key

Strategic Communications

The Science behind the Art

Copyright © 2016 by Katie Harrington

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover design by Chetan Pujari

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1. The new rules of Public Relations

Chapter 2. Reputation Matters

Chapter 3. Defining goals, objectives and audiences

Chapter 4. The PESO Model

Chapter 5. Creating a strategic Public Relations plan

Chapter 6. Do gatekeepers still exist?

Chapter 7. Measurement and Evaluation

Bonus content: The best of the blog

About the author

“If a young man tells his date how handsome, smart and successful he is – that’s advertising. If the young man tells his date she’s intelligent, looks

lovely, and is a great conversationalist, he’s saying the right things to the right person and that’s marketing. If someone else tells the young woman

how handsome, smart and successful her date is – that’s PR.” – S. H. Simmons

Foreword

The Public Relations industry has a bad reputation. It’s really quite ironic. Tasked with managing the brand equity of our organisations and clients, as practitioners we have failed to sufficiently address the qualms people have about investing in PR.

As a profession, we struggle to earn and maintain credibility. Our budgets are generally derisory compared with our friends in Advertising and Marketing. Our attempts to prove our value are often met with a barely concealed eye- roll. Jokes about professions that charge by the hour abound.

Our forefathers in the world of Public Relations and Communications did the sector no favours in allowing – and even encouraging – the perception of Public Relations teams as practitioners of a dark art.

Known since the early days of the profession as arch-manipulators, spin doctors and “fixers”, the industry has long struggled to break away from this image – even as unprecedented standards of ethics and transparency are implemented.

Yet, good Public Relations is more important than ever. Disruptive technology and the gig economy offer consumers more options than ever before. Savvy consumers block advertisements on their digital platforms but flock to both paid and unpaid social influencers. Social channels can turn a customer’s most minor grievances into serious reputational issues, and crisis management has become an increasingly crucial function of any PR, Communications or Public Affairs team.

This book aims to demystify Public Relations, arm practitioners with the tools to create powerful campaigns, and demonstrate that effective measurement and evaluation of Public Relations campaigns can prove our

impact and value for money. For the purpose of this book, Public Relations is defined as targeted communications between an organisation and multiple publics.

The Public Relations industry can and must do better – or face a future where it becomes increasingly irrelevant. The writing is on the wall, so to speak; entire PR departments are being replaced by sophisticated pieces of software, eulogies for the humble press release are written daily, and Public Relations practitioners that fail to keep pace with futuristic technology and rapidly increasing standards of transparency will ultimately fail.

The principle aim of the book is to reinforce the standard Public Relations professionals must set for ourselves, and to critically assess the Barcelona Principles. Established in 2010, these are a voluntary set of guidelines established by industry representatives from 33 countries at the 2010 International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) summit. The principles were updated in 2015, and the latest version is outlined in the next chapter.

In Chapter 4 we champion the PESO Model – an integrated communications strategy combining Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media. Examining how to four strategies combine and overlap, we endorse the PESO model as best practice in making a provocative, coherent and powerful impact on audiences. Looking at a 2015 case study, we examine how the model can be used to create vibrant, successful Public Relations campaigns with proven results.

In the final chapter, we look at measurement and evaluation. AVEs are rejected as a measure for Public Relations, the long discredited method of using the value of an advertising space to calculate the value of Public Relations is still alarmingly common, despite mounting evidence that there is little correlation between similarly placed editorial content and adverts. But

what comes in its place? Proving the value of a PR campaign is a complex, but far from impossible, task. Chapter 11 details a variety of qualitative and quantitative ways to demonstrate the impact of campaigns.

This book focuses more strongly on the day-to-day skills a Public Relations practitioner must draw on than academic theories of communication. Each chapter seeks to align the creativity or art of the profession with evidence- based models of best practice and with our responsibility to prove the impact we make with logical, replicable methodologies.

For further reading on the PR industry, see www.wildewords.ie, where new articles are added on a weekly basis.

“Without publicity there can be no public support, and without public support every nation must decay.” – Benjamin Disraeli

The new rules of Public Relations

Chapter 1

The Barcelona Principles For a while now, we’ve known that there are parts of the Public Relations

industry that are broken. Old models that relied on ‘spin’ have rightfully rejected in favour of a more transparent, ethical and honest style of Public Relations.

Social media and the rise of smartphones have created a revolution in the communications industry, reducing the power of the media as the gatekeepers, offering individuals and organisations the power to gain a following and generate coverage independent of traditional media. This creates huge potential for Public Relations teams, but standing out amongst the noise in a world where 6,000 tweets are posted every second of every day poses a significant challenge.

Meanwhile, the purse strings are pulled ever tighter, and organisations demand tangible proof of the impact their PR spend makes. Public Relations teams shoulder the responsibility not just for media relations, but also public affairs, investor relations, corporate social responsibility, strategic communications, events and internal communication. The management of a company’s reputation is among a PR team’s most important tasks.

According to a PR News survey in March 2013, 83% of PR professionals want to demonstrate the value of their PR activities. However, as things stand, only 52% of the respondents said they measure tone and less than half measure the prominence of key messages. Clip counts (64%) and impressions (55%) are the most popular measures, and as few as 47% use both quantitative and qualitative measures for social media.

In the world of big data and Google Analytics, clip counts and cuttings are

nowhere near enough to demonstrate the effect Public Relations has on consumer behaviour and brand equity.

While this book is primarily concerned with action – creating and implementing strategy – rather than theory, it’s useful to take a brief look at what the world’s top Public Relations practitioners are looking to as the basis of their strategic communications plans. How can an industry as broad as PR address the challenges described above? One attempt to answer that question came in 2010, in the form of the Barcelona Principles.

Public Relations practitioners from more than 40 countries gathered in the capital of the Spanish region of Catalonia for a think-in on industry issues. Around 140 people attended the conference, which was hosted by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC). AMEC is the world’s largest trade body representing communications research, measurement and insights.

The result of the conference was the first draft of the Barcelona Principles; seven core focal points for the implementation, measurement and evaluation of strategic communications campaigns. Early adopters of the Barcelona Principles included Edelman, FleishmanHIllard, Ketchum and StrategyOne.

In the five years that followed, the wording was debated and fine-tuned, ultimately resulting in the Barcelona Principles Mark II, agreed at the AMEC summit in 2015. The updated principles are listed below.

1. Goal setting and measurement are fundamental to communication and public relations

To an outsider, this might seem too obvious for words. Yet, a huge number of organisations go from year to year attempting to make their strategy up as they go along. Measurement, evaluation and goal-setting should be holistic

across media and paid, earned, owned and shared channels. In Chapter 3, we’ll discuss the functions and benefits of goals and objectives and how they can be applied in Public Relations projects.

2. Measuring communication outcomes is recommended versus only measuring outputs

Outputs can be measured easily in quantitative terms (i.e. objective observations given in numbers), but the second principle has now been updated to reinforce the importance of qualitative feedback (i.e. subjective observations given through words). The original principle stated quantitative methods of measuring outcomes were “often preferable,” however, the updated principle recognises that the use of qualitative methods (along with quantitative) should be used as appropriate. The updated principle also specifically mentions advocacy as an outcome that can (and should) be measured.

3. The effect on organisational performance can and should be measured where possible

The updated third principle notes that while communications and public relations can impact the bottom line and increase profits, that is not the only effect it can have. This principle was originally focused exclusively on the impact PR has on business results, but the updated wording reflects the fact that communications can impact the overall performance of an organisation.

To do this, organisations must have, and practitioners must understand, integrated marketing and communication models. The Public Relations

channel does not exist in a silo, nor should PR measures.

4. Measurement and evaluation require both qualitative and quantitative methods

The fourth principle recognises that qualitative measures are often needed in order to explain “the why” behind the quantitative outcomes. The updated principle reminds practitioners that to be truly objective, we need focus on measuring performance (be it positive, negative or neutral), and avoid making assumptions that results will always be positive or “successful.”

5. AVEs are not the Value of Communications

While some cling to Advertising Value Equivalent as a measure, Public Relations practitioners following best practice should entirely reject this concept. The old school practice of measuring the success of Public Relations by the yardstick of advertising rates is dead. Throughout this book, better models for calculating the qualitative and quantitative impact of campaigns will be outlined.

6. Social Media Can and Should be Measured Consistently with Other Media Channels

A variety of sophisticated free and paid-for tools are available to measure social media impact and following. Between the analytics offered within social sites themselves, Klout scores and the numerous other measurement tools that detect share of voice, engagement, followers, likes, retweets and so on, there is no excuse in the present day not to measure and report on social

media channels just like any other.

7. Measurement and Evaluation Should be Transparent, Consistent and Valid

When we measure our performance, it is vital to compare like with like, and act with integrity, honesty and openness. The updated principle includes more specific guidance valid quantitative and qualitative methods in an effort to ensure quantitative methods are reliable and replicable and qualitative methods are trustworthy. The Barcelona Principles pave the way for a renewed level of trust with the public and governments. Currently, there is an unprecedented level of mistrust in institutional power, from governments to corporations, the media and – yes – PR firms. This is as true in the old industrial towns in England that voted for Brexit as it is in Donald Trump’s American rust belt. In an essay titled Post Truth, Post Trust, Post PR: The crisis of trust is a crisis of leadership, Robert Phillips, former EMEA CEO of Edelman argues that in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, institutions didn’t change. Rather than adapt to a climate that demanded fairness for the 99%, an ethical approach to business and true leadership, organisations relied on clever messaging to continue masking problems that lay at their core. He said:

Clever communications was being used to prop-up bad leadership in business and politics – thereby fuelling the crisis of leadership and, in turn, the crisis of trust. We thought we could spin our way out of everything, even if that spin was only lightly or innocently applied.

