In this new article, we are talking about PR campaigns and offer you our insight on how to develop a bespoke digital PR campaign.
We will be covering:
- Preparation in how to create your bespoke digital PR campaign
- PR strategies
- Your campaign budget and how to spend it
- Paid Digital Marketing
- Email lists
- Web marketing
- Social media
and a whole lot more so let’s get started!
How To Create And Develop A Bespoke Digital PR Campaign
When you’re running a PR campaign, your points of focus will always be centred on a return on your investment and obtaining your objectives effectively with as little cash expenditure as possible. But building a bespoke digital PR campaign, which is naturally going to include some level of personalization and uniqueness, is generally more expensive and more complex.
In this complete guide, we’ll look at how you and your team and collaborate on a bespoke digital PR project.
Social media is currently regarded as one of the best ways to achieve PR goals, much of this article will focus on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites.
So, let’s take a look at your preparatory steps.
Preparation
Before any effective PR campaign, you need to ensure that you and your team are all on the same page regarding your aims and objectives. Often, a team meeting will hash that out. Assign a project leader who will brief the rest of your team on the following key details:
- Who or what you’ll be promoting.
- What your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, might look like.
- Whether you’ll keep this campaign as an ongoing one, or whether it’ll have a set end date.
- Who will be responsible for which aspects of the campaign and who will handle the tough questions.
- What your budget will be, and how flexible this budget is with your bosses.
With all these details heated out and shared with the relevant workers, you’ll be ready to plan your campaign.
Join the conversation: Before any effective PR campaign, you need to ensure that you and your team are all on the same page regarding your aims and objectives.Click To TweetPR Strategies
When you’re working on a bespoke PR strategy, the key will be finding a novel and exciting way to introduce the general public to your business, product, service, or to the individual with who you are trying to bathe in the exposure.
So, how do strategies work: how do you form a strategy, and how do you know that you’ve chosen the right one?
Here are a few ideas:
- Check out previous examples of PR projects which have significant overlap with your own. How did they tackle the job at hand?
- Think about all your previous projects. What worked well and what went badly? What would you change for this bespoke campaign?
- Should you bring in consultants who might be able to give you specialist advice and guidance regarding your campaign? This will largely depend on the budget you’ve set aside.
- Are there any tips on the internet, in online courses, or in eBooks, which will help you decide on the right strategy?
It’s important that you take time going over the strategy instead of launching into spending which equates to firing from the hip.
Your bespoke digital PR campaign should be clinical and planned, not spray-fire and ad-hoc.
With a strategy in place, it’ll be time to consider what you might spend your marketing and PR budget on.
Spending On Your Campaign
Of course, you’re well aware that there are some forms of marketing that are more effective than others and that, more often than not, you need to pay to be seen by the largest volume of web users and consumers.
This has been the industry wisdom for some time and only the odd guerrilla marketing campaign and viral social media item has broken that trend towards paid advertising.
Still, whether you have a large budget to spend on your campaign, it’s worth considering how you’ll be able to effectively and efficiently plan that spending so that you’re not bleeding your budget out on pointless and less impactful forms of advertising and marketing.
Before we even consider the paid options, it’s worth considering whether you should go for entirely free forms of marketing: like emails, website copy, and social media posts that you don’t pay to boost. Often, these forms of marketing can deliver a great return on your investment (of time, not cash).
Still, let’s count through the paid advertising options for your PR campaign so that you’re aware of what you might be able to leverage to have your message heard, appreciated, and understood.
Paid Digital Marketing
As you know, there are a terrific number of digital marketing tools and services open to you. You’re able to go to a digital marketing agency to cover you almost entirely in your campaign if you have a large budget. Or, as this will be a bespoke campaign, you may instead choose to run with a selection of the following:
- PPC advertising or Pay Per Click. This is great if you’re trying to get people on to a website, but less good if you’re promoting an individual or a news piece.
- Paid social media boosts. These work the same whether you’re using Snapchat, Instagram, or TikTok. You pay for the attention of the people on these platforms.
- Programmatic marketing. This is a bid-based system of web advertising. You compete in an auction for the attention of target consumers which is great if you have a specific demographic you’re trying to reach.
- Influencers. These are more and more popular with fashion brands and youth-focused companies who want to reach fashionable audiences through social media accounts.
- Television, radio, and films. These are less popular in today’s world, although, seeing how many shows and movies are now online, there are new opportunities to market on streaming sites and channels.
Of course, there are dozens of more ways you can get your message seen online. These are just a handful of the most important and the most popular.
For a full run-down of the marketing opportunities in the modern world, look to lists from prominent marketing gurus.
Emails
Email marketing is still regarded as one of the most effective methods of marketing, even though it’s also one of the oldest in the digital marketing playbook.
Why? Because it’s personal and professional at the same time.
People often check their emails even more than they check their social media pages, which means that you’re more than likely to get spotted.
And finally, due to automated email services like MailChimp and HubSpot, you’re easily able to automate emails and target large groups of recipients with your campaign materials.
