Most effective 5 PR strategies in 2021

Public relations is a demanding business, mostly because of the conditions of digital media. Consumers access multiple online channels on an almost constant basis, so keeping your brand both visible and positively received by the masses can be troublesome for the busy entrepreneur. Many entrepreneurs, especially those helming startups or small businesses, simply neglect their public relations development strategy, believing it to be a secondary priority. But no matter how busy you are, you can make time for these simple, yet effective, PR strategies:

1. Cultivate Testimonials. Testimonials are your best friend as an entrepreneur. Depending on the medium you use for your inbound testimonials, you could enjoy the benefits of increased brand visibility, increased user trust, increased SEO authority from external links, and an increased propensity to go viral with a product or campaign. Encourage your users to post written and video testimonials on their social media profiles and external sites. You can offer them a small reward in exchange for their honest opinions, or sponsor a competition that recognizes a random participant. Initiating a steady flow of user testimonials is a way to let your customers do your PR work for you. Consumers trust other consumers more than brands anyway, so you’ll be able to build your reputation naturally without doing all the work yourself.

2. Make the Most of Your Press Releases. Have a plan in place to submit regular press releases whenever your company does something newsworthy. Press releases can be a great source of external links for SEO, since they’re usually published on high-authority news sites, plus you’ll get a boost in brand visibility from the shared readership of each publication. But press releases don’t have to be one-use-only. If you’re already creating and distributing your press releases on a regular basis, you can tap them for additional PR value without spending much additional time. For example, you can post a variation of the press release on your own site as a blog entry, possibly adding an extra feature like an interview with your CEO. You could also repurpose it into a whitepaper, or include it as part of an informational packet. It’s a form of recycling, which will let you take advantage of the press release’s full value.

3. Set Aside Ten Minutes a Day. If you’re having trouble keeping up with the nonstop social media posts and constantly evolving news landscape, you’re not alone. It’s almost impossible to keep up with everything. But instead of giving up and no longer trying to get involved, try setting aside ten minutes a day — an amount of time that almost anyone can afford to allot. Ten minutes a day will give you an opportunity to scan your news feed, figure out the gist of what’s been happening, and reach out to at least a handful of followers. You may not get time to answer every query or post lots of messages, but it will establish your brand as one that cares enough to make a daily effort.

4. Focus Your Strategy. It can be tempting to pursue every possible channel and target every possible demographic, but for the busy entrepreneur, that’s an inefficient strategy. Instead of trying to do twenty things with an average success rate, narrow your strategy to do one or two things with the best success rate. For example, if you’re trying to build a following on five different social media profiles, instead focus on building an audience for one (with the other four on the back burner). You’ll have a smaller potential audience, but the audience you end up with will be more passionate, more loyal, and more enthusiastic about your brand.

5. Leverage the Power of Influencers. This is another way of letting others do your PR work for you. Instead of spending hours a day trying to force your way into new markets, make friends with a handful of influencers and ask them to do the work for you. For example, if there’s an industry leader with a huge following, you could ask him/her to tweet a link to your latest press release — or if you’re on good terms already, you could ask him/her to create a testimonial for you. If they honor your request, you’ll gain almost-instant access to their audience, adding their range of visibility to your own without significant extra effort.

Lilly | Lilly - Get it out of the way

Insight

Getting men to visit a doctor is difficult in the best of circumstances. Trying to encourage a visit to discuss to Erectile Dysfunction (ED) and Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH enlarged Prostate) is near impossible. And yet that was the primary objective of Lilly’s ED and BPH treatment education campaign.

Peeling apart the core target provided the insight that these “balanced men" (referred to as "Balanced Barry") – aged 40-65 yrs, active, healthy and in stable relationships - want to enjoy life with their partner and hope nothing gets in the way. As sensitive personal conditions, Balanced Barry is reluctant to talk about them, with anyone: partner, friend, let alone their doctor.

In fact, research has shown that it can take an average of two years to seek treatment for this condition, with many men not seeking treatment at all, instead viewing this as an untreatable part of the natural aging process. Against this backdrop of embarrassment and stigma, the internet is a unique vehicle which allows for understanding of the condition and the potential treatments available, whilst offering complete discretion. Trust is vital - Balanced Barry wants to ensure they are receiving accurate health information and when investigating the conditions, the first place they turn to would be a trusted medical source.

