What do