Use emails when you’re able to offer a discount or a deal to those who open and read your email. Include call to action buttons and coupon codes so that they are incentivized to make a purchase or visit your site right away.
Web Marketing
Meanwhile, as mentioned above, there are a few ways in which you can use web marketing to bounce your PR campaign into the public sphere. According to Word Stream, Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts are often the go-to for larger firms looking to get traction with a wide range of consumers.
If you’re building a campaign around a news story or an individual, though, it’s a wiser strategy to write press releases and to slowly drip them onto PR newswires. If picked up by a major newspaper, your story will be read and seen by millions.
Looking to Social Media
Most practitioners in the PR industry agree that the future of the smart campaign will rest in the lap of social media giants who are able to expertly segment their audiences into ever smaller, ever-more bespoke units. These units are the groups that you’ll be advertising to and it’s difficult to underscore how valuable Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram boosted posts can be for your firm.
That said, there are plenty of other social media websites that it’s well worth engaging within your bespoke campaign. If you have content creators on your team, for instance, asking them to produce video content will help your campaign engage social media users across all companies and platforms.
Where Instagram is home of the photo, it’s YouTube that’s home of the video. All you have to do is look at CashLady’s campaign regarding YouTube stars — arranging them into a league of their own — to understand how valuable good video content can be in a PR campaign online.
Meanwhile, it’s fair to say that the younger crowd are currently swarming to Instagram and away from Facebook. That’s no surprise: Facebook is now regarded as an old and slightly tired and faded social media platform. Instagram is cleaner, with more engaging content.
If you’re interested in reaching the 18-35 age group, you should consider marketing on Instagram. Remember that you can use a paid boost for your posts, or you can go straight to influencers with similar audiences to your target demographics. You may pay upwards of $10,000 for a post from a popular Instagrammer, but that can be worth $50,000 in additional sales of the featured product.
A slightly older and more textually engaged demographic exists on Facebook. Many younger people distrust this platform and tend only to use the Messenger service on their smartphones. That means that if you’re after younger users’ attention, you should pay for the in-chat advert feature on Facebook.
The most exciting thing about a Facebook post that you pay to boost is that you can track, in real-time, the effectiveness of your post. This enables a high level of A/B testing, which will show you how to keep optimizing your campaign around the most effective posts and content.
Meanwhile, Facebook is also loved by those running PR campaigns that are after the attention of a few specific consumers, rather than many non-specific ones. You can target Facebook ad campaigns based on literally hundreds of different metrics from income to region to interests to brand affinities. It’s a great platform for targeting.
The same can be said of Twitter, though you should note that fewer people use Twitter than other social media platforms. Often, businesses or PR firms will use Twitter for prep releases, comments, and engagement with fans, customers, or consumers.
If you can write a funny tweet, or respond to a world event with a post that appears erudite and worth sharing, you may well end up ‘going viral’. This is a kind of Holy Grail for PR executives and it’s a rarity on the campaign trail. But if you manage it, you’ll have a whole load of free exposure to the Twitter-sphere and the news agencies that report upon it.
Snapchat and TikTok
Generally, users are younger on these two platforms. There’s significant overlap between the two, meaning that you may only wish to use either TikTok or Snapchat to share your PR campaign. Again, it’s worth noting that you’re rarely going to find a consumer over the age of 30 years old on these platforms.
What’s great about these two apps is the amount of engagement they generate. If you create a great piece of content, it can spread rapidly amongst groups of young people. Paid adverts are of course an option here, too, though they’re regarded as less effective than those on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
In Summary
So, you’ve learned all about the different platforms and tools that you can use to build your digital PR campaign on a bespoke, tailor-made basis. You know which platform will suit your objectives and whether you should use emails or web adverts to help achieve your aims.
It’s worth leaving you with a quick summary so that you’re able to build your next bespoke PR campaign quickly and confidently in the future:
- Brief your team and arrive on the same page for your campaign.
- Prepare a strategy that everyone will follow, based on best-practice case studies.
- Decide where you will spend your budget and how much you’re willing to part with to achieve your objectives.
- Manage different social media advertisements based on what kind of users you’re looking to access and at what volume.
With these tips in mind, it will be difficult for you to go far wrong when you’re next building out an exciting PR campaign. Go bespoke and make all your own decisions to have full control over your output and eventual success.
So do you have experience in creating digital PR campaigns?
Do you have any additional tips or tricks you have used to create your bespoke digital campaign?
Let us know in the comments section below.
Make sure that you subscribe to the comments so that you are notified when we reply.
Regards Dexter
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Jones
I’m scary – about these PR campaigns. I’m still zero in this area. Thanks for your insights to launch a potential PR campaign. I must walk through more detailed articles on these PR campaigns for more clarity. I’ll bookmark this one for now!
matt henery
Outstanding work you are doing. this post is very helpful for us thanks a lot.
Ideakard
The digital world needs to target properly to gain the maximum benefits out of the campaign. Doing research is always better than regretting later.