In other words, successive governments and business leaders have ignored the needs of the people who propped them up for too long. The people now feel that the institutions they once trusted have reneged on the social contract we were raised to believe in, which says “If you work hard, you can have a better life than your parents did. To paper over the cracks in their policies,

governments and boards of management hired PR firms instead of fixing the core issues. Canny Public Relations professionals will have learned a lot from the 2016 news cycle. We now know with greater certainty than ever before just how powerful the tools of emotion and nostalgia are, and that simplicity combined with repetition garners results. This leaves the PR industry with a choice to make. We can lean in to spin. In the post-truth era, it is unquestionable that there will be money to be made by doing so. We will have greater freedom than ever to stretch or simply ignore the truth. No doubt there will be Public Relations companies who will see the dollar signs in this business model and find it too tempting to resist. On the other end of the spectrum, Robert Phillips proposes a radical post-Public Relations model of leadership. He says:

The corporation of the future should look less like a traditional hierarchy and more like a social movement, within which the CEO needs to think and behave like a social activist… This means being citizen-centric and society-first, re-setting the consumption fetish of the late 20th and early 21st century. The activist Public Leader negotiates and enables – and does not impose. Aristotelian values of Truth, Wisdom, Justice and, above all, Courage prevail. I have long argued for the ascendancy of profit optimisation over profit maximisation and for a longer-term focus on purpose and not just profit – challenging Milton Friedman and his Thatcher/ Reagan disciples, where the only responsibility of business is to maximise profit for a small group of

shareholders. We need to mutualise more. Achieving this also demands activist business leadership.

To some, Phillips’ proposal looks hopelessly optimistic. Governments, organisations and Public Relations companies, whose very survival seem to depend on resisting this call, will be slow to pick up the gauntlet he has thrown down. But the framework of the Barcelona Principles may allow us to take the first steps towards transforming the Public Relations model of the past to the Public Leadership model of the future. In the following chapters, we will discuss key messages and PR strategies – but make no mistake, key messages will never take hold unless key actions are taken to back them up.

“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room” Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon

Reputation Matters

Chapter Two

Establishing, maintaining and protecting reputation The public perception of a company, institution or governmental body is fundamental to its ability to achieve its objectives. The hope is that with consistent, creative and clever Public Relations, Communications teams can wield a certain level of control over the organisation’s reputation. The relationship between a company’s brand and its reputation is not entirely straightforward however; despite any brand’s best effort to convince their audience of its message, the public ultimately decide a company’s reputation based on whether it lives up to its brand proposition. Brand can be defined as how your organisation wants to be seen by the public, whereas reputation is how people actually see you. Public Relations has a vital role to play in earning, maintaining and protecting an organisation’s reputation. There are a variety of strategies teams can employ to build trust, but in the world of the whistle-blower, this must begin with ethics, authenticity and a two-way dialogue with the people you’re targeting spoken in a human voice. Organisations are often fiercely protective of their branding, to the extent that civil wars between internal departments begin over the incorrect use of a logo or an outdated boilerplate. The real challenge for any company, however, is in ensuring its products, services, employees, raw materials, labour and manufacturing standards, among other factors, stand up to scrutiny as being

in line with the company’s messaging. There is good reason for companies to show such concern for their reputations. The Global RepTrak Pulse 2016 was the largest study of corporate reputation in the globe, involving 7,000 companies, 55,000 consumers, 40 countries and 25 industries. The study claims that reputation is an emotional bond between consumers and organisations that impacts:

Whether consumers will buy your product If the general public would recommend your company Policy makers and regulators in giving you a license to operate The financial community’s willingness to invest in your organisation How the media reports your point of view Whether employees deliver on your strategy

The crucial role of Public Relations in establishing, maintaining and protecting a company’s reputation is beyond doubt. Reptrak measures a company’s ability to deliver on seven factors:

Product/Services: Offers high quality products and services - it offers excellent products and reliable services Innovation: Is an innovative company - it makes or sells innovative products or innovates in the way it does business Workplace: Is an appealing place to work - it treats its employees well Governance: Is a responsibly-run company - it behaves ethically and is open & transparent in its business dealings Citizenship: Is a good corporate citizen - it supports good causes & protects the environment Leadership: Is a company with strong leadership - it has visible

leaders & is managed effectively

Performance: Is a high-performance company -- it delivers good financial results

RepTrak claims that company’s that deliver on this will earn the emotion, admiration, trust, and esteem. The impact of this is then seen in seven domains – purchases, verbal support, crisis proofing, recommendations, investment and employment.

According to RepTrak, regular reputational audits are required in order to prioritise stakeholders and map the road to success. In 2016, their research named the following as the top ten companies with the best reputations in the world:

1. Rolex 2. The Walt Disney Company 3. Google 4. BMW Group 5. Daimler 6. Lego 7. Microsoft 8. Canon 9. Sony 10. Apple

The link between a strong reputation and profitability is clear. There is a financial imperative to investing in Public Relations that goes beyond “spin”.

People are overwhelmed on a daily basis by traditional and digital advertising, product placements and word-perfect corporate brochures that

are designed elegantly, edited meticulously and then roundly ignored by the majority of people who see them.

Lack of trust in an organisation has a direct on revenue, but also extends beyond this sphere according to a McKinsey Quarterly report in 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crash, which stated:

Companies and industries with reputation problems are more likely to incur the wrath of legislators, regulators, and the public. What’s more, the credibility of the private sector will influence its ability to weigh in on contentious issues, such as protectionism, that have serious implications for the global economy’s future.

This has serious ramifications in a compliance-obsessed corporate culture. Lack of trust in your organisation can have consequences as local as objections to planning permission for a new site you plan to build on, or at a macro-level on your ability to shape the conversations that take place in the post-globalisation era.

RepTrak found that 84% of those surveyed would purchase from a company with an excellent reputation compared with 9% who would purchase from a company with a poor reputation. While 83% would recommend the products of a company with an excellent reputation, 8% who would recommend products from a company with a poor reputation. People are overwhelmed on a daily basis by traditional and digital advertising, product placements and word-perfect corporate brochures that are designed elegantly, edited meticulously and then roundly ignored by the majority of people who see them.

Lack of trust in an organisation has direct McKinsey Quarterly report in 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crash, stated:

Companies and industries with reputation problems are more likely to incur the wrath of legislators, regulators, and the public. What’s more, the credibility of the private sector will influence its ability to weigh in on contentious issues, such as protectionism, that have serious implications for the global economy’s future.

This has serious ramifications in a compliance-obsessed corporate culture. Lack of trust in your organisation can have consequences as local as objections to planning permission for a new site you plan to build on, or at a macro-level on your ability to shape the conversations that take place in the post-globalisation era. For companies competing for talent, 73% would work for a company with an excellent reputation compared with 11% who would work for an organisation rated as poor, and 67% would invest in a company with a an excellent reputation compared with 7% who would invest in a company with a poor reputation. The research Reptrak carried out found that there was a 13-14 point difference in trust in a given organisation depending on whether or not they had come across the company in their day-to-day media consumption. Where a person had come across an organisation in the print media, they gave them an average score of 81.7 compared with 67.7 if they had not. If they had seen coverage in the broadcast media, they gave an average score of 81.4, compared to 68.1 if they had not. For social media, the score was 82.2 for organisations participants had come across compared with 69 for those they had not.

These figures demonstrate the impact Public Relations has on business outcomes and corporate reputation, and represent a strong argument for investment in PR. Chapter 4 of this book will outline how the PESO model can be used to ensure that stakeholders hear a company’s key messages across multiple channels. Public Relations must live up to its name and become the catalyst for real relationships between organisations and the people they want to attract.

“People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.” – Seth Godin

Goals, key messages and target audiences

Chapter Three

Goals and objectives The goals, objectives and key messages for a given campaign should always be defined at the outset and measured once the campaign is complete.

In a paper titled Guidelines for Setting Measurable Public Relations Objectives: An Update issued by the Institute for PR in 2009, a team led by Mark Weiner, CEO PRIME Research, outlined the following benefits to setting clear goals and objectives.

Objectives:

create a structure for prioritisation: Once your aim is clear, the focus and sequence of your strategy and tactics are clear. reduce the potential for disputes before, during, and after the program: If everyone agrees in advance on the objectives, it is less likely anyone will challenge the program’s priorities and results. focus resources to drive performance and efficiency: A clear and shared sense of purpose distils program tactics and focuses financial and human resources on those areas on which they have the greatest impact. help create successful programs by identifying areas for prescriptive change and continual improvement. Over time, tracking performance against properly set objectives allows for corrective action, or positive adjustments. Set the stage for evaluation by making it easier for sponsors and team- members to determine if the PR program met or exceeded expectations. Once those who are underwriting the PR investment understand and

authorize measurable objectives, there can be no doubt as to whether the program met or fell short of the desired outcome at conclusion. link the PR objective to the business objective. Proper PR objectives are derived from the organization’s business objectives. This makes the business case for the PR program. For example investing significant resources towards the promotion of “product A” when the company’s future is pinned to the success of “product B” is not in alignment. However, if the PR objectives in support of “product B” are met or exceeded, the link between PR and the overall success of the business is much more tangible, especially among senior executives.

Each campaign should begin with a single overarching goal that sums the entire purpose up in a sentence or two, for example, in 2013, Emirates Airline and Group’s primary Public Relations goal was:

Emirates Airline should become one of the top 100 lifestyle brands globally

Emirates is a luxury airline – generally speaking, it can’t win customers based on price. The solution? They sought to make their brand more than a seat on an aircraft – by positioning flying with Emirates more than that, a lifestyle choice that reflects something more about the customer to the world, they tapped into a valuable marketing secret: Customers don’t just pay for the functionality of a product or service, they pay for what it signals to the world about their status, lifestyle, values and opinions.

