'How can you speak to your audience?' - REVPR

In our last blog we looked at the PR planning process and how you can put your creative ideas into a more formal structure. Now we’re moving on to consider how researching your audience can help to create really compelling PR campaigns.

It seems obvious but it’s a mistake many people make when they don’t have a PR or marketing background – you need to know your audience for your PR campaigns to reach them and, most importantly, resonate with them so they take the desired action. You will waste your time (and budget) if you put out PR campaigns that your target audience can’t relate to. Your PR campaign may be worthy of an award when it comes to its creativity but if it doesn’t hit the mark with your target audience then, quite simply, it’s pointless. So, don’t get carried away!

Knowing your customers, their influencers, your employees and other stakeholders will help you to target your communications. Here’s a mad idea – why not ask them what they want to hear about, what they read and who they listen to? PR is all about opening up two-way communication so start as you mean to go on.

It’s easy to forget in the busy business of business that your target audience may change, develop and expand with your brand so remind yourself to revisit the research on your target audience on a regular basis.

Here’s a great cheat for business owners starting out with PR, look at case studies of PR award wins. There are plenty of PR and comms awards out there – start with googling the CIPR’s PRide awards. Looks at brands that operate in your sector or with similar products and services that have won awards for their PR campaigns. Who did they target and how? It’s a really good starter for ten where you can see how other brands related well to their target audiences.

Look out for our blog next time on formulating your brand messages and how that can save you so much time in the long term.