An effective PR campaign is the key to increasing brand visibility and reaching your target audience. Finetuning your WHY and CONTENT is critical to ensuring that your PR campaign is a success. Here are some simple tips to ensure your PR efforts are effective in securing coverage: Finetuning your WHY Ask yourself — what are you hoping to achieve for your brand? This could include driving sales, increasing awareness, or making an announcement. Without a clear intention and direction in your mind as the brand, how will anyone else see or understand it? Understanding your AUDIENCE Thoroughly decipher who your audience is and what they are interested in learning about. Further to this, spend some time researching media and subsequently creating relevant pieces of content that appeal to their audience and tone. To find the platforms that your target audience prefers, ask yourself a few questions: does your target audience prefer to listen to the radio, watch television or use social media platforms? Consistently sharing information that is irrelevant to a particular media may potentially damage your relationship with the outlet, and is not an effective way to receive coverage. Not all coverage is equal or effective for reaching your target audience, which is why it’s important to thoroughly understand the various channels and your audience. While your content may be published, if it’s not in the right publication and communicating the key messages, you wouldn’t be achieving the purpose of your campaign. Explore every ANGLE What is at the heart of your campaign? Why are you doing it? These are questions that need to be fully fleshed out to ensure that when you are talking about your campaign and the offering, it is a robust explanation with strong unique selling points. Media outlets are not necessarily interested in what you have to say, but more about if you can say it in an interesting way that can be valuable for your audience q. Stepping into your audience’s shoes and understanding what they want to hear is the best way to make your campaign interesting. Moreover, for international campaigns, it’s important to do a cultural analysis of your campaign to take in as many perspectives to minimise the chances of the campaign gaining attention for the wrong reasons. This could be anything from phrases, symbols and metaphors, that could potentially not translate effectively into other languages. Identify your SPOKESPERSON It’s so important to have a member of the team that can speak with authority on behalf of the brand to ensure that there is a relatability and level of trust. Having said that, this individual needs to be trained to speak with the media to ensure that the key messages are always effectively delivered and they are comfortable in front of the media. This is typically an individual in the C-Suite. EDITORIAL or ADVERTORIAL Editorial content is any valuable content that’s designed to inform, educate or entertain to demonstrate a brand and individual’s knowledge, expertise and authority in a given field. While it may not seem as having a direct relationship with conversion, it supports with building awareness and loyalty as you are providing readers with the information they can use, which earns their trust. In the long term, this trust will drive more sales than direct selling. Advertorial, on the other hand, is advertising designed to look like editorial content. It may say “branded content” or “paid promotion” somewhere in the article. The content of the article may be geared toward a particular brand, product or individual. You have to ask yourself which one is more suited to your goals and objectives. LEVERAGE the coverage you receive Now that your article is published, you need to take advantage of the traction you’re gaining and boost traffic to your website and social media accounts. When you find people discussing your business or company online, ask them to link back to your website or tag you on social media. You may be thinking that it is difficult to find these mentions, but it is easy! This will help you gain a lot of traction. Practising this will help you get quality backlinks that will not only allow your audience to know more about you and increase your web traffic, but also increase your website’s ranking on search engines. TRACK your efforts Running PR campaigns are a great way to build awareness around your brand, but you’ll only know it was a successful campaign if you track the activities. Some of the ways to measure the effectiveness of your PR campaign include: Media Impressions: A media impression is the overall number of individuals that have heard about your campaign through one source at a set time. Web Traffic: Web traffic is the number of visitors that land on your website in any particular time frame. Tracking the sources of your website traffic will give you an understanding of the exact places your visitors are landing from. Followers & Average Engagement Rate: Based on your main social media account, measuring follower counts and if they engage more with the account will help us understand whether the page is growing, and if yes if is it growing with the correct audience. A PR campaign that fulfils your objectives and brings in the results anticipated is quite challenging without an expert in the field. Partnering with an established agency like SOAR PR can support you in strategising, conceptualising, and executing a PR campaign that reaches your goals. 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