Public Relations
What can PR do to advance a firm's business goals?
Public relations activities can support organic growth by supporting such marketing and sales goals as improving sales, positioning a product or service, and developing a definitive competitive advantage. To do this requires a thoughtfully formulated program based on the company's business and marketing strategies.
The purpose is to market the firm's ideas in ways that will penetrate the cluttered communication environment in order to build a market presence with credibility. The goal is always to influence the attitudes of target customers positively in order to create awareness and win acceptance for market offerings.
To be successful, the program has to be grounded in a thorough understanding of the people in the target audience, such as prospective clients. Who are they? What are their issues and perceptions? What is the environment in which they are doing business? What alternatives do they have to your products/services? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these competitors?
These data provide the basis for, first, the marketing and sales strategies, and then communication strategies and messaging. They also deliver the basis for making the messaging relevant, credible and compelling.
Effective messaging consists of the essential copy points you want to get across. Getting visibility for a name through news media or other messaging vehicles is meaningless unless the name is in the context of these copy points. In general, it's a good idea to keep a quick checklist of approximately five messaging points before an interview or when writing a presentation, by-line article or news release. They should be concise but substantive and should not contain catch phrases. In an interview, you want them to lead to questions that give you the opportunity get other points across.
Being relevant is critical to penetrating noise and mindspace to get attention. Relevance means talking about business issues and outcomes in which a target audience is already interested.
Market credibility is essential for the audience to stay with the messaging long enough to get your story and to their accepting it. Credibility means (1) focusing on the substance with minimal adjectives and adverbs and (2) supporting all claims. The smarter and better educated the audience, the more you will need metrics and logical reasoning to prove your point.