How to start a perfect PR campaign?

In this age of competition where many businesses are trying to gain the leads and win the customers, a lot of them are turning up to PR as the best medium for fulfilling their business goals. Public relations is an effective communication strategy which brings businesses move a step closer to their customers. Call it a one-to-one relationship between them that PR fosters or just a business awareness strategy, it’s a necessity for them! However, running PR campaigns successfully that help the brands improve their image, and expand their customer base is a major roadblock. Not everyone can get it done right. So we have jotted down a few tips how to effectively set up and manage the PR campaign for success below:

1.    Determine your goals

What for you want to set up the campaign? Do you want to showcase your products? Are you seeking enough media coverage to enhance your reputation? Or do you want to attract more investors for your business? It is very critical that you first decide the aim & goals of your PR campaign as it will help you strategize the Public Relations campaign accordingly. Further, you can establish media contacts, and pitch the selective ones who can help you attain the goals.

2.    Conduct a productive research

Once you are clear with your aim & goals, it’s time you begin an extensive research. You must research and identify who are your ideal customers, what are their interests, how do they interact with the different types of content, and to what extent your brand is closer to them. When you know all these things, you can better target the customers to reach and connect.

3.    Hop on your PR plan

Soon after you developed a complete PR plan, including the content distribution & coverage, you must start working on it at immediate. Start with preparing a list of the relevant journalists, and the interactive pitches to send them for covering your business story.

4.    Keep a track

You should keep a track on how your PR campaign is going on. It’s integral for you to know whether all your PR efforts are giving you any results or not. Suppose you opted for one of the PR companies in Delhi, but you want to target the audience in Punjab. In this case, you must keep track of the content being delivered to your audience; measure the impact of coverage you get from newspapers or online media.

Powering up the social media content with visual marketing

In laymen terms, Visual marketing is the art of creating photos, videos, graphics or even GIFs for various web portals. It is the key to seeking attention and getting information seen and shared by more and more web users. While marketing persuades the consumer to buy, visual marketing on the other end enhances this factor by increasing the tendency to recall, memorize and identify. 

Here are a few tips and tricks to empower the social media content with visual marketing:

Build Trust: Visuals create more promising image amongst the audience regarding a brand as compared to the text on the other hand. They’ll instantly get what you are trying to advertise through your online content. It’s not necessary to copy anybody’s style but what is necessary is to stick to a style and take it forward with all the audiences of the company.

Define your Brand Identity: Every brand has a unique characteristic feature to differentiate itself from that of other brands, sticking to that similar theme one needs to create visuals that further clarify the ideal message of the brand in the minds of its target audience. Remember, work with brand identity never ends; once you are done establishing your brand identity in the social media channels, it’s important to be consistent to stay relevant in the market.

Stay recognizable:  To stand out from the crowd the main idea is to stay original and innovative. The more you interact with the crowd with original content, the more close relation you will be able to create with them. It’s easy to earn likes on social media but to earn loyal followers and customers, the company needs to make true efforts for both online and offline channels.

Include how-to-do and other call-to-action elements: To make your social pages more engaging; inculcate information with graphics or videos that reminds them of the brand, each time they get a glimpse of it. This will make the people stay up close to the brand as they will get to learn something or the other each time they visit the page. To promote these how-to tutorials and call-to-action videos, one can even engage in the audience by sharing teaser beforehand, thus creating good hype well in advance before actually posting the real thing. Make sure to have catchy captions that are relevant to the graphics or videos have been shared and also to the message that the company is aiming to share.

Brainstorming your way to PR success

With the technological transformations and innovations changing the communications industry every now and then, it has truly become difficult to master the art of Public Relations (PR) and marketing. From the time of physically clipping client’s coverage in media, the PR industry has now reached a time where digital especially the social media is the new scene to share the client wins in.

As argued by many of the PR experts it’s the adequate blend of the team effort, creativity and strategic thinking. Crucial most elements in this powerful blend are the creative process which involves a lot of brainstorming, both individually and as a team. This brings out the best of all the intellectual minds and is therefore considered an important part of the overall Public Relations method. But at times, these sessions also lead to conflicts and chaos in the team. Therefore, to avoid any such mishap and to ensure benefitting responses develop out from these sessions, here are a few tips to keep in mind when organizing a brainstorming session:

Goals Identification: Absence of predefined goals lead to either of the two conditions: One, the conversation breaks down awkwardly. Two, the result isn’t satisfactory and is all wastage of resources. When sitting for brainstorming rounds be clear with the problem that needs to be solved, a clear-cut strategy which needs just the implementation tricks and tactics. This clarity will guide the entire process, thus avoiding any ambiguity while performing tasks.

Be ready well in advance:  Advance preparation never goes off waste; instead, it creates more scope for revision and enhancement of plans. It’s one of the crucial most factors of the brainstorming session to do homework well in advance and prepare the team with all the relevant data available in the latest reports related to the subject matter. This will prep them up to better analyze the competitive landscape and hence, allow the team to reach the greatest of their potential. Always remember, doing research about competitors and industry problems will help the team move forward at a pace much faster than that it would have been before.