Your goal should be clear and unambiguous, and ideally ambitious. If your entire campaign was to achieve just one thing, what should that one thing be? That’s your goal. All of the supporting strategies and tactics should be aimed at making your goal a reality.

The next step is to set specific, measurable, achievable objectives. Achieving

these objectives should be incremental steps toward achieving your goal. Taking the example of Emirates, some of the stepping stones along the way to achieving their goal may have included:

Align with established lifestyle brands with loyal followers e.g. Arsenal FC Sponsor of major lifestyle based events e.g. the Melbourne Cup, US Open, Emirates Dubai Rugby 7s, as well as a variety of arts and culture festivals Endorsements by popular celebrities e.g. Jennifer Aniston Targeted social media campaigns aimed at key demographics

All objectives should be measurable, and timeframes should be put in place for success. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative measures should be used, for example:

“We want to see an increase of 25% in the number of people visiting the product page on our website.” “We want to change how we talk our customers on Facebook so that we get more engagement and less negativity.” “We want to see our CEO profiled national newspapers.”

Goals should be achievable yet ambitious. At the end of the campaign, results will be measured against goals (See Chapter 7), so it’s wise not to set them hastily.

Defining key messages Key messages are short, memorable phrases that create an emotional

narrative around the unique selling point(s) of your product, service or organisational goal. Organisations that fail to define their key messages can be sure that if they don’t know what their key messages are, nor do consumers. They are clear, concise and consistent sound bites that sum up your value proposition. Key messages answer the question: “What do we want the public to know about us?” in a nutshell. Your audience will not listen to, comprehend and accept the message you are trying to convey immediately upon hearing it. A certain frequency needs to be achieved before a person will hear, understand and buy into it. The key messages your organisation wants to impart will need to be repeated over and over again to become the dominant narrative.

To do so without boring your audience to tears, the PESO model – discussed in the next chapter – suggests combining traditional media, advertising, social channels and company-owned media to reach them in a variety of different ways. Key messages may be shaped or presented in different ways according to the demands of different channels, but the messages themselves remain the same. Some organisations choose a quarterly or annual theme as a way to group key messages.

Communications expert Jeremy Porter argues in an essay on persuasion that emotion is a critical component of a key message. He said:

Don’t rely on facts and figures to persuade your audience. You need emotion to persuade. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and understand where they are coming

from. If you can make an emotional connection you’re on the path to persuasion. That’s how you get them from where they are to where you want them to be.

Porter invokes Aristotle in arguing convincingly that emotion generally trumps reason. This theory, touched on in Chapter 1, was discussed ad length by commentators in the British and world media in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Despite stark warnings from economists and politicians from all major parties of the negative repercussions of leaving the EU, slogans like ‘Believe in Britain’ that appealed to people’s sense of sovereignty prevailed. Similarly, Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’, appealed to a powerful sense of nostalgia and emotion.

Porter argues that there are nine elements to bringing emotion into messaging; a human voice, authenticity, framing, storytelling, use of metaphor, visuals, delivery and wording. Creating a key message that combines these elements in a few short sentences is no mean feat. G

One method worth considering is the combination of a claim, a fact and an example e.g. “80 people sleep on the streets of Dublin each night. Your donations save lives. John went from sleeping in doorways to working in the post office within six months.” That’s a powerful key message in 29 words, which takes around ten seconds to say. The shorter your key messages are, the less likely they are to be misinterpreted.

Key messages are vital in defining your company’s brand to the public. As noted in Chapter 2, however, no amount of messaging can help your company’s brand if the products or services you provide fail to match up. Iconic branding, clever catch phrases, celebrity endorsements and positive publicity can help turn a good company into a great company, but they cannot turn a bad company into a good company.

Who is your audience? Naturally, good Public Relations requires an encyclopaedic knowledge of

the sectors of the public you’re with whom you’re communicating.

A good place to start is an analysis of current customers and clients. Who buys your products and services? Who visits your website? Who leaves comments? Who follows your brand on social media, and do they engage more on Instagram or on Snapchat? How do these demographics differ from those actually walking into your stores?

The next step is to identify the audiences you want to appeal to. Depending on your sector, this might focus on demographics including:

Gender

A particular age group

Geographic location

Disposable income

Business segments (the SME market, governmental bodies, multinationals)

Don’t forget to think about psychographics too, including:

Personality

Lifestyle

Values

Language

Behaviour

Ultimately, this process should result in a clear picture of the audience(s)

you’re hoping to target, and eventually sell to. An example of this summed up in a short sentence would be: “We’re targeting busy working mums aged 25-34 in Australia who want to lost weight”, or “We’re targeting small and medium sized companies in the Middle East who struggle to get media coverage.”

Once you know which audiences you want to target, you can tailor your PR and Communications activity toward them. Research the kinds of media your audience is most likely to engage with – but don’t make assumptions.

Building a customer persona Meet James, Sara, Marie and Thomas – the new personifications of your

ideal customer or client. Each represents a composite sketch of the type of person who might buy your products or services. Customer personas humanise your audience; instead of asking yourself whether a single female millennial who works in financial services will purchase your new product, you ask “What would Sara think of this? How would this campaign make her feel?”

Story-telling has become such an integral part of how brands position themselves – and after all, what is a story without characters? Creating a customer persona is a useful starting point before defining what the campaign itself will look like. It allows for the concept of homophily – the love of what one knows, or to use a cliché, the idea that ‘birds of a feather flock together’.

According to ‘Segmentation Marketing: A Case Study on Performance Solutions Group, LLC:

To select a profitable target market, companies should do extensive research to understand who will most likely benefit from their product, and then analyse the

characteristics of this group of people. After the general target market is assigned, companies can use the information to create a customer profile. Customer profiles are a specific group of customer characteristics the company believes will be most profitable in the long run. The more specific the target market and customer profile is, the more effective the marketing strategy to this group will be in the long run (Pakroo, 2014).

To create an effective customer profile and develop it into a persona, use the data you have available to you, make some educated guesses and add some human details. The purpose of the exersie is to get an idea of what your ideal customer looks like as a person, rather than rows and columns on a spreadsheet.

Start with simple questions, and then build toward something more sophisticated:

What age group does your ideal customer fall into? Where does he or she live? How much disposable income does he or she have available? What is his or her favourite social media site? Where does he or she engage most? What industry does he or she work on? Does he or she shop more often online or in-store? What challenges does he or she face on a daily basis? Which influencers does he or she pay attention to in making buying decisions? How far along in the consideration process is he or she?

Using a mixture of demographics and psychographics, you might end up with something like this:

Sara, 27, is a successful, single millennial living in London, England. She loves Instagram, and

regularly posts colourful shots of her favourite brunch spots and new purchases. Sara is a young, professional earning a decent salary, but with a high cost of living in one of Europe’s most expensive capitals, good value is essential to her. Sara often browses online clothes stores before making a purchase, but enjoys making her purchases in-store so she can feel the fabrics and try the items on. Sara bought her favourite pair of shoes after seeing her favourite fashion blogger post photos of them with a positive review.

Once target segments have been identified, and personified through customer personas, it is possible to tailor a corporate message specifically to that group. One of the best ways to find out what your target segments want is to ask them. Run surveys, polls and focus groups to take the guesswork out of the equation and form a full picture of the needs of your demographic. Where PR and Communications efforts appear to be failing, it may be the case that the strategy being used is based on false assumptions.

According to one PR industry anecdote, a major B2B brand stormed into a meeting insisting to their Public Relations agency that they wanted coverage in the Financial Times. Those were the kinds of readers it was after – nothing else would suffice. The agency, which was one of the top 10 globally, had a sneaking suspicion that the client’s focus on the Financial Times was more about vanity than reaching the right audience – after all, it is a prestigious newspaper.

At the agency’s suggestion, research was carried out on what those who engaged most with the brand actually read on a day-to-day basis. It found that the busy high-flying men and women who engaged most with the brand had little time for the meaty reads found in the Financial Times on weekdays, and

would only generally read it on weekends. With that, the strategy changed to focus on where readers got their news day to day – normally the BBC, the Guardian etc.

Case study: Reaching a wider audience

According to a case study by marketing expert Stephen Zoeller (www.stephenzoeller.com), the world’s most profitable automotive brand, Porsche, repositioned itself within the market between 2011 and 2013 to reach a wider audience and boost sales.

According to Zoeller, Porsche has five traditional customer profiles or target segments:

The top gun profile consists of an ambitious and driven individual who cares about power and control expecting to be noticed. The elitist profile, includes an individual from old money (blue blood), has the attitude a car is just a vehicle and not an expression of a person’s personality. The proud patrons owner profile sees a Porsche as a trophy considering it a reward for hard work with ownership as the main goal not being noticed. The bon vivants profile consists of thrill seekers and jet setters with the Porsche as a means of excitement. The fantasist profile sees the Porsche as a form of escape and does not care about impressing others.

In each case, the Porsche was a symbol of luxury – of owners who lived a lifestyle most could only aspire to. In the early 2010s, not long after the economic crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession in the US and elsewhere, research showed that the average age of a Porsche owner had crept from 48 in 2007 up to 51 in 2012. The brand’s demographic was – as it has always been – predominantly

male (85%).

In 2011, the brand decided to target new segments including younger men and women, who did not fall into the brand’s traditional segmentation model. As part of the strategy, the band announced tennis player Maria Sharapova as a spokesperson. The result was a significant sales bump for the Panamera and Cayenne models. In the two years that followed, sales of Porsche cars to women almost doubled, from 8% to 15% of sales.

The tagline ‘Engineered for magic, every day’, was used to promote a repositioning of the brand that sought to maintain the luxury associated with Porsche while appealing to a broader audience than the sports car enthusiasts found in their traditional segments. The campaign primarily used the 911 to reposition the brand for everyday use. The results have seen Porsche 911 sales increase 35% according to Cramer Krasselt.

“Internet has turned what used to be a controlled, one-way message into a real-time dialogue with millions.” – Danielle Sacks

The future is the PESO model

Chapter Four

The PESO Model There are four main ways to get your brand seen by the public, as outlined by the PESO model:Paid, Earned,Shared and Owned. This chapter will define each of these and show how integrating them creates successful Public Relations campaigns.

A successful media plan should include all of the above, bearing in mind that they will naturally overlap frequently, for example when organisations share ‘Owned’ blog posts or ‘Earned’ media interviews on ‘Shared’ social media sites.

Paid media Paid media is exactly what it says on the tin – any kind of advertising and coverage that is paid for and guaranteed. Traditional forms of paid media include billboards, radio and television adverts, newspaper and magazine adverts and so on. Newer forms of paid media include influencer marketing, Google Adwords, banner ads on websites, affiliate links and so on.

There is also a huge crossover between paid media and shared media, which we’ll talk more about later, in the form of paid-for social posts like sponsored Facebook posts and promoted tweets on Twitter.

The advantages of paid media can be summed up in two words: guaranteed coverage. Ultimately, the three factors that combine for a successful advertising campaign are a deep knowledge of your target audience and where they can be found, a clever creative team, and the appropriate budget to hit the objectives the campaign has set.

The disadvantages of paid media include a saturated market – consumers are

bombarded with advertisements from the moment they take out their smartphones in the morning, through their commutes, their daily activity online and through the print and broadcast media. The sheer number of ads people are exposed to over the course of a day makes it difficult to break away from the pack and make a genuine impact on your target audience through advertising alone, even with a large budget.

Conversely, a small brand can take on an industry titan and win with a cleverly orchestrated advertising campaign that goes viral.

Additionally, a number of studies including Hallahan (1999) found that advertising generally rated lower than editorial for credibility, a clear indicator that companies should aspire to achieving meaningful editorial coverage and strong advertising campaigns.

Earned media Earned media is editorial coverage in traditional and digital media outlets, including regional and national news organisations and trade publications. It can include bylines written by your executives and sold in to relevant publications by your PR team, interviews with your CEO, profiles of your management team, thought leadership pieces, comments in articles, and even coverage generated from a humble press release.

This type of coverage is extremely valuable because it generally carries greater credibility than paid media. It also targets a wider sphere than adverts; while paid ads generally target one message at one audience, Public Relations encompasses media relations (See Chapter 6), investor relations, corporate social responsibility, crisis and issue management, community relations and public affairs, as well as both corporate and consumer PR.

Stacks and Michaelson (2009) found that:

…advertising and editorial content are at a parity in many respects in their ability to affect consumer attitudes on new product introduction [however] public relations appears to have greater efficacy in two critical areas: building a relationship with the consumer, and providing knowledge about the product under consideration.

Editorial content is produced by journalists, who are generally seen as unbiased, so their reviews of everything from new movie releases to Apple’s latest product release are given more credence than paid-for advertisements.

There is a grey area when it comes to products reviewed by bloggers, who often endorse products because they love them – and this kind of authentic earned coverage is hugely valuable for companies. People trust bloggers they follow, and will often make purchases based on their endorsements.

However, companies capitalising on this by paying influencers for coverage should familiarise themselves with local laws and best practices. Generally speaking, if an influencer has been paid for their posts or received benefits- in-kind (free products), this information should be given to the consumer.

Shared media The giants of social media at this point are well known: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the behemoths for most industries, but new channels are launching all the time, with SnapChat and Pinterest two rising stars aiming for a seat at the table. YouTube continues to gain dominance as more and more companies wake up to the fact that users love video content.

Businesses use social channels to interact witht heir target audiences, promote their products, give insight into how their companies work, introduce their employees, answer questions and run competitions, among other things.

Used in this fashion, social media creates a sense of homophily –the feeling that a company holds the same values as the consumer and understands them.

Organisations that are not on social media for whatever reason are undoubtedly missing out on revenue as a result. While most companies don’t need to be present on all social media channels, it is essential to choose two or three channels where your audience is most likely to want to connect with you and maintain an active presence there.

The key to building an audience is to post regularly, provide useful information, run regular competitions and giveaways, and produce visually appealing, sharable content. It is better to have only one social channel and dominate it with regular, high quality posts than to have a sporadic presence with patchy quality on seven different channels.

Don’t know where your audience is? Get Googling – the data is out there. Or simply ask your clients and customers which channels they use the most.

How to create sharable content How can your company create viral content? According to Brent Coker, author of Going Viral, the answer lies in social currency. People share things because they want to be seen in a certain way – one person may constantly share TED talks because they want to be seen as intelligent, while another who consistently shares memes may want to be seen as funny.

Our social currency encompasses our status within the groups we belong to, the respect we have and our reputation; for a PR campaign or ad to be sharable, the target audience has to feel like sharing it will enhance people’s opinion of them.

The simplest way of putting it is this: You have to show people what’s in it for them if they share your content.

Will it make them seem trendy to their peers? Maybe they want to be seen as ambitious? Or well-read? A share is often a signal of the person’s value system. It is usually emotional rather than logical: How will your content make your target feel? Understand your audiences priorities, and how they want the people around them to see them – and then the kind of content they find sharable should come into view.

Most people won’t share explicitly sexual or overly controversial campaigns, because they are too personal for social networks. Increasingly, people are mindful of what they share, and wary of going against the grain (we all know our future employers will Google us).

Coker claims that being “interesting” is simply not enough to go viral nowadays. With the overwhelming amount of content available online, we consume “interesting” content from a wide variety of sources on a daily basis – to go viral, people must be given a specific reason to share, and the first of these is that it may shape their image to the outside world.

Bonus points: To turbo-boost your audience, go beyond social networks to bookmarking sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon. Create awesome content on your owned channels and share it on StumbleUpon by simply pasting the link – it couldn’t be easier (you can boost traffic to your website this channel cheaply through Paid Discovery). Users will give it a thumbs up or thumbs down depending on how much they enjoyed it, and the more thumbs up you get, the more users will see your post.

Reddit is an online discussion forum where users posts under handles or usernames. There are hundreds of subreddits that cater to an overwhelming variety of different interests. Find the subreddit most appropriate to your products or services and build a profile. Users of Reddit abhor being

spammed by companies, so it’s important to make a number of non- commercial contributions to the subreddit before adding a link to your own site. Even then, it’s advisable to go for a soft sell approach.

There are numerous other popular bookmarking sites, and thousands of forums where companies can use these strategies, often referred to as native advertising. Research to find the most appropriate channels for your niche is essential.

Increasingly, companies are moving away from the need to “be everywhere”, instead narrowing their focus to where their audiences are most likely to engage with them. As purse strings tighten on budgets, there is no excuse not to use the information that is readily available in Facebook and Google Analytics to determine where your attention should be.

Shared channels integrate easily with the other elements of the PESO model: They can be used to showcase paid-for content and to share links to earned media cover, as well as promoting owned channels, which will be discussed in the next section.

Owned media Owned media is all about adding value for your customers and potential customers so that they come to you instead of the other way around. This means using inbound marketing strategies like free, high quality e-books, white papers, blog posts, infographics, podcasts or other form of media to attract customers to your website. Any organisation, small or large, can come up with great content to their customers will love:

A local bakery could create a free recipe e-book or weekly recipe blog post Gyms could create content that help their site visitors reach their fitness goals

An NGO could make weekly videos that show the impact donations make on the ground Finance companies could create infographics that help their clients to save money

Always use strong visuals. A mounting body of evidence suggests that content that includes compelling images, infographics or video all result in significantly higher engagement. Humans think in pictures, and can process an image faster than words, so wise content marketers use captivating images to reinforce their key messages.

In most cases, to access the free gift, visitors must give the company their email address. This means your company now has multiple opportunities to turn your site visitor into a customer. She may purchase something then and there on the site, but if not, you now have a way to contact her again. And since she opted in for your free gift, it’s a warm lead because you already know she’s interested in what you have to offer. Email subscribers convert to customers at a rate 40 times higher than Twitter or Facebook followers according to McKinsey. If that’s not enough to convince you to take owned media seriously, consider these reasons to amp up your company’s output.

It’s cost effective Studies have reported an ROI of up to a phenomenal 3800% from email marketing. No other type of marketing can come close to competing with that. In fact, if you’ve got decent content creators and designers in-house, your e-book or infographic needn’t cost you a penny to create. The important thing is to create something genuinely useful and to package it attractively, so that when your emails arrive in your new leads’ inbox, they already have a good impression of your organisation.

It integrates perfectly with your social strategy Your social media and content marketing strategies should complement each other perfectly. A corporate blog can combine evergreen posts, which are always relevant and can be shared time and again, with posts on current trends, major news occurrences or seasonal events. Your social channels can be used to amplify your content to a wider audience, and creating new content regularly means you always have something fresh to say.

You have complete control over the message When you deal with traditional media outlets, you can never know exactly how they’re going to report on an interview. Your CEO might speak eloquently on your key messages for 59 minutes and then slip up at the last hurdle and give the journalist a controversial or off-message headline. The beauty of owned media is that you have total control over what you share with the world. This has been seen in the US presidential campaigns, for example in Donald Trump’s nightly news show. By creating his own show where the ideology is supportive of his election, he has avoided more difficult interviews with journalists who may have given him a harder time. Conversely, it’s important to be able to react quickly to breaking opportunities and get your message out there, so don’t get too hung up on painful, arduous approvals processes.

It builds goodwill with your community People love getting something for nothing. If your company can provide a How-To for a problem that’s been vexing them, teach them a skill they’ve been dying to learn, show them how to get the best out of your products, or impress their boss in a presentation, they will appreciate it. And if you do it time and again, they’ll come to think of you as more than a company they buy things from, they’ll respect you as a thought leader in your industry. Here’s the best part: The vast majoritycompanies are doing a really paltry job of this at the moment – and that means there’s a huge opportunity there for you. Companies who do content marketing well are making a fortune from it.

Why use the PESO model?

Alone, each of these strategies has benefits and drawbacks, but when used together, they are almost unstoppable. Numerous recent case studies, including those cited in this book, demonstrate clearly that an integrated approach allows campaigns to ‘touch’ potential clients and customers at multiple points along the sales funnel, guiding them ever-closer to the point of purchase.

CASE STUDY The PESO model in action A record breaking week for the UK’s NHS Blood and Transplant figures

A London-based PR agency with a small campaign budget and big ambitions set out to save lives in 2015 – and did it. How? By using the PESO model, of course.

Engine was tasked with creating a campaign around National Blood Week for the National Health Service (NHS) Blood & Transplant. Significantly, this was not intended as an awareness campaign – the objective was a change in behaviour, namely, to register a minimum of 10,000 new blood donors through the campaign.

The number of blood donors in the UK had plummeted in the decade leading into 2015, with a 40% drop in donors. The campaign specifically targeted those in the 17-24 age group, in order to safeguard the future blood supply for hospitals in the UK.

Like many brilliant PR campaigns, the concept Engine created was deceptively simple. Dubbed the MissingType campaign, the idea was to get brands, places and names to drop their As, Bs and Os, to symbolise each blood group or type.

Engine approached numerous brands and organisations to act as partners in the campaign, including the Daily Mirror, which is one of the country’s most popular newspapers, O2 which is a major phone network, and even managed to convince Downing Street No 10 (the headquarters of the British government) to participate.

Engine engaged in an extensive media relations campaign, across tabloid and broadsheet print media as well as broadcast media. The centrepiece was the Daily Mirror, which dropped the A and O in the newspaper’s title, marking the first time in its history that the newspaper had changed its masthead. The newspaper, which has a daily readership of 767,000, also ran an editorial explaining how readers could participate.

An extensive social media campaign was supported by brands including

Coca Cola, football team Tottenham Hotspurs, Google, Microsoft, Cadbury and Allianz, to name just a few. The result was a record breaking 26,000 uses of #NationalBloodWeek and #MissingType across Twitter.

Combined with sponsored posts on social media, advertising, and extensive promotion on the NHS Blood & Transport’s own channels, each aspect of the PESO model was combined to create a campaign that has won numerous awards and accolades.

But while we all love awards and recognition, the real measure of any campaign is whether or not it achieved its objectives. As mentioned, the benchmark was 10,000 registrations over the course of the campaign. The actual number signed up exceeded 30,000, with 18,000 of those falling in the 17-24 target age category. It is estimated that 100,000 lives were saved or improved as a result of the campaign. Broadcast coverage of the social campaign included air time on flagship shows like BBC Breakfast, Good Morning Britain, This Morning, Sky News, BBC Radio 1, Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2, The Today Programme and BBC Radio Five Live. Print and online coverage of MissingType included national dailies The Guardian, Mail Online, The Sun, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror, The Times and Buzzfeed. The campaign also won the support of more than 60 digital influencers who have 10/10 authority on Twitter and more than 1,000 brands and organisations. People weren’t just sharing social content with #MissingType, they were registering to donate blood in record numbers:

30,000+ new donors registered during NBW, an increase of 20,000 on 2014, directly resulting in 100,000 saved or improved lives 101 pieces earned national print and online coverage including Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times, The Guardian and Daily Mirror - 14 items on national and regional TV including BBC Breakfast, Good Morning

Britain, This Morning and Sky News - 29 items on national radio including BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat, Jeremy Vine BBC Radio 2, The Today Programme and BBC Radio Five Live 27,121 uses of #NationalBloodWeek and #MissingType across Twitter and Instagram - the highest number of mentions for an NHS Blood & Transplant social media campaign to date.

Campaign cost: £110,965 If the Missing Type campaign had primarily aimed at raising awareness, it would no doubt have been considered a success. More important, in this instance, was a measurable outcome – an increase of 20,000 registrations on the previous year. By integrating paid, earned, shared and owned media, the campaign achieved significantly more than it could have done by focusing on any single element of the PESO model. Building on the success of the campaign, #MissingType was relaunched globally in 2016.

“I suspect in most companies, the public relations person is down at No. 20 in the pecking order. But here, he is fighting incredibly important battles. If a negative story starts running away with itself in the press and is not dealt with fast, it can badly damage the brand, and so we put enormous weight on our PR people.” – Richard Branson

Creating a winning PR action plan

Chapter Five

Creating your plan Now that we’ve brushed up on the theory, it’s time to take action and

implement it. Why put a huge amount of time and energy in up front at the planning stage? We’ll get to that in a second. First, let’s briefly touch on why and how organisations end up making serious mistakes in choosing not to plan strategically approach their relationships with the media and the public.

In many organisations, communications is approached on an ad hoc basis without much in the way of planning. In these types of organisations, phrases like this are common/;

“Let’s do an event next week to mark the launch of product X” “We haven’t put out a press release in a while – let’s check if the Commercial team have any news”

Although it may result in the occasional success, this haphazard approach has glaring flaws. Of course opportunities will come up unexpectedly from time to time and we should embrace them wholeheartedly – but it’s important to have a roadmap so that you know what resources are available to you when these things do come along.

In other organisations still, planning is acknowledged as vital to success, but it’s often left too late, leaving the Public Relations team in limbo. Often, the first quarter of the year is spent playing catch up, meaning that the benefit is not felt through the year.

Lastly, there are organisations that approach planning as a box-ticking exercise, intended primarily to show senior management that there is some structure in the department. These types of plans are often vague, with few or

no criteria for success defined. These are the types of plans that are convenient for managers who do not want to be held accountable. It’s difficult to prove the success of your campaigns have been if your goals were vague, but it’s also difficult to definitively prove failure for the same reasons.

A successful annual plan involves quite a bit of groundwork before you start filling in details on the calendar. Research should include the following elements:

Homework: Before you begin planning your strategy for the next year, it’s well worth taking a look at how this year went first. Ask your senior leadership team, some trusted clients and frontline employees what they thought went well this year and where there was room for improvement. Look into what your main competitors are doing, what current trends in the industry are, and what kinds of comments come up time and again on social media.

Action: Ditch the formal survey and pick up the phone or meet people face-to-face to get feedback on how this year’s PR campaigns went. Listen attentively. Clear objectives: As seen in Chapter 3, it’s almost impossible to achieve optimum PR results without a clear objective and supporting goals. Communications objectives should always support business objectives, so it’s wise to consult sales and operational teams on what they’re setting out to achieve in the coming year.

Action: Create your annual PR plan document and write your objectives in it. PowerPoint is a useful for creating a plan that’s easy to amend.

Key messages: Once objectives have been set, the PR and Communications teams should work with their colleagues across operational and sales departments to hone key messages for the year. A maximum of three key messages should be set, and all Public Relations activity for the year should support those key messages. To figure out what your organisation’s key messages might be, ask this question: “If the public only knew three things about our company at the end of the year, what would we want those three things to be?”

Action: Set a meeting with relevant colleagues and decide your three key messages for next year, and document them in your plan. Target media: What websites, TV shows, radio, newspapers and magazines are likely to talk about your company? Go back to your customer profile to decide what’s likely to work. Do you approach your target markets by region e.g. “We’re aiming to grow our business in Latin America”, or by segment e.g. “We’re aiming to grow our business among millennial-aged women”. Action: Create a list of all relevant media outlets in a spreadsheet, along with their social profiles and contact details, to be added to the plan. (Note: Every day, new companies are launching flashier software and other ways of reaching media organisations, but for a reliable, low-budget PR calendar, the good old spreadsheet works just fine.) Intelligence gathering: Most media outlets will be able to provide a

media kit which gives details of their focus as well as their audiences and circulation. Many will also be able to provide a list of features they plan to run through the following year. By getting your hands on this, you can spot relevant opportunities well ahead of time and capitalise on them.

Action: Collect media kits for each publication including target audience details, deadlines and most importantly forward features. Media Relations: Our top tips from journalists on pitching are documented in Chapter 6, but for now, the most important thing is to know who the right journalists and other influencers are, and how they can be contacted. It really doesn’t matter how perfect the pitch if it is going to the wrong person. Including social profiles is a good idea, because journalists phone numbers and email addresses may change if they switch from one media outlet to another, but they’re social profiles are likely to be the same.

Action: Create a list key national and trade journalists including their contact details and social profiles. If a list already exists, go through it and update it, eliminating redundant contacts and adding new ones.

Once the groundwork above is complete, it’s time to start scheduling things into your calendar. Although a 12-month calendar is recommended, a quarterly approach might be more useful depending on the industry.

Go through the calendar year, month by month, marking important dates. Here are some you should definitely include:

Important company dates: High level

dates to include here may be the beginning and end of the financial year, budget deadlines, expected product launches, the organisation’s anniversary and major annual events.

Holidays: What day does Christmas fall on this year? What public holidays do your target audiences celebrate? What dates will kids break up from school for the summer? These things impact your own employees as well as consumers.

Planned PR activity: Using a colour code, mark off planned press releases, interviews, forward features, corporate social responsibility events, social media posts, advertising campaigns and blog activity.

Planned events: Mark off exhibitions the organisation plans to attend, as well as conferences and speaker opportunities. Does the company hold a sales conference, an annual think-in, or a corporate team-building exercise? Include that too.

Now, pencil in how each event will be targetted. Use the PESO model to create integrated campaigns, dividing the budget between paid online and offline advertisements, content creation for owned channels, media relations activities to generate earned coverage and social media outreach. AMEC provides an incredibly useful and completely free tool on their website for planning campaigns according to the PESO model.

In practice, this might mean creating a press release and posting it on the company website (owned media), sending the press release to media contacts to gain earned media coverage and sharing it on your social sites to hit your shared media audiences. The paid element might involve Google Adwords, a

sponsored blog post from a relevant influencer, or a quarter page print ad depending on the type of audience the campaign will target.

The importance of creating visuals cannot be underestimated, and all campaigns should include vivid photography, engaging video content or colourful infographics.

“It is always a risk to speak to the press – they are likely to report what you say.” – Hubert H. Humphrey

Do gate keepers still exist?

Chapter Six

Media Relations still matters Although the PESO model follows the global trend of reducing reliance on

editors and producers in favour of communicating directly to audiences, it does not eschew traditional media completely. Journalists maintain access to huge platforms that are still absolutely fundamental to the success of campaigns, and their word often holds greater credibility than a brand’s singular voice.

The relationship between journalists and Public Relations practitioners is an interesting one. At times, it can be a fractious relationship. Ultimately, the two professions are bedfellows, with journalists relying on PRs for content and Public Relations teams relying on journalists for coverage. It was ever thus.

The Golden Rule in gaining coverage from media outlets is to make life as easy as possible for editors and producers. Anticipate their needs. Give them all of the information they need to make a decision on whether they want to include your submission, but do it in as few words as possible – these are busy people. Include suitable images, and your company’s logo.

In researching this book, we interviewed a number of journalists on common pitfalls and easy wins for PR practitioners.

Get the basics right

A remarkable number of Public Relations practitioners fail to grasp the

basics. Caroline Allmark, an Abu Dhabi based lifestyle journalist, said: “My

biggest pet hate is not getting the information in enough time to do anything

with it.” Get familiar with the deadlines of the publications you wish to be

featured in and submit your clients’ news well in time.

Additionally, Allmark says she often receives information from PR teams

without appropriate photographs. For most media outlets, high-quality,

people-led, vibrant, colourful photos are best, and in order to cater for

different web formats, a choice of landscape and portrait should be offered.

For print, high resolution photos are absolutely essential, at 1MB minimum in

size.

Target your pitches

Deirdre O’Shaughnessy, Irish journalist, producer and broadcaster, says she regularly gets approached by Public Relations teams seeking publicity for their clients, without explaining how this will benefit her audience. Deirdre said: “My first concern has never been helping you to promote your event. My first concern is to provide good content to our show’s listeners.”

In approaching the media, it’s crucial to remember that their goals are entirely different to yours. Journalists do not care if you hit your KPIs for this quarter – they care about timely, relevant content that is going to keep their audiences engaged.

Do not attempt to sell in a celebrity interview without knowing why that

celebrity is the right fit for this particular media outlet – what are their demographics, what types of guests do they regularly host, is there a local angle?

Pitches should be tailored to the journalist and to the publication. This is a time-consuming and labour intensive approach compared with sending a generic pitch to a list of vaguely relevant members of the press, and may result in fewer results; however, practitioners must begin training their clients and employers to understand that quality, targeted media results are more desirable than a large quantity of untargeted results.

Georgina Enzer, a Dubai-based Managing Editor, said: “I am not self- important enough to think that everyone must know me, but a quick Google search or, even, checking on our company website will reveal both my name and my job title. Small things such a knowing my name and what my position is in the company goes a very long way towards me wanting to give you a few minutes of my time, and even attending your event or publishing your press release

Don’t forget to come back on follow-up questions

Success! Your media outreach has worked a treat and journalists are coming back with follow-up questions and requests. Treat all relationships with the media as long-term – you may benefit for years to come from putting just a few minutes of extra effort into responding to a journalist’s questions. Make sure to include contact details and be available to respond to queries.

Rachel McArthur, journalist and founder of Dubai Ink Content, said: “A good PR professional is someone who is happy to talk at all times – not just when they have an event or press release. I love PRs who take the time to build relationships. It makes the world of difference (to both of us) knowing who you are dealing with. And they’re the ones I am most likely to reach out to when I need a quote from an expert.”

Read the journalist’s work

Reinforcing the point on researching and targeting pitches, Janet Newenham, a top travel blogger and journalist advises reading the work of any journalist or publication you intend to pitch to prior to getting in touch.

She said: “Get to know the journalist, do your research and only send them work that is extremely relevant to the area they already write about. I like it when PR companies build a relationship with me over time, and don’t just email to send me press releases and pitches. It’s also important that they read my work, I love receiving emails that let me know they have liked a particular article I have written.”

Do: Get to the point

Sunday Business Post journalist Emmet Ryan, following his own advice carefully, said: “I get too many press releases to count – in the region of 500 every week. The biggest mistake people make is not getting to the point quickly enough.”

On newswires

It’s incredibly rare for the scatter-gun approach of throwing a press release up on a news wire to result in coverage of any real value. Since thousands and thousands of companies worldwide post to newswires each day, it’s easy for your news to become swallowed up and never reach the intended journalists. Investing time and energy and, yes, money, into a comprehensive media relations strategy is a much more coherent way to garner coverage.

Measuring and evaluating Public Relations

Chapter Seven

Did the campaign succeed? The campaign may be over, but your work is not yet done. It’s critical to

make a genuine attempt to gauge the impact it has had.Measurement and evaluation of PR campaigns have never been more important. A PR News survey in 2013 found that while 83% of practitioners want to demonstrate the value of their Public Relations activities, fewer than half of respondents measured tone or key messages.

So what is the industry measuring?

64% of those surveyed used clip counts 55% measured impressions 25% limited measure of impressions to those which are ‘targeted’ 47% used both quantitative and qualitative measures for social media 27% continue to use widely discredited AVE metrics

Significantly, only one-third of those surveyed track all the way through to sales, leads or other outcomes.

Whether you’re working on an in-house corporate communications team looking for an increased budget or an agency looking to demonstrate your value to a client, measuring the success of your campaigns effectively is vital. Despite this, 59% of Public Relations professionals surveyed by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication in 2013 said that biggest barrier they face in measuring their success is that it’s “too complex”.

This is not good enough. In the same survey, nearly 60% of respondents said that clients were showing more interest in measurement than they were in 2011. As an industry, Public Relations can and must do better. If we want PR

to be regarded as an essential rather than a nice-to-have, we must demonstrate how our activities impact the organisation’s profit margin. Otherwise, our demands for greater spend will justifiably fall on deaf ears.

The measurement and evaluation of a Public Relations campaign or activity depends on the communications objectives of the campaign, which should always relate to a business objective. When your organisation successfully achieves a business objective, it is essential that the PR team can show which communications objectives were aligned to support this and contribute to it.

In traditional media, quantitative measures (that means stuff you can count) can include press clippings, circulation and readership figures, opportunities to see, air time and volume of coverage. For digital media, quantitative measures include web rankings, followers gained, website visitors, and social media engagement (number of likes, comments, shares, retweets)

Assess the impact the activity had on the tone blogger comments, hold focus groups for consumer feedback, monitor any commentary by public figures including celebrities or politicians, gauge the impact on community sentiment on your social media channels. Internally, it’s possible to run surveys to find if the campaign had an effect on employee morale.

Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) have been widely discredited as a mechanism for evaluating PR. Measuring our own industry by the yardstick of another shows an alarming lack of confidence in our own abilities. There is no common measurement for advertising and editorial, and it is akin to asking a footballer how many tries he scored in his last game.

Here is a simple, consistent formula for calculating the value of your campaign based on total spend versus audience reached. The Cost Per Thousand reached formula has been adopted by some of the world’s largest PR firms, including Edelman, Ogilvy, and FleishmanHillard. It’s calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of stakeholders

reached and multiplying by 1,000.

So a campaign costing $50,000 and reaching an audience of 200,000 would be calculated as seen below. Clients and PR teams can then assess whether $250 per thousand reached is a reasonable cost for the product of service in question, and use it as a benchmark for future campaigns.

Cost per Thousand reached formula in action:

$50,000 x 1000 = $250 per Thousand reached ______________ 200,000

Outcomes: A new frontier Our forefathers in Public Relations often relied on output as a measure of

success – how many inches in that column? How many clippings compiled? Nowadays, we understand that such measurements form only a small part of the picture, and unless combined with other methods of measurement and evaluation, can fall far short of painting an accurate picture.

A 2002 white paper by Jack Felton for the Institute for PR pre-empted many of the principles later solidified in the Barcelona Principles. He said: There is no one, simple, all-encompassing research tool, technique or methodology that can be relied on to measure and evaluate PR effectiveness. Usually, a combination of different measurement techniques are needed... Measuring media content, while of great value, needs to be viewed as only a first step in the PR measurement and evaluation process. It can measure possible exposure to PR messages and actual press coverage; however, it cannot, by itself, measure whether target audiences actually saw the messages and responded to them in any way.

The folly of using quantitative measurements only can be illustrated by looking at an organisation facing a crisis, when the media may produce huge volumes of coverage that is almost exclusively negative. With purely quantitative KPIs, the organisation could be said to be vastly exceeding its targets even as their reputation is torn to pieces. It’s vital to look at the outcome and impact of the communications being produced to avoid this kind of misleading result.

AMEC have produced an integrated framework to assist Public Relations teams making the move to more comprehensive measurement techniques,

which is available for free on their website.

Measuring outcomes is an essential step beyond measuring output. Here are some practical ways to measure PR outcomes based on communications and business objectives. Felton said:

The PR measurement and evaluation process should never be carried out in isolation, by focusing only on the PR components. Wherever and whenever possible, it is always important to link what is planned, and accomplished, through 5 PR, to the overall goals, objectives, strategies and tactics of the organization as a whole.

Practical ways to prove outcomes

1) Objective: More sales leads Where media relations is the main method of reaching a target audience, leads or sales can be monitored by benchmarking the period before the PR campaign with the period after. Quarterly results for a given product or service can be compared on a before-and-after basis, allowing the PR team to demonstrate their impact.

2) Objective: Increased sales Companies like Southwest Airlines have proven the value of their PR activity by using hyperlinks in their press releases to track when people follow them to a point-of-sale on the website and whether or not the users follow ultimately follow through to a purchase. This is a strategy that is a lot simpler to employ than it may sound, and allows PR teams to prove a direct link between their activities and revenue generation.

3) Objective: Show a change of attitude Since the role of Public Relations is to influence consumer knowledge, attitudes and behaviour, measuring how these factors are impacted over time

is a useful way of demonstrating PR’s contribution. Conducting monthly, quarterly or annual surveys and polling can result in revealing insights into how a particular PR initiative or program is impacting consumer behaviour.

4) Objective: Demonstrate the value for money of a given campaign Using the Cost per Thousand formula above, calculate the reach of your campaign as compared with the cost. Then do the same with a campaign from last year. This should show how you’re making your budget go further than ever.

5) Objective: Evaluate the penetration of key messages generated by PR output in the media This method requires collecting coverage in print, broadcast, online and other vehicles over a period of time and carrying out critical analysis of the coverage. Factors considered include share of voice news item placement, headline, initial mention, extent of mention, dominance and visuals.

There are a multitude of advantages for Public Relations teams who can prove their outcomes; it becomes infinitely easier to justify a more significant budget or retainer, the allocation of other resources including team members and office space can become less tiresome, and teams benefit from the well- earned respect of colleagues in other departments who do not otherwise understand PR.

Whether PR professionals are working on in-house teams, for agencies or as independent contractors, the more natural proving outcomes becomes, the greater the advantages they will see to it.

CASE STUDY Successfully measuring a campaign driven across multiple channels The BioOil Skin Stories campaign An impressive case study on the AMEC website relates to a BioOil campaign that aimed to retain its market leader position by defending against own brand replicas, secure new customers and encourage existing users to purchase more frequently. Execution/Implementation: A mix of PR, digital and social media advertising, point of sale in pharmacies across the UK and extended reach from the British Skin Foundation, Look Good Feel Better and the Iolanthe Midwifery Trust drove engagement with the campaign on Facebook and Twitter. Continuous measurement throughout the campaign took advantage of real time social media analytics and allowed activity to be developed according to the response and engagement to key activities. Facebook & Twitter Facebook allowed people to share their story, or read and engage with other people’s stories, with £1 donated to charity for each one shared. Key metrics reported were an increase in page likes and the engagement rate – both the monthly overall average and the engagement rate of each post. The team manually analysed the underlying sentiment of Facebook comments, tweets and third party posts to gauge the community’s response to the campaign. Story of the Week A stand out story was elected every week. This ‘Story of the Week’ enjoyed high engagement, demonstrating the power of community support which, in turn, encouraged more people to share their story. The campaign took a bold approach by discussing hard-hitting body issues. Engaging media and bloggers A survey of 10,000 UK women provided a platform for media and blogger discussion, as well as social media content, around the issue of women’s skin confidence. The survey identified:

that four out of five women think they are the only one who has

skin imperfection the reassuring reality that, on average, every woman has three

scars and nearly half have stretch marks Bloggers were engaged to share their own skin stories and provide content to share on Facebook, while media were encouraged to tweet and post on Facebook as well as traditional coverage routes. A media monitoring service measured the quantity and circulation of media coverage, while a bespoke rating system developed by the Pegasus team analysed its quality, allowing the team to focus the client on a quality, rather than quantity, metric. Point of Sale A real fan, Sally, featured in pharmacy point of sale to integrate activity into the arena where people were receiving scar and stretch mark advice. Calls to action drove social media engagement to ensure Bio-Oil could create a long- term relationship and develop further advocacy. #myskinstory featured on all collateral to allow us to track interaction via social media. The sales team reported back on the number of pharmacies in their area who were using the campaign materials. Charity partnerships For each story shared, Bio-Oil donated £1 to The British Skin Foundation, Look Good Feel Better or the Iolanthe Midwifery Trust. Charities were sent regular updates to keep them engaged with activity. Their engagement was measured through their interactions and sharing of the campaign. Since the end of the campaign, the charities have remained engaged and regularly retweet or mention Bio-Oil in their social media posts. Monthly newsletter Pegasus designed and wrote a brand newsletter, which summarised the campaign achievements and was distributed to the Bio-Oil UK team and the international brand owner in South Africa. The content was then featured in a global newsletter, which led to the launch of the campaign in other markets. Digital dashboard These were used throughout the campaign to provide a quick visual update

on key campaign metrics and the wider discussion of the brand online. The format allowed the client to add them to their presentations to update stakeholders and internal management. Each dashboard included a Skin Stories section. Engagement

568 stories were shared (target 500) campaign posts had an average 3-4% engagement the number of fans and engagement increased substantially at the

launch and continued throughout the campaign (see graph) there was an average of 4,420 people ‘talking about this’ each

week, representing an average engagement rate of 3% Awareness drivers

The campaign reached 13.9 million people via a combination of media coverage, third party social media posts and Bio-Oil’s own social media platforms (Target: 5 million)

There were 53 items of media and blogger coverage and 20 media outlets shared the campaign through social media (Target: 55), of which 39% were gold, 49% were silver and 12% were bronze

1,009 tweets using the #myskinstory, reaching 177,194 Four celebrities supported the campaign on Twitter (non-paid)

reaching 544,998 followers Impact

Bio-Oil developed an online relationship with a further 51,370 people (49,565 new Facebook likes, of which only 12,000 were from paid activity, and 1,805 new Twitter followers). Since the campaign ended, the level of likes has not dropped (Target: 20,000)

A survey of a sample of Bio-Oil’s Facebook community revealed that 48.4% felt that the Bio-Oil Facebook page had encouraged them to purchase it. Comments received through the survey demonstrated that the campaign had helped to motivate people to use Bio-Oil

Posts were monitored for sentiment, of which 90% during the campaign were positive. A number of posts clearly demonstrated the influence on purchasing

Over 500 brand advocates shared powerful testimonial content. From this group, we recruited a series of brand ambassadors who featured in a subsequent marketing campaign

The campaign identified five key audience groups who formed the basis of an ongoing marketing communications strategy

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.” – Daniel J. Boorstin

The best of the Wilde Words blog

Bonus material

6 basic SEO tips for technophobes Creating sharable, engaging content is only the beginning of your website’s journey to success. Then people have to find it, read it, and take action on it. Social media has a huge role to play here, and you can also advertise your posts – but one of of the most valuable things you can do to make your site a success it have it featured on one of the first pages of Google and other search engines. This is called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO. Read on if you know how important this is but you don’t feel like you have the technical skills to improve your site’s SEO ranking. Disclaimer: I am not an SEO expert. These tips alone will almost definitely not be enough to get you ranked on page one of Google. These are some extremely basic SEO tips I have chosen because they are really easy to implement to get you started. 1. Choosing and using a keyword Your keyword should be a phrase you think people would Google to find your site. Generally, the more specific you are the more targeted your results will be. There might be a million hits for the phrase “grocery shop”, and only a few hundred for “vegan grocery shop London”, but if you own a vegan grocery shop in London, you want that targeted traffic because those are the people who will actually want to buy your products. Once you’ve chosen an appropriate keyword, try to use it in your post title, the URL, in at least one

heading, and in the body of your post. You can use free tools like this one to research the best keywords for your topic. 2. Write longer posts The minimum you should write to get ranked in Google is 300 words, but there is strong evidence to suggest that writing longer posts is better. Most posts that rank on page one of Google are 2,000 words or more, because the search engine wants to provide its users with thorough, relevant answers to their queries (so don’t waffle on just for the sake of it, the information has to be useful). Most blog posts come in at around 500 words or less, so by going the extra mile to add value in yours, you can differentiate yourself from others writing in your niche. 3. Format your posts using headings Headings are important because they make it easier for users to read your posts, but also because search engines pay attention to the words you have used within them. You can choose headings from H1 (most important) to H6 (least important) by hitting the toggle button on your WordPress editor toolbar (it’s the one furthest to the right). Search engines put most weight on what you’ve got in your H1 heading, and you should only use one of those per post. Read more on using headings here. 4. Share your posts on Google+ Unsurprisingly, Google ranks posts that are shared on Google+ more highly than those that are not. Most people don’t bother to share their posts on

Google+ because it hasn’t taken off as a social network, but it’s a super easy way to improve your ranking. It may not result in the same level of traffic as other social channels immediately, but over time it will result in an increase in search traffic. 5. How to optimise your images Optimising your images is a great way to grow organic traffic. Sites that load slowly rank lower in Google, and sites with lots of huge images will be slower to load. If you use lots of images, make sure to resize them before you upload them to make sure this doesn’t effect you. Google can’t read images, but it can read the words that you use to describe them. This is another opportunity to use the keyword you chose above. Use phrases people might search if they were looking for your site in both the image title and alt text boxes. You can gain traffic from Google Images in this way too. 6. Use an SEO plugin If you’re using WordPress to post and you need support with SEO, you can install a plugin that will guide you. My two favourite SEO plugins are Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack. Both will allow you to do more technical SEO things like change the meta-description (the sentence or two that is displayed in Google when your site comes up in a search). By default, the first paragraph of your post will appear, but often that’s just your introduction – by changing your meta-description, you can choose to insert a really powerful sentence or sentences from your post here, making it all the more likely that someone will click onto your site.

Stop wasting your time (and your budget) on newswires

Not so long ago, I worked for a large multinational with a one-person Public Relations team (me!) Given that we needed to achieve global coverage in multiple languages, I had the support of a well-known and well regarded international PR agency. Grab a coffee and prepare for a rant. Getting a press release ready to go out was a mission: I’d brief the agency, they would draft the press release, I’d edit it, they’d send another draft, I’d edit it again, and then it would go through an arduous approvals process involving the stakeholders, the legal team and senior management, each with their own thoughts marked in the tracked changes. After weeks and in some cases months, the go-ahead would be given to release the news. The agency, a global leader in their industry, was responsible for distributing the news to the media, and their approach was to simply fire it up on the newswire and see what happened. Newswires: Return on Investment A global press release with a photograph cost up to €5,000. Bear in mind, we were already paying this company a hefty retainer for their services, and given that we aimed for one press release per month, this lazy approach added in the region of €60,000 to the annual PR bill. Sure, they would call the trade magazines (who always printed our news in any case), but we

wanted coverage in national news outlets, and all they could give us was excuses. Best practice would have been to build relationships with journalists in our industry, but that would have been time-intensive and altogether too effort-y. What were the results, you may ask? Perhaps it was a worthy investment, reaping an enviable ROI? The Account Manager would proudly present a coverage book the following week showing that the story had been picked up by the trades and published on hundreds of websites worldwide. The problem? The vast majority of the coverage was to be found in regions where my company’s product isn’t sold. Obscure, regional and small-town newspapers with no relevance to my company published the release. The coverage we were getting from newswires added no value to our business – the lovely numbers my ever-cheerful Account Manager was so delighted to present me with were no more than vanity metrics. Here’s the truth about national media outlets: If your announcement is relevant they will cover it, and it is not they won’t. The PR agency’s role is to make it relevant. It’s incredibly rare for the scatter-gun approach of throwing a press release up on a news wire to result in coverage of any real value. Besides which, if a company wants to use a newswire, there is absolutely no need to involve a PR company – it’s a very simple process anyone could handle in-house. What is the PR agency’s role?

Companies pay PR agencies to fill gaps in their own teams. The role of a top PR practitioner in this scenario is as follows:

▪ It’s their job to build strong relationships with journalists, so they don’t have to cold call ▪ It’s their job to find the angle or nugget of information in your product release or company announcement that will be of interest to those journalists ▪ It’s their job to use these contacts and abilities to deliver coverage that is of genuine value to their clients

Sorry to be crude, but putting a press release on a newswire and crossing your fingers is simply a case of “throwing enough shit and see what sticks.” It’s not good enough. It’s a sham. So – let’s make a pledge – no to newswires! Commit to achieving real coverage, in publications your client’s audiences actually read. Yes, it will take longer and you will need to work harder – but the results will be so much better.

How to fail at pitching… The email pings into your inbox. You’re been shortlisted. Over the last few months, you’ve been liaising with an in-house PR team about their needs, and they’re finally ready to go ahead with the tender. Responding to a PR agency tender can be time consuming, and pitching it can be intimidating – but it is also a massive opportunity to prove yourself at your agency.

Winning business out of nowhere like that is no easy task.

Four well-known agencies prepared pitches for an organisation I consult with recently, and I managed the tender process. I was shocked by some of the basics mistakes these internationally-recognised Public Relations companies were making.

Here are some surefire ways to get yourself relegated from a PR agency tender.

1. Fail to prepare… Prepare to fail. This shouldn’t need saying, but it does. An agency that is often cited in the top 10 globally fundamentally misunderstood our business, mixing it up with a separate but related one. Looking back on the detailed briefing document I prepared, I saw that there was some ambiguity. Was it my fault? No. Had the agency in question had a proper look at the company’s website, recent press releases or bylines, their mistake would have become clear. It seemed this global heavy- hitter felt there was no need to do any research beyond the document prepared for them, and that’s a big black mark.

2. Death by Powerpoint During this recent tender, every single agency that was shortlisted chose Powerpoint as their tool of choice. Public Relations requires creativity and innovation, and this is just the opposite – yawn- inducing and monotonous. I began to dread the decks. I understand the practical reasons why Powerpoint is so ubiquitous, but if you want your presentation to stand out from the competition, try something different. Here are some alternative ideas from Forbes. If you really must use a deck, make sure it’s short and visually appealing.

3. Gone in 60 minutes If you are given an hour to pitch, pitch for an hour. Not 20 minutes, not 90 minutes. An hour. If you’ve got 83 slides, you’re not going to get through them all in time. Ditch them. It doesn’t say much for your time management skills if you can’t even estimate how long your pitch is going to take correctly. I’m impatient. And I had six questions I wanted to ask you, but that’s not going to happen now because you ate up all of our allocated Q&A time with your extended pitch.

4. Manners, darling Do you really need to send three or four people to the pitch? Maybe. But if you’re going to send a whole gaggle of people along to pitch, mind your manners. Stop interrupting each other and talking over each other. Let the less experienced members of the team field some of the questions (we all know you Directors aren’t the ones I’m going to be on the phone with day to day anyway). Take it in turns to respond to questions, and invite other members of your team to speak: “Do you have anything to add, Amy?” This is basic.

5. So, specifically… We know that no matter what agency we appoint, certain things will happen. They will create content, prepare and distribute press releases, manage media relations for us and so on. Generic information on how these processes are handled is not all that important. Get specific. What publications do you think we would be perfect for? What kinds of campaigns do you think we should be doing? How exactly will you help us reach our key audiences? It’s all very well to point to successes you’ve had with other clients, but we want to know what your plans are for us.

6. Look the part Public Relations is sometimes unfairly seen as a fickle industry. While that’s not in fact the case, you will be representing my company at a high level and in places where image matters. Comb your hair, for crying out loud. Come suited and booted. If you’re pitching for an account worth €200,000 a year to your company, it’s worth taking the time to put in an extra bit of effort – even if the company you’re pitching to has a more casual philosophy.

What is storytelling anyway? Neil Gaiman could tell you a thing or two about storytelling.

I’ve just finished reading his book Anansi Boys, a book that’s difficult to categorise neatly into a single genre, but falls somewhere in between fantasy, science-fiction and thriller. The book draws on both mythology and modern life. It has a main character and a supporting cast, plots and subplots, themes, stark imagery, and draws heavily on symbology. It’s complex and emotional. It has a beginning and a middle and an end. I won’t give away any spoilers, but it’s a fantastic book.

Neil Gaiman is a consummate storyteller. So is J.K Rowling. So was Roald Dahl.

When you think about it like that, co-opting the term “story teller” for the Public Relations industry seems just a little but cheeky. Especially as it seems to be most commonly used as a synonym for content marketer, which was one of last year’s buzzwords. Writing non-fiction, especially in the corporate realm, does not involve quite the same level or world-building as the authors above have achieved.

Nonetheless, it got me thinking. What can we learn about writing from the world’s most talented fiction writers?

Characters A story is nothing without strong, compelling characters. Who are the main characters in the stories you’re telling? Do you have charismatic senior executives you can draw on like Richard Branson at Virgin? Or are your most important characters the brand ambassadors, like Jennifer Aniston is for L’Oreal? You may even choose to make your customers the most visible character in your campaign, like Starbucks do on their Instagram page.

Whatever story you plan to tell, figure out the characters you need to propel it to the forefront of your audiences’ minds.

Themes While your campaigns will vary in terms of content, it’s wise to have an ongoing themes. For example, Coca Cola releases new ads all the time, but they all have similar themes. The Coca Cola #TasteTheFeeling campaign that’s out at the moment has different components but one core theme: We’re part of your family’s happiest memories. A solid theme allows the different elements of your campaign to build on each other, so that ultimately, the sum is greater than its parts.

Imagery and symbology Despite tons of evidence that engaging photos and infographics increase click-through rates dramatically, most companies continue to use the same selection of boring stock photos and bland corporate shots to illustrate their stories. If you’re looking for an easy way to go head-and-shoulders above your competition, invest extra time and energy into creating eye-catching, memorable shots to go with your campaign. [Yes, I know, I’m not quite following my own advice here]

Even in writing, whether it’s a press release, a byline or a white paper, strong imagery can create a lasting impression. Use imaginative analogies to paint pictures of the problems you’re customers and clients face – and how you’re solving them.

Know what to leave out Storytelling is an art. It’s about choices. In many ways, it’s easier to write 1,000 words on a topic than it is to write 250. Learn to be brutal. Weed out unnecessary words, sentences and paragraphs. Readers can sense it when you’re waffling and it will cause them to close the page. Each point must justify its own existence.

So, while I remain skeptical about PR practitioners redefining themselves as “storytellers”, these vital traits of the stories that enthrall us can be encompassed in successful campaigns.

About the author Katie Harrington is a Public Relations expert and writer. Passionate about the power of PR to make a positive impact on organisations and communities, Katie believes integrated campaigns are the way of the future. Katie began writing about best practices in Public Relations and Strategic Communications in 2016,

quickly gaining traction and building a large audience worldwide, on her website and on social media. Katie posts regular articles on www.wildewords.ie and can be found on Twitter @wildewords_PR, where she curates content from Public Relations experts worldwide.