PR strategy and 
Public Relations Planning

The key to creating an effective PR strategy is in identifying your brand’s core values. You need to understand the unique value proposition of your business, and what motivates you to drive it forward. These values inform all decision making in regard to PR, as it determines how you tell your story and how you want to position yourself in your industry. 

You also need to do an analysis of your competition, looking at what trends are working in your industry and implement this into your own strategy.

A fully integrated PR strategy will include a content marketing strategy, a social media plan, strategic branding, SEO positioning and consistent graphic design to communicate your messaging. It's also important to be create metrics to measure the success of a PR media strategy and to make adjustments as you progress.

As a startup you are constantly looking for new vendors or customers, a challenge when people are drawn to companies with an established reputation. Creating visibility for yourself is thus a key component of growing your brand which is the purpose of PR. Increase your visibility, build your reputation and credibility, and increase consumer trust in your brand. On paper PR can sound simple, after all, it is simply building and maintaining a relationship between a business and its customers.

However doing this effectively requires an integrated approach, combining PR with other marketing strategies such as strategic branding, social media marketing and graphic design. This is because PR works best when the message is communicated consistently across all channels. Having a strategy ensures consistency and that your PR efforts are integrated into your wider business model.

The best PR plan for startups is one that is built on the foundation of core values and a strong understanding of your target audience and niche industry. Having a clear definition of your brand’s value and the people you are trying to reach will enable you to clearly communicate and implement the various public relations strategies. 

The best plan will consider all the tools that are available to you. If you are commited and hardworking to developing and executing an effective PR strategy, you won’t need extensive resources. Take the time to utilize social media for reaching your audience and learning about them. While you may not immediately be getting mentioned in top tier publications, you can begin to work towards these goals if you have clearly defined them, and start nurturing relationships with journalists and positioning yourself as a thought leader. There are steps you can take today that will pay off in the long run. PR is a marathon not a sprint.

Media skills training is important because speaking to journalists requires an entirely different skill set to that of talking to your colleagues and industry peers. While a journalist is a person just like you, conversations and interviews with journalists have a transactional nature. They want to find out information about you to create an interesting story, and you are trying to promote your brand.

This the main reason for media training, improving your ability to effectively share your brand’s message and information that will resonate with your customers and educate a wider audience about your business. By following a PR marketing course you can learn how to clearly transmit the key messages of your business in a clear and precise way, and control the direction the interview is taking. The journalist asks the questions, but you can still steer them in the direction you wish the conversation to go.

While the skills from this public relations management course will do more than benefit your PR department, as developing stronger communication skills is simply beneficial to you. You will learn to communicate in a persuasive, natural and empathetic manner which ultimately will build your confidence and add credence to your credibility.