Set a clear time limit: Brainstorming round surely is a time-consuming process and can’t be rushed up randomly. Still, the team managers need to specify a time limit to cover up things as quick as possible.  Don’t be afraid to get together with your team for the brainstorming rounds again and again as great ideas were never generated in one go and involved several rounds of a revised session. The managers have a crucial role to play; they need to ensure that all such rounds of creativity building are moving forward only.

Keep a track of the activities: One of the simplest and effective most approaches of keeping track of ideas, themes and important things is to jot it down either on a paper or a digital device which you keep with you most of the time.  This is true especially in the creative areas where one need to keep the flow of ideas moving in one direction only. Always remember the key idea behind brainstorming is to develop tricks and tactics that translate into winning PR pitches and campaigns.

PR Industry is nowhere to go and will continue to grow rapidly

With the digital wave spreading all across the nation, the industries have switched most of their work from touch, feel and visit world to all virtual to keep up their competitiveness on a global level. Speculations are rife that with the digital booming, the downfall of Public Relations (PR) is to happen very soon. Thankfully, to the benefit of the professionals working in the PR industry, PR is nowhere to go and it will remain there till the very end of businesses. And, the recent PR industry report by Public Relations Consultants Association of India stating the industry value to double up and be at INR 2,100 Cr by 2020 confirms the constant growth of the industry and impending evolution of the PR industry in the coming future.

The digital has surely transformed the way PR campaigns and activities are happening these days but the fundamentals are still the same. Hence, instead of being dead, the PR world is still breathing and evolving with the advent of newer services like social media and digital platforms. While fundamental PR campaigns and activities will drive the future growth, other forms, such as social media, digital, and content-driven campaigns are going to be credited for nearly 25 percent of the revenues. Hence, far from being dead, the world of public relations is growing and evolving, especially with the advent of newer services like digital and social media.  

The growth predictions of PR industry are not just based on vague promises but are instead part of a deep and detailed research done after analyzing the status of various industries linked to the genre of Public Relations. The Information & Communication Technology tops the list of contributing sectors and is providing around 20% of the overall revenues accrued by the PR Industry. Firms providing financial services have contributions of around 12% while the third in contribution line is the consumer goods sector that provides nearly 9% for this sector. To clear the picture of past it’s better to take a step back and analyze the past performances and then take a step forward. The previous charts of the PR sector also registered an industrial growth of 13% in 2016 and 19% in 2017. This clears out the scene and provides a righteous view for PR experts. In fact, with more and more technological transformations taking place in public relations, the industry will continue to remain relevant and become innovative and creative in serving the diverse and dynamic needs of their clients.

In the present scenario, one simply can’t deny the PR practices and along with it’s also extremely important to rope in the righteous PR agency that carves out the best of the PR campaign as per the needs and budget and pitches in the right media channels to touch in the right audiences like that of industry leaders, investors, customers and VCs.

Creating intriguing PR campaigns with the power of AI and Human Sentiment Analysis

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning might be the technologies creating sensation across several industries in today’s world, but for the communication sector, they aren’t alone. It is’ the natural language processing (NLP) that is supporting them and has even made their essence relate to the world of Public Relations (PR) and communications.  

Simply defined, NLP refers to the ability of a computer program to understand, analyze and revert to the human language as per their literal rules. At present, there are several innovations like Alexa, Siri and Google Play that has made commands like “Alexa, add milk to my shopping list” and “Siri, call Mom” possible. It took almost half a century and several technological innovations to bring the machine learning up to this stage and hopefully much more is about to come.

But, now the question is, how can we tap into the power of NLP and AI to serve better in the PR and communication world?

Natural language processing otherwise includes a broad scope of abilities for the betterment of humankind, but it’s their power of identifying audience sentiments that have worked to the benefit of communicators. It has empowered the PR professionals in planning and executing impactful earned media programs in a way that has never been done before.  

Earlier for technologies, communication only involved simple logic-based algorithms that identified words as either positive or negative and left many terms as unclassified. But today, the time and technology have transformed completely changed; thus, equipping the automated systems with the power to adequately interpret the nuances of human communication and deliver the context and attribute of the words true to their meaning.

With a crowd and noise of too many in the media world, the idea to lead with PR strategies is not limited to the number of coverage but is also to identify the stories and news issues that will get the desired impact on the target audience. All-and-all this is a time-taking and tedious process but with NLP engine built in the automated systems, it becomes a quick work to easily identify sentiments from the string of texts brought in through any relevant channel.

When it comes to crafting intriguing earned media campaigns, the sentiments of the audience both with regard to the brand and around its coverage is of extreme importance.  This insight will help the PR professionals better demonstrate the client with the impact of their messaging, whether positive, negative or neutral on the target audience.