STRATEGIC THINKING IN PR: Putting Strategy First

By Paul Smith

Strategy must be one of the most overused and misunderstood words in PR. So how do we encourage more strategic thinking in our agencies?

First, we must remember that when you boil it down, clients only buy PR for one of two reasons, either:

• to help them sell more stuff, or
• to change a target audience’s behaviour – like the NHS does by trying to encourage us to eat more healthily and exercise to prevent heart disease or diabetes.

Everything we do in our PR programme must easily tie back to achieving these over arching goals.

So, what do we need to create a good PR strategy?

First, we must understand the client’s business objectives – what they want to achieve – and make sure they are measurable.

Then we identify our communications objectives. This is what we, as an agency, have control of to help our client achieve their goals. For example, if the client wants to grow their ecommerce sales by £1m a year, our communications objective is to drive enough people to the website to help them achieve that goal.

However, what happens once the customer arrives on the website is beyond our control, so it wouldn’t form a part of our communications objective. But with some simple maths around website sales conversion rates and average sale prices, we should quickly be able to put measurable targets around our communication goals.

Next, we need to do our homework by researching all the things that might help us or prevent us from achieving our goals. This includes understanding the target audience, the competitors and any trends or influencers that are affecting the market.

As we do our research, we are looking for insights – those nuggets of information that will form the basis of our strategy. Insights help us to grab our target audience’s attention and switch them on to new possibilities or behaviours. They are the magic ingredient of any PR strategy.

Once we have our insights, then our strategy – i.e., how we will help our client – becomes clear.

Remember, there can’t be a strategy without clear business and communications objectives…and key insights.

So, are you giving enough thought to your client’s PR strategies?