How to Pick the Best Tactics for Your PR Campaign

When you’re launching a PR campaign, there are many tactics available to use. So how do you choose? Account Executive Tom Horn explains.

Press releases, thought leadership, events, podcasts, social media, video, newsjacking and blogs are just a handful of the tactics available when you’re planning a PR campaign.

With so many choices available, how do you begin to assess which will be most effective and deliver the best results for your campaign?

Building a communications strategy should provide clear direction and help to choose which tactics are most appropriate, avoiding failure. You can find out more about how to set direction and build a strategy by listening to our podcast, Turning Up the Volume, where you’ll also find out more about different tactics and how to use them.

Once you have a sense of the direction you want to head in, it’s a process of refining the different options until you find those which are most appropriate. Here are four factors to consider when doing this.  

Resource

The most important factor of all. If you don’t have the resources required to do implement a tactic, don’t try to.

Many firms try and fail to put on events, create social content and write thought leadership articles without thinking about the time and cost involved in doing so, and the results are never as good as they’d anticipated.

In fact, such campaigns are often detrimental to a brand as they’re implementation is rushed and there is not the level of attention to detail required to have a positive influence.

Rather than delivering a crisp, positive, and impactful message, it suggests that you’re not effective at what you do.

Resource will dictate the number, as well as the type of tactics you’re able to implement. It’s not always necessary to use more than one tactic for a campaign, but doing so can have a disproportionately influential effect if the two align and reinforce each other.

However, the same principles apply. Trying to stretch your budget will result in two things being done badly, rather than one being done well and your results will reflect this.

Audience

The purpose of PR is to reach and influence your audience. Therefore, your choice of tactics should be wholly centred around what your audience will see and resonate with the most.

Use market research to find out which methods and platforms work best for your stakeholders and stick to them rigorously and relentlessly. Only by doing this will you reach your audience ] regularly enough to influence their decision-making process and see success in your campaign.  

Brand

Whichever tactics you choose should align with your brand positioning and messaging. Using methods that contradict these will make you look inauthentic and are unlikely to reach the people you want to reach.

For example, if you’re a MedTech company searching for investment, a series of social media videos promoting what you’re doing may seem like a good idea.

However, if you’re a small company it’s unlikely that a prospective investor would organically see your posts. They’re much more likely to see and engage with an article by you in a sector specific publication for investors though, which could considerably boost your credibility and prospects of success.

Give people the information they need to be influenced in a credible and convincing way.

End Goal

Different campaigns have different end goals. Think about what you want to achieve from your campaign and whether a certain tactic will help you to achieve it.

For example, if you’re a pre-market startup most of the people that you want to influence will never have heard of you, so a series of press releases raising your profile and explaining what you do would be a good first step towards growing brand recognition.  

Selecting tactics is not a binary choice between good ones and bad ones. The efficacy of tactics varies depending on the stage the business is at, and what it is aiming to achieve. A thought through, logical strategy should give you the tools you need to identify and select the best tools for the job.