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Your business could be doing great things in the industry. You could be a pioneering disruptor, leading the way in product innovation or contributing to important corporate social responsibility initiatives. However, none of this matters if no-one has heard about what you’re doing. This is where having a highly effective PR campaign can help set your business apart from the competition.

The importance of an effective PR campaign

Ownership of your image

Implementing an effective PR programme for your business enables you to manage your own company image – whether that’s through owned, earned or shared content. PR supports you to build positive and meaningful relationships directly with customers and stakeholders.

Raising authority

A successful PR campaign will not only raise authentic brand awareness, it will also increase your authority and credibility through expert positioning and achieving third party endorsement of your company’s products or services.

Building relationships

Media relations is usually one element of a fully rounded PR campaign. Working regularly with relevant journalists and influencers ensures your business is getting its fair share of voice amongst the competition. To ensure effective media relationships, it’s extremely important to have a developed network of contacts and that you’re providing them with useful, interesting and newsworthy content, relevant to their specialist areas. A carefully planned PR campaign will help you build those all-important relationships, which can be used to raise awareness of your business with influencers for your target market.

Reputation management

Sometimes things go wrong. How a business handles the situation can be the difference between weathering the storm and causing huge damage to your brand. With a robust reputation management strategy, you can smoothly navigate challenging times in your business, whilst maintaining a positive public image. The great relationships you’ve built up with press over time (see point above) can help ensure media are more willing to support your brand during a crisis .

If you’re convinced that committing to a PR strategy is the right thing to do for your business, the next step is to set clear objectives for your campaigns.

Meeting your objectives

PR is only effective if you are using it to achieve specific goals. Only then can you get the most from what you’re doing and ensure you’re not wasting your investment.

For example, if your aim is to improve the public perception of something relating to your business that may impact the local community, you will need to ensure all communications activity helps to rebuild broken trust or negative feelings. Alternatively, you might have a major consumer launch event you need to publicise and the central aim is ensuring your key industry press contacts are there to share the launch with their audience.

Setting SMART objectives (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely) and KPIs (key performance indicators) for all of your PR campaigns will help keep you on track to achieve what you need to help your business grow.

Once you’ve set these carefully considered goals, it then comes down to measuring the effectiveness of your PR campaign.

Measuring your PR campaign

Again, you will only learn the effectiveness of your PR campaign, and replicate this in the future, if you take the time to measure it.

You might be wondering how it’s possible to measure those more ‘vague’ concepts such as brand awareness but there are a number of tools you can use, including social media analytics, market research, online media monitoring and traffic trends.

Related article: Measuring The Effectiveness Of Your PR Activity

Measuring your PR strategies will help you identify which particular tactics are working for you, and change those that aren’t. Constantly refining your approach will ensure that your investment in PR is worth it!

If you’re interested in developing a PR and communications campaign, we can help your business navigate through today’s complex media landscape and provide essential strategic advice. Send us a message to find out more.