Strategy

Discretion & Integrity. Due to the sensitive nature and strict regulatory requirements, OMD needed to accurately target Balanced Barry. Therefore, it needed digital vehicles that would serve a message against the specific profile. The efforts focused on encouraging men to deal with ED/BPH concerns by connecting them with information that enabled a meaningful conversation with their doctor, helping them realise these conditions are treatable and need not infringe on their relationship.

The overarching digital strategy was to own Balanced Barry's experiences, within laser targeted male interest sites, in trusted health resources and when they were seeking additional information within Search. The objective was to help support Balanced Barry on his journey to treatment, occupying all of his digital touchpoints, like a trusted friend offering guidance and prompting action. Establishing a long term (always-on) presence was a key goal within these trusted platforms. The agency recognised that standard digital advertising can sometimes be seen as wallpaper, so went deeper by integrating Lilly ED & BPH doctor-produced tools and advice into trusted 3rd Party medical environments. This allowed Lilly to embed content and form a deeper association where men and their partners were going to learn more. Search is also a key resource for men looking for guidance and information.

Of course, paid search is the backbone to many campaigns and OMD looked to own and optimise the core ED/BPH keywords, to establish real estate in this space, capture traffic and drive to Lilly content areas for greater education and engagement. These relevant partnerships and quality search implementations were further reinforced by serving highly targeted ads via a real-time display buying tool. Focusing in on Barry in their other core areas of interest - News, Sports, men’s lifestyle – these communications acted as reminder messaging, additional to offline media and encouraged prompt action.

Execution

The partnerships with flagship third party independent medical sites involve annual, always-on activity to establish a long term association within the ED/BPH space. While unique solutions were developed in each market, these partnerships delivered deeper engagement and integrity across a breadth of activity:

- Trusted Medical writers, commissioned to answer new questions on ED and BPH within the site
- Co-branded Medical Site / Lilly Hub, providing integrated content through an environment the reader trusts
- Case studies for readers to engage with
- Sponsorship of ED Health Centres

These editorial relationships gave understanding and credibility to the Lilly message and drove greater engagement to prompt action – supporting the goals of educating men and getting them to talk to a Doctor. Specific to Search, it concentrated on information seeking terms around ED and BPH, served with continually tested ad copy. Optimisation focused to the Talk to your Doctor and Questionnaire sections of the website (for Barry to print off to take to his doctor). Additionally, bidding on campaign terms and ED/BPH health related terms, connected the audience to content offline to online - allowing them to explore content relating to symptoms, causes, treatment etc., furthering the propensity to talk to a doctor.

To serve highly targeted messages to these men with limited wastage, OMD utilised digital programmatic buying. This technology offered both contextual and demographic data targeting, combined with the cost efficiency of biddable display media. This ensured it directed the display communications to Balanced Barry effectively and efficiently.

Results 

Independent Millward Brown research proved achievement of the primary objective getting "Balance Barry's" to visit their doctor - on average those who saw the campaign were 45% more likely to visit their doctor. The extremely relevant partnerships dramatically improved our primary “Talk/Find a Doctor” measures. -

Sweden: In first 5 months 12.2k men read the partnered articles with an outstanding 31% clicking through to Lilly for more guidance

Spain: CTR jumped from 0.15% display, to 0.71% with the new partnership presence and Talk/Find a Doctor % post click conversion improved to 8.8%, versus 1.2% of previous activity across all markets.

Search improved the key KPIs during the April/May campaign with 1 in 10 going from homepage to take the ED/BPH health questionnaire and 1 in 16 to visit ‘Find/Talk to your doctor’ (28,000 ED/BPH questionnaire and 18,000 Find/Talk to doctor visits). Overlaying programmatic buying dramatically reduced the cost per KPI (Find/Talk to a Doctor) conversion, with reductions of 51% in Sweden and 67% in Spain vs. previous traditional display.

A challenging task but the campaign has prompted more "Balanced Barry's" to visit their doctor and solve their ED/BPH problems.

BRAND:

Lilly

CATEGORY:

Pharmaceuticals/Healthcare

REGION:

France

Italy

The Netherlands

Portugal

Spain

Sweden

United Kingdom

DATE:

2013

AGENCY:

OMD

MEDIA CHANNEL:

Direct Marketing,Digital,Online,Print

A masterpiece in wine

Wine labels are similar to luxury brands in that as a group, they have been collectively resistant to marketing innovation, believing that the quality of the product is good enough marketing in itself. This interactive billboard and the wider art project it comes from is a beautiful idea supported by a clever use of SMS technology.

They don't drink a lot wine in Latin America. Drinkers in France and Italy happily quaff between 50-60 litres of the stuff annually per capita, which makes the Colombian average of 0.26 litres seem a particularly restrained amount.

But the local market for wine has been steadily increasing over the past decade, and Argentinean label Bodega Navarro Correas has been capitalising on this trend and celebrating the work of local artists with its 'Arte por dentro y por fuera' campaign. Translated as 'art inside and outside', this campaign is based on the idea that if Bodega Navarro Correas produces a masterpiece inside the bottle, its consumers can produce masterpieces on the outside.

This amazing billboard in Colombia is the latest expression of 'Arte por dentro y por fuera', and proves that you can create an arresting work of art with wine, robotics and a little bit of SMS technology.

BRAND: Bodega Navarro Correas

BRAND OWNER: Diageo

CATEGORY: Drinks (alcoholic)

REGION: Colombia

DATE: August - August 2011

AGENCIES: Alpha 245, Leo Burnett

Philips Wake-up Light| 'Make me a morning person'

Marketers like dealing with universal human truths. You can normally rely on the insight section of a case study to feature phrases such like “people like to upload and share content”, “visitors want to engage with their favourite brands” and the awards-season favourite: “Young people love music”.

Another universal truth, and one that has been recognised by Philips, is that people generally dislike getting up in the morning. Philips has attempted to offer an alternative to early morning alarm clock in the shape of its Wake-up Light, a kind of bedside lamp that supposedly mimics the effect of a natural sunrise.

Philips recognised that people generally dislike getting up in the morning. Philips has attempted to offer an alternative to early morning alarm clock in the shape of its Wake-up Light, a kind of bedside lamp that supposedly mimics the effect of a natural sunrise.

The light was tested last year in the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, where there is no sunshine for three months of the year, and its effect on the community was recorded in an excellent short film by Doug Pray. But while the lamp had demonstrated its effectiveness in the Arctic, a more relevant angle was required for the European consumer.

The 'make me a morning person' campaign kicks off late-September with a recruitment drive to search for the world's worst grumps, snoozers and zombies. Consumers can nominate themselves, their friends and family, or even a colleague, on Facebook to take part in the challenge. They can also take a quiz on Facebook to find out which of the seven morning types they are - The Grump, The Grunter, The Snoozer, The Zombie, The Corpse, The Early Bird or The Chirpy. Hundreds of entrants will then be selected to receive a Philips Wake-up Light and take part in the 21 day challenge.

The social experiment

From mid-October 2011, participants of the challenge will chart their progress via the dedicated iPhone 'Wake-app' that has mini-games to test them on alertness, mood and ease of getting out of bed, and will determine whether a 'non morning person' has truly become a 'morning person' by waking up naturally with the Philips Wake-up Light. The mini-games were designed with the help of Philips light therapy experts and the Wake-app is the first consumer-facing app to feature tests undertaken in sleep laboratories and clinical studies. Non-participants can also download the free iPhone app and take the challenge themselves.

The Longyearbyen experiment

Results

Full results to follow. Campaign launches across October 2011.

External links:

Facebook Wake-up Light app: http://apps.facebook.com/wakeupchallenge(6/10/11: not live yet)

BRAND: Philips

BRAND OWNER: Philips

CATEGORY: Electronic Goods

REGION: The Netherlands

DATE: September - October 2011

AGENCY: Tribal DDB

MEDIA CHANNEL: Experiential,Online,PR

The Holmes Report |The 100 most important in-house communicators in the world

The Holmes Report has researched an interesting list of the 100 Most Important In-house Communicators in the World. It is a fascinating compilation of 100 of the most senior corporate communications professionals in some of the world’s largest companies who are responsible for the reputation management of some enviable and challenging brands.

