Role of PR Campaigns in Marketing
As the world of marketing switches gears, so must its tactics. With the advent of social media, it has become easier than ever to reach out to consumers and engage them in interpersonal conversations about your product or service. However, this does not mean that traditional advertising campaigns are no longer needed for brands and businesses to succeed. In fact, PR campaigns have emerged as an efficient means of disseminating information about a company's products and services not only through intermediaries like journalists and bloggers but also through more traditional methods such as print publications and TV commercials.
PR campaigns are used not only to launch a new product or service, but also to re-launch an existing one, or to make the public aware of a brand that might have been under their radar until now. Most PR campaigns aim to raise the profile of a business, product, or service. So even if your company is already well known and spends a significant portion of its marketing budget on advertising campaigns, launching a PR effort helps you further build your reputation among your target audience by reaching out to journalists and bloggers who might not regularly cover your products – either because they do not care about them or because they are simply too busy covering other topics (thereby making it difficult for you to acquire press mentions).
In the digital age of social media, search engines, and user-generated content, traditional advertising techniques have become more expensive. For instance, if a company wants to run a TV campaign in order to reach its target audience, it must pay a significant amount of money to acquire airtime during the appropriate programming. The production costs typically exceed the amount paid for running a commercial (for instance, by paying A-list actors or well-known directors/designers). In addition to that, media outlets often charge hefty fees for running ads in their content (even if it is not on TV). And even after all that you might still not get enough views for your commercial to go viral and be seen by millions of people.
PR campaigns, on the other hand, are often much cheaper and more efficient. They can be launched on a shoestring budget and still give great bang for the buck. For example, a blogger or a popular forum user who covers your product gives you free publicity that would otherwise cost you tens of thousands of dollars.
There are different types of PR campaigns:
Analyzing your target audience is essential:
Before launching a PR campaign, companies must first understand their target audience's level of interest in their brand or product. The public relations industry offers several tools for measuring public sentiment about brands and products.
Some tools that can be used to measure public sentiment are: blog feedback, social network sentiment analysis, and search engine ranking.
Blog feedback is a form of measurement that allows brands to see the amount of commentary they receive on blog posts they have contributed to or sponsored. This method is useful for measuring how many people are reading the blog posts. It's also an effective way to gauge the popularity of a product or service because it's easy to find out if people are talking about it on blogs and forums. Bloggers and forum users often respond publicly when asked questions in their own blogs, so companies can use this data for their own purposes as well.
Social network sentiment analysis is a tool that allows companies to see how users react to their brand or products. This is a representation of the social networks surrounding your company or products. There are two types of sentiment analysis: explicit, which involves brands asking users directly what they think; and implicit, which takes into account the general public's reaction.
Search engine ranking differs from blog feedback and social network sentiment analysis because it monitors the way people search for brands and products in search engines. For instance, a popular keyword people look up might be "cars." The results of this query most likely contain information about many different cars; however, there are also many pay-per-click advertisements that show up on these results. Because of this, search engine ranking is an effective way to measure how many people are searching for the brand or product. It might also be a good way to gauge the popularity of a product.
The most common reason that companies decide to pursue PR campaigns is because they are trying to gain more customer attention and create a buzz around their products or services. If a brand wants its customers to become more loyal and continue purchasing products, it has to get them talking about it first. By using these techniques and tools (and others), companies can measure how well their PR campaign does in terms of product or service awareness, customer loyalty, and brand buzz.
Public relations experts and practitioners suggest that companies should make sure that every PR campaign is tailored to the specific goals of their business. For example, a company that sponsors an event or sends out members to talk about a product is likely to get it talked about in the press, but if this company only wants to get its brand mentioned, it might not be able to reach its target audience by promoting an event or by sending out influencers.
If the goal of your PR campaign is to advertise your biggest product or service, using traditional advertising models will not help you achieve it. However, if your goal is getting more customer awareness and sales through new channels, you don't necessarily need an advertising budget.
Before launching a PR campaign, companies should also create a media list. This is a list of all the newspapers, magazines, and blogs that are related to your product or service. Ideally all of them should be relevant to the company's goal for launching a PR campaign.
The channels through which companies can launch PR campaigns include:
Social media
Social media is widely used by companies in order to get their message out there and promote new products and services. The most common social networks used in public relations are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. These platforms allow users to interact with other users according to their interests. When companies choose to have a social media presence, they may use certain networks over others depending on the audience that they want to reach.
When launching a pr campaign through social media, companies must think about their target audience and create a strategy to capture their attention. In order to get attention from customers, companies should offer something of value for free. For example, if there is an app that matches up users who share similar interests with each other, there could be a contest where people are rewarded for meeting someone new or joining new groups. If a company were trying to attract young males between the ages of 16 and 26, it may choose Instagram’s platform because this demographic is more likely to use it than the other platforms. This example is based on research conducted by Robert Levine with a sample of 1,000 Americans. It was found that Instagram is more popular among 20- to 24-year-olds.
Companies may choose social media platforms that are similar to the ones their major competitors are using.
Branding
A brand is an image or an idea that is used to describe a company. Brands can help sell products and services because they are linked together with an emotional memory and can relate people to the selling point of the product or service itself (customer). A brand must be unique and consistent in order for it to be successful; otherwise it will soon be lost in sales figures and information about the brand won’t be as effective.
Conclusion
Public relations publicizes information about a product or service, and it can be done through the use of various tools and techniques, as well as through social media. It is important for a company to develop a strong public relations strategy in order to gain customer awareness and loyalty.
There are many different ways to approach a PR campaign. All methods are techniques that companies can use again or that they can learn from when creating their own strategies for future PR campaigns. Some of them include traditional advertising and branding, along with social media strategies that depend on the company's goal for launching the campaign. By using these PR campaign types and tools to measure your efforts, you will be able to determine how effective your campaign was overall.