The influence & impact of public relations
Key strategies for a campaign that leaves a scar
The art of public relations, and its crucial role in presenting information to the public eye, resides on the ability not just to tell a story, but communicate a message that will leave a mark on whomever you are telling it to.
To fashion up a compelling PR campaign that will engage your audience, there are three major things to consider: clear and impactful key messaging, relatable and actionable content, and a unique story to drive it all home.
Clear and impactful key messaging
Messaging is the key to achieving impact with communication. Key messages demand attention, control, and intensity when influencing your target audience. Key messages are the foundation of your PR strategy and should be used with consistency in all aspects of a campaign.
But, communicating with your target audience is not always an easy feat. To ensure you get your point across, it is essential to establish your key messages before starting any conversation with the media or your audiences via social media. Key messages are the core messages you want your target audience to hear and remember. They create the meaning behind your campaign whilst also headlining the issues you want to discuss.
When considering what you want your key messages to be, the first task is to make sure they are believable, credible, and justified. For your audience to trust and become influenced by whatever story you are telling, your core messages need to be supported by evidence, and delivered with concise and engaging language.
Showcasing relatable and actionable content
As most businesses continue to rely on age-old content creation techniques, their customers are getting bombarded with a seemingly endless supply of information that just doesn’t stick. To make matters worse, people generally don’t always have the attention span that we, as communicators, desire.
In the face of these trends, the key to delivering engaging content is to make it actionable. Actionable content is that which can easily be implemented by your audience. In other words, it’s the type of content that people find informative, relevant, entertaining, and unique. One of the best examples of actionable content is something like a ‘how-to’ post, allowing your audience to take something away from your content and integrate it into their own life.
Snowballing from this approach is the creation and utilisation of interactive content. Interactive content works to prompt action from the reader by using a call to action. Interactive content can take on various forms, including online polls, registration forms, and initiatives to like and share content, such as online or social media competitions and prize giveaways.
Actionable content not only explains what to achieve, but also tells your audience how to achieve it. As the target audience can execute the steps smoothly after reading it, actionable content can attract a greater number of people to view and interact with your campaign, as well as generate new leads and provide you with a measurable number of who and how many people are engaging with your campaign’s content.
Influence your Audience with Actual Influencers
The biggest key to creating an influential PR campaign is relatability, and what better way to make something relatable than by using an influencer to reel in your audience and make them listen to what you have to say. Using an influencer for a campaign, in this case, is much like using an ambassador, they are one in the same. You are essentially using a public figure who already has credibility in the public and the media space to help tell your story.
In fact, the key secret to an influencer’s success is their skill to become relatable to their audience. This powerful feeling of relatability breeds trust, so an influencer’s recommendation or view on a particular topic for example, almost feels like its coming from a friend. Of course, this is dependent on an influencer building that reputation of trust already. When influencers work with brands that align with their own values and their audience’s needs, the partnerships appear more natural, which helps to retain the trust and attention of your audience.
This focus on building trust and intimacy is why influencers are secret public relations wizards, as they really understand the power of authentic relationships. Their friendship might be with tens or hundreds of thousands of people, yet they create a space that feels personal to you. Influencer marketing and communication is a key aspect to building momentum for your campaign and capturing the interest of your audience in a powerful new way that can be even more effective than traditional messaging.
Fundamentals to Follow
Thus, some of the key fundamentals to creating the perfect campaign to engage, influence and impact your audience resides in the above strategies. Likewise, each of these cogs in the wheel of a successful PR campaign work to deliver your message effectively, and in a way that captivates your audience to really remember and think about what they have just read or seen, instead of filing it away alongside the many other overloads of content that is fed their way.