It’s also released the now seemingly mandatory infographic summarising the list (see the end of this post). Some of the key facts on the infographic include:

• Edelman is the most respected public relations agency, followed by Burson-Marsteller, Waggener Edstrom and Weber Shandwick.
• In 60% of the organisations responding to the survey, public relations has primary responsibility for social media, while in 20% responsibility is shared between several departments, including PR. Just 8% have social media led by marketing, with customer service and IT having the lead in 4% each, and the remaining 4% being elsewhere (can’t think where – legal or HR perhaps?)
• Everyone on the list has responsibility for hiring and firing PR agencies, but most are also primary decision makers on digital and social media agencies (79%), event management companies (50%) and sponsorship (46%). Just 25% have a primary role over advertising agencies.

About half of the list are based in the US, but many countries are represented including the UK. I’ve pulled out some of the UK-related names that I found interesting:

Lord Stephen Carter, Chief Marketing, Strategy & Comms Officer at Alcatel-Luncent in France and previously head of strategy for Prime Minister Gordon Brown after being CEO at Alan Parker’s Brunswick.

Sue Clark, Corporate Affairs Director at SAB Miller in London having previously been at Railtrack and Scottish Power.

Thomas Delabriere, Marketing Director at Innocent Drinks is interesting because he’s from one of the smallest companies on the list, but was brought in to bring a “dose of corporate heft” as he’d previously been at PepsiCo, Unilever and Danone.

Dominic Fry, Director of Comms & Investor Relations at Marks & Spencer having previously had similar roles at the Channel Tunnel, J Sainsbury and Scottish Power as well as various heavyweight corporate PR firms.

Pierre Goad, Co-head of Group Comms at HSBC in London.

Peter Henshaw, Group Head of Comms at BP has the enormous challenge of “rehabilitating BP’s battered reputation”. Intriguingly, he’s a lawyer by background and has previously held a variety of both legal and communications roles.

Gaye Hudson, VP, EMEA Corporate Comms for Oracle is unusual because she’s only responsible for EMEA whereas most people on the list have a global remit.

Howell James, Corporate Affairs Director at Barclays is another graduate of Downing Street having worked for two prime ministers – Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Company Secretary and Group Corporate & Legal Affairs Director for Tesco is another who spent significant time working for UK government before joining the corporate sector.

Lucas van Praag, Head of Corporate Comms at Goldman Sachs in London has the unenviable task of working on repairing the reputation of one of the world’s most pilloried investment banks.

Michael Prescott, Group Director of Comms at BT Group in London is the former political editor at the Sunday Times who moved into PR via a stint at Weber Shandwick.

Ben Stewart, Head of Media at Greenpeace in London is one of the NGO’s leadership team that is well placed to teach the corporate sector a thing or two about how to run effective communications and lobbying campaigns.

Michael Stewart, Partner, Global Director of Comms at McKinsey & Company in London has an enviable track record in CSR-related institutions such as the Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum, the UN Global Compact and the Centre for Our Common Future.

Phil Thompson, SVP Global Comms at GlaxoSmithKline in London is a 15-year veteran of GSK having worked his way through a variety of marketing and public relations roles.

Keith Weed, Chief Marketing & Comms Officer at Unilever is a marketing professional who has sought to unify marketing, corporate communications and sustainability under his leadership. An interesting approach that appears to be at odds with what many other large corporations are doing.

15 savage mistakes commonly made by PR folks

After reading about the Brody PR fail I thought I’d compile a list of common issues experienced by journalists when dealing with PR people.

A good PR makes things easy for journalists. They coordinate things behind the scenes. They follow up promptly on requests for further information or interviews. The understand the subject matter and how the journalist / publication plays a part in communicating news to a wider audience. And they do not try to pull the wool of your eyes.

A bad PR can be ill-informed, demanding, haughty, deceptive, intrusive, and sometimes plain idiotic.

So if you work in PR and want to improve your game then try to avoid any of the following. Any of these things will harm your personal reputation, and damage the chances of gaining coverage for your client.

BCC fail
This is an all-too-common scenario, and it’s not limited to junior PRs. Instead of using the BCC field when emailing a group of journalists / bloggers, the PR uses the CC field. As such you have revealed your media list to all recipients, and completely ignored privacy regulations. Sometimes journalists are so outraged that they Reply All, which only helps dig a deeper hole for the unfortunate PR.

Totally irrelevant content
Sending me a press release about semi-conductors isn’t going to cut it. We’re not into that kind of technology, and a few minutes checking out our blog would reveal as much. Over the years I’ve had releases relating to agriculture and pharmaceutical, neither of which remotely appeals...

No understanding about audience
An understanding of audience is crucial, before you start pitching to journalists. In our case, many of our members / readers have been with us for years. Some were working in the internet in the late-1990s, when we first launched our website. These people are not juniors! In our case we’re unlikely to teach people how to suck eggs. So emailing us ‘Why email matters!’ press releases isn't really going to grab our attention (nor that of our readers).

Impersonal emails
“Dear journalist.” FAIL! If in doubt, leave it out. Just push out the press release. Better still, open up with a paragraph, to explain the news in a sentence or two, and to introduce yourself if you’re new. It’s not rocket science to automate the personalisation of email, but I suggest a hand-written sentence or two to ‘tier one’ media for the best results.

PDFs / attachments
Why anybody emails press releases in PDF or Word format is totally beyond me. Answers on a postcard please. It is best to paste the press release into the body of the email. Make it easy for journalists to read them.

Weird formatting
The best example recently came from Lady Ga-Ga’s PR. Not content with telling me all about The Ga Ga, she decided to use five different colours in the email, as this rubbish photograph will show:

“Feel free”
You bastards know who you are. I absolutely loathe this phrase. “Feel free to add this to your blog!", "Feel free to post this video!", "Feel free to promote our viral!” I have previouslycomplained at length about this horrible, throwaway phrase. It sucks.

“Let me know if you post something!”
Are you kidding me? If you’re not into online reputation monitoring then you’re not much of a PR are you? Feeds, feeds, feeds. It is easier than ever to monitor your clients, brands and competitors online, so get to it! Do not expect journalists to tell you… they expect you to be tuned in, given that you reached out to them in the first place.

Lack of a decent response channel
Some of the bigger internet firms have a bad habit of pushing out news but having no real desire to develop a two-way communication. Be prepared for questions, if you email press releases to journalists. Make it easy for them to get in touch with you (and your executives). If your executives don’t want to talk about it then we can assume it’s no big deal.

Poor service
If you offer me an interview and the journalist accepts, then be sure to make it happen. We have somewhere between 30 and 50 interview requests in an average week, and we obviously can’t do them all. So whenever we agree to an interview let's make things happen.

Big Brother-style lurking
If you decide to sit in on conference calls or interviews then please remember who the journalist is trying to interview (clue: it isn’t you). PRs who try to step in and deviate the course of the interview are playing with fire. Brief your clients beforehand and give them – and the journalist – the space to have a proper, uninterrupted conversation.

‘Exclusive!’
The first thing I do when something is pitched as an ‘exclusive’ is to copy and paste some part of the release into Google. If I see it then it’s game over, no matter how big your news is. There are plenty of other things to write about. In any case, exclusivity is overrated these days. For my money it is all about ‘scoops of interpretation’.

‘Embargoed’
Ditto. And if you allow other publications to break your embargo, then I'll assume you have agreed that in advance and make a mental note for next time. As such I’m with Michael Arrington on this one.

PRspeak overkill
Jargon is one thing, and sometimes cannot be avoided, but telling me that a company is ‘leading’ or a service is ‘world class’ or an application is ‘mission critical’ makes me instantly doubt the validity of these claims. And any release that includes the word 'synergies' is immediately in a lot of trouble. See my Econusltancy Style Guide for a longer list of these terms.

CAPS LOCK SUBJECT LINES!
Hey, you know what? WRITING SUBJECT LINES AND HEADLINES IN CAPITCALS DOESN’T MAKE THEM ANY EASIER TO READ AND IT KINDA SOUNDS A BIT LIKE YOU ARE SHOUTING AT ME AND CAPS ARE SEEN TO BE A BIT SPAMMY IN THE EYES OF THE AVERAGE EMAIL CLIENT AND AS SUCH MAY BYPASS THE INBOX ENTIRELY WHEN REALLY YOU SHOULD BE DOING ALL YOU CAN TO MAXIMISE DELIVERABILITY RATES GIVEN THAT YOU ARE THEORETICALLY AND EXPERT IN COMMUNICATIONS. See what I mean about readability?