyed say that their public relations departments are involved with their formal crisis communication plans, even though PR crises account for only 6% of crisis events.*
How to develop a public relations strategy
When determining how to create a public relations strategy, the most effective PR plans begin with a deep understanding and knowledge of your target audience. That includes psychographics and demographics, including what publications they read, social media platforms they are active on, how they like to be communicated with, and more.
Set business goals
First, set your business goals. Maybe it's increased positive brand sentiment, more social media reach in engagement, website traffic, or sales. Especially when measuring PR key performance indicators (KPIs) in the future, it's important to know exactly what you want from PR campaigns.
Define your target audiences
Next, define your target market regarding PR. Maybe a big focus of the year is increased sales from customers. Perhaps you're looking for seed money from investors for a new product line. Get clear on exactly who you're speaking to with these public relations campaigns.
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Craft your PR messaging
Once you know the audience you're speaking to and the ultimate goal, it's time to craft your PR messaging, which should be clear and concise. A PR message should also be convincing, providing compelling messages and data points to craft an authentic narrative. Ditch the industry jargon and craft messaging around your key brand pillars.
Choose your PR tactics
Once your message is finalized, it's time to distribute that narrative. PR tactics are often cost-effective as many successful PR campaigns are dominated by earned media, which is often free. Define the channels you'll target, including pitching to journalists, publishing on your company blog, running paid ads, purchasing out-of-home billboards, email marketing, and more. A comprehensive PR strategy often entails a variety of channels.
Create a budget
Establish exactly how much budget you have to distribute your message. Use budgeting software for small businesses to help calculate your expenses. This might include fees for an outsourced PR agency. Build a budget that allows for external support, paid advertising, graphic design, printed materials, paid media placements, and more.
Develop a timeline
One of the best PR tips is to think strategically about your campaign timeline. It's extremely difficult to craft an intentional PR campaign overnight, and depending on your specific public relations tactics, you want time to build and execute a plan. Think at least six to eight weeks of pre-planning before you start executing your PR strategy, and PR campaigns often run between 90 days and six months.
Measure your results
Building PR KPIs ahead of time will provide accurate measurement of the success of your public relations strategies. Public relations KPIs can be both qualitative and quantitative, such as positive brand mentions, website visits, social media engagement, and more. Creating a clear picture of public relations success or failure helps guide your future public relations strategies and tactics.
Types of public relations media
Once your PR message is clear, concise, and ready to distribute, it's time to choose the type of public relations media. Also, building a comprehensive PR strategy might include a mix of these channels.
Earned media
A PR strategy is typically a mix of earned, paid, and owned media. Public relations, meaning media and brand mentions in their purest form, is earned media, or a type of advertising you can't pay for. For example, no matter how much you offer, most publications will not take money to cover your business positively.
Press release
Many PR strategies and campaigns kick off the earned media component with a press release, which is an official statement issued to publications. It's considered a primary source of information and includes a newsworthy headline, a date, quotes from executives or stakeholders, company info, logo, and media contact information. A press release is designed to help your PR strategy get noticed and covered by the media and your target audience.
Community events
Community events can be another pillar of an earned media PR strategy. Among industry organizations, influential groups of people, and other stakeholders, community events are a more nontraditional way to amplify a PR message authentically. For example, when high-profile tennis player Naomi Osaka declined to attend a press conference after a match due to mental health stress, the team of the popular meditation app Calm offered to pay her penalty fees.[2]
Paid media
On the other hand, paid media is content that's promoted through lead placements like pay-per-click ads, sponsored social media posts, video ads, influencer marketing, and more. If budget allows, paid media helps garner leads, increase visibility, and boost engagement.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a cost-effective and efficient way to get your message out and grow your business. Third-party validation is also one of the most trusted forms of advertising, so whether it's a content creator, subject matter expert, or industry influencer, having a well-known third-party recommendation talk positively about your brand is priceless. SeatGeek, a mobile ticketing platform, partnered with macro influencer and YouTube creator David Dobrik over several years to sponsor videos, leading fans to memorize David's ad tagline for SeatGeek.[3]
Traditional ads
Traditional ads might include out-of-home billboards, newspaper ads, or any other type of local advertising. Ads are a cost-efficient way to amplify your brand message and reach a wider audience and can even become iconic pieces of advertising like Apple's "Shot on iPhone" campaign.
Owned media
Owned media are channels your business operates and has complete control over, such as your website, blogs, email newsletters, organic social channels, and more. Owned media is important because you have full creative control over the content and targeting, but it comes with the potential drawback of limited reach if your audience isn't huge.
Social media
Another way to distribute your PR message is through organic and paid social media. Organic social media might include posting your press release, medium mentions, or company blog posts on your accounts and encouraging sharing. If budget allows, paid ads allow you to amplify your message to a larger audience.
Public relations tips
When developing your PR plan, take a look at these effective PR tips that help you create, organize, and measure the effectiveness of your strategies.
Research competition and audience
While it's important not to copy, look at the type of PR campaigns your competitors are running. Determine what you like about their messaging and what you don't like, and see what you could improve on for your audience.
Build and maintain relationships with media professionals
A vital component of public relations is establishing and maintaining relationships with media professionals like journalists and reporters. These could be local writers at your city's newspapers or well-known writers at large industry publications. Start by reaching out to these professionals with a unique perspective or take on a recent piece written. Retweet them on X, formerly known as Twitter, or engage with them on LinkedIn to start building that connection organically.
Social media management
Building and maintaining a social media presence allows you to have an engaged audience when you're ready to run a PR campaign. Social media platforms also help amplify your message through organic engagement, like shares and retweets, and paid advertising.
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Since you’re here, browse our Social Media Marketing Software Buyers Guide to explore software benefits, common features, and more.
Event marketing
Events have the potential to be tentpole pillars of your PR strategy. For example, if your industry has a huge conference in February, build that into your PR campaign timeline to maximize the event's visibility and recognition. Even smaller, local events are valuable for capitalizing on people's attention around a certain topic or theme.
Measuring the success of your PR strategy
When it comes to how to build a PR strategy, it's hard to fully measure success without pre-planning your business goals and objectives. PR KPIs are best established ahead of time, and once a PR campaign is done, take a look at how you performed against those goals.
Public relations software is one tool that helps measure the success of your PR strategy, as platforms often aggregate impressions, media mentions, engagement rates, and more.
For small businesses, here are some specific suggestions for channels and KPIs in your PR strategy:
Owned channels
Consider measuring these results on owned channels like your website or blog.
Pageviews
Time spent on page
Click-through-rates
Social channels
Across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, or YouTube, take a look at these measurements.
Follower count
Engagement rate
Sentiment of commons
Reposts, reshares, and saves
Elevate your brand with strategic public relations
Give yourself ample time before a key industry event or product is launched to craft business goals, define your target audiences, establish your messaging, create your budget, and choose your channels.
When building your PR strategy, create a mix of earned, owned, and paid media through tactics like press releases, traditional ads, influencer marketing, and social media.
To learn more about enhancing your brand with a strong public relations strategy, check out the below resources: