Aligning PR activity with your business goals

Posted by Charlotte Goldthorpe on 14th July 2017

PR is so much more than just a creative profession. It’s also a strategic management function involved in planning, formulating and implementing strategies, which create outcomes for an organisation.

Involving your communications team in discussions about your business strategy from the very beginning of the relationship will ensure they know what success looks like for you. And talking to them about how you make money can help them generate revenue for your business.

When it comes to setting business objectives, how you communicate them to your comms team is vital. A good place to start is to build understanding between the different parties within your organisation. This could be between a senior management team and an internal PR or marketing team, or between a brand and an external PR agency.

Once your communication lines are established, your comms team will get to work on a tailored strategy that aligns PR activity to your business goals. This starts with identifying your target audience and key messages, and working with you to set out ‘SMART’ objectives, ensuring they make them specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. From this, they will select the most effective marketing channels and tools to help achieve your goals and develop a plan.

In terms of your business plan, it’s fine to set out long-term objectives over one, two, or even five years, but with 24-hour news and the changing nature of social media, we find three to six month ‘moving’ communications plans are more realistic.

Developing an internal campaign schedule or calendar of events, with key dates and events happening within your industry will help you plan for the months ahead. Using online, shared calendars or social media management software for seeking approvals can be a great way for brands and agencies to communicate planned activities. Key dates in your PR plan should also form the basis of your social media and content strategy and could allow for specific promotions communicated through various marketing channels.

Evaluation of PR activity or a campaign is just as important as the delivery. Your comms team should track, measure and evaluate activity. This could be done weekly or monthly depending on the type of activity. An evaluation framework model should be used to set out inputs (e.g. the planning phase), outputs (e.g. what is delivered/target audience reached), outtakes (e.g. audience awareness and understanding) and outcomes (attitudinal/behavioural changes among your target audience).

The most successful comms teams are those who regularly meet with the senior management team and who are aware of how a business is performing. Keeping each other in the loop about how a campaign is running and whether this is having a quantifiable impact on your business over time will help track performance and relate this back to your business objectives; whether it's to increase revenue, increase visitor numbers or retain staff and clients.

If you are responsible for marketing, PR or communications in-house, why not suggest to the board, that you, or someone in your team, could attend the meeting to present the results of your activity? And if you work with an agency, invite them to meet the board. After all, an agency should be an extension of your team and can bring a completely new perspective!

Only by working together, sharing ideas, goals and information on business performance, can the comms team and board work in synergy with one another.