You’ve spent months brainstorming and planning your latest PR campaign, and it’s now finally time to show off all of your hard work – but how do you make sure a campaign lands with impact?
Whilst unique and creative PR campaigns are great ways to show off your brand and grab people’s attention, there are some simple steps you should consider to further amplify a campaign to ensure it reaches as many people as possible.
There are a variety of different strategies that can take your PR campaign to the next level, both in terms of impact and reach as well as quality, which means you can focus on one, or combine a few, that are most relevant to your campaign.
Utilise Your Social Channels
The beauty of social media is that you can build an audience who are interested and engaged in your brand and use this to curate content that will maintain and increase engagement.
When launching a PR campaign, your social channels are a perfect place to push this content to your audience and build further awareness of both the campaign and your brand. However, it is important to pay attention to how you communicate the campaign on social media, making sure it is consistent with your overall brand image.
First of all, identify which social media channels will be most relevant to use and how to adapt the content based on this. A platform such as LinkedIn will work effectively for longer-form content with a hard-hitting message, whereas Instagram and TikTok allow for more creative and fun content. Therefore, when sharing your campaign on social media, make sure to create content that is suited to that specific platform. Furthermore, rather than opting for a blanket approach and posting on each platform, focus on the social media channels that are most likely going to be used by your target audience and creating content that will resonate with them.
One thing that remains the same, no matter which social platform you choose to post on, is that your content must be engaging. Whether you use images, graphics, videos, or incorporate various types of multi-media into your posts, make sure that they are eye-catching and sleek, whilst also conveying just how exciting your campaign is, and why people should pay attention.
However, also make sure that any content feels authentic and in-touch with your overall brand image, as audiences on social media often demand authentic content, otherwise they are less likely to become engaged. This is not just important for existing social followers, but also potential followers who may become customers. New followers will need to immediately understand where you stand as a brand, and where your PR campaign fits into this, therefore creating this overall cohesive brand message is important across all forms of social media.
To further utilise social media, you can also amplify your campaign through a targeted advertisement spend. Whilst your own social media profiles can be powerful, paid opportunities can further engage new audiences by opening up your campaign to a wider audience. This is particularly useful for those with lower organic traffic to their profiles, as advertisements help to target potential new customers, driving them to your own profiles, helping to boost new traffic and further engage users across different platforms.
The Power of Influencers
Whilst your own social media accounts are great for posting about your campaign and sharing it with your existing audience, there are other tools on social media that can be just as useful for amplifying a campaign. As their name suggests, influencers can directly influence the spending behaviours of their followers.
Influencers often build a social following around a certain area or niche market. They cover a variety of areas, from fashion to gaming and even property. What’s more, these influencers already have a well-established and engaged following, meaning that you can tap into this following without having to build it yourself.
Using an influencer partnership can help you to further amplify your campaign, however, it’s crucial that the partnership aligns with your brand image and is also authentic to the influencer.
Whilst influencers know their audience better than anyone, it is important that your key messages and the campaign itself still shine through. Therefore, working together to tailor your content to the influencer audience will help the partnership to feel as genuine and authentic as possible, allowing the influencer’s audience to still feel engaged, which will only help you to further amplify your PR campaign.
Influencer partnerships can take various different forms, from influencer drops, where you send them your product to allow them to try it, to influencer events. Paid for partnerships will often involve working with an influencer on grid post, story, and video content to help raise awareness of your brand, campaign, or product launch. You may focus on one of these tactics which is most aligned with your campaign or use a selection of different partnerships to help boost campaigns reach.
Get The Press Talking… Again
Whilst utilising social media will help to maximise activity, online and print media are still influential and crucial to an effective PR campaign. National newspapers are read by a significant number of adults in the UK who are looking for engaging and interesting content, and so building a story around your PR campaign can be a way to tap into this huge audience.
When building your campaign, it’s important not to put all of your eggs in one basket, so to speak, and make sure you have several different angles to use when outreaching to the media. Particularly for consumer research led campaigns, you need to include a range of survey questions that will generate both the headline you are hoping for, as well as alternative interesting statistics. By incorporating several story angles into your research, your PR team can populate a number of press releases and create a variety of content that will appeal to different sectors of the media.
With a variety of different story angles, this gives you an advantage when reaching out to the media. The media landscape is constantly changing, meaning topics of interest can quickly become obsolete to journalists. Therefore, armed with a selection of different story angles, you can ensure that, if one topic isn’t as popular, you still have others that will remain relevant among the media.
When reaching out to the media, working with a PR agency can help you to build a strong press release and sell this into the media more effectively.
A press release builds a story around your campaign, relaying the key information and messaging to journalists in an exciting way. Journalists aren’t obliged to cover your story, so you need to get them interested in your campaign and show why it deserves to be published in their newspaper.
PR agencies have existing media relations experience, working with a wide variety of different clients across different sectors and industries. With this experience, they can help you to build a strong press release, and use their existing contacts within the media, along with the years of experience they have selling into the media, to get a journalist to notice it and potentially cover it.
With your campaign ready to hit the press and social media, now’s the time to think big, with creative and imaginative ideas to further amplify your campaign – and we’ve got you sorted!
If you’re looking to build a creative PR campaign, or need help with amplifying an existing campaign, call us on 0161 951 5399 to see how we can help you.
Tags: influencers, Media, pr campaign, Social Media Posted by