Ask yourself “In the big picture of my profession or business, what do I want public relations to accomplish for me?” 

Some of the main goals of public relations are to create, maintain, and protect the organization’s reputation, enhance its prestige, and present a favorable image. And, for the vast majority of organizations, to earn a profit. 

If you are a commercial organization, the most obvious reason you want PR in your marketing mix is to drive sales.  

If you are a non-profit or an organization that is not sales-dependent, then you want PR to sell ideas. 

What are your public relations objectives? 

Too often, marketing and communications leaders say they have a PR plan.  

And that plan often becomes a “to-do” list of tactics that lack objectives and strategies.   

Start by creating clearly defined PR objectives.  

Part of the challenge is in achieving clarity between PR goals, objectives, strategy, and tactics.  

In some manner, they all refer to “what you want to achieve.” So, they’re interchangeable, right?  

No! The difference is critical. Each planning element plays a different role in mapping out how you approach achievement of your objective. It’s much more than semantics.  

An example of how goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics result in a plan 

If you are football coach, what is your goal? To win as many games as possible.  

Then, what is your objective? To outscore the opposition in each game. 

Okay, if you want to win the game, then what is your strategy?  

Your strategic direction will, of course, depend on your assets. If you have a terrific offense and a poor defense, then your guiding strategy might be “Ball control. Keep the ball out of the hands of the other team’s offense.”  

Having established that your offense will be key to your success, you would shape your tactics to overcome the other team’s defense. Your tactics (a sort of  “to-do” list) might be something like keeping control of the ball longer by running the ball more than passing or employing short passes, rather than long passes, to maintain control of the football. 

PR should complement your overall marketing effort 

Okay, let’s go beyond football — where objectives, strategy, and tactics are more difficult to develop. 

The PR component of your business should bolster your overall marketing plan (which should have the same basic elements as your PR plan).  

Orchestrating your marketing plan means coordinating advertising, public relations, sales, promotion, and research in a concerted direction to accomplish your marketing goals.  

The elements of your marketing plan should point toward the same objectives.  

Your strategies will depend on variables that include: 

Budget: How much do I need to spend to achieve effective levels of communication? How much money is available for marketing? What is the best use of my budget? 

Influencing factors: What does my competition spend for marketing? How do they spend it? What do they say? How are they priced? Is there seasonality that needs to be considered?  

Research: What does my audience want? Or need?  

Market environment: What opportunities exist for marketing my product or idea? What challenges will I face in marketing my product or idea? What are the best locations for my product or idea (physical location or placement of product or idea)? 

When you step back and address all of this, your marketing plan, and it’s PR component, more clearly presents itself.  

We can help you with marketing public relations 

If you have a marketing plan, we can shape a PR plan for you that will affordably complement your overall marketing efforts.  

If you don’t have a PR plan, we can help you create and implement a program that will augment your overall marketing…at a cost you can afford.  

Our efforts will be marketing-directed. While we applaud and agree with the notion that PR should help boost your reputation and be looked upon favorably, we are bulldogs about adhering to the notion that PR is most effectively used to help you to sell things and ideas.  

Look over your marketing plan and ask yourself “Can my plan be improved by an infusion of cost-effective, affordable PR?”.  

If so, then give us a call. Put Wellons Communications to work for you to develop and implement a PR plan that will boost your overall marketing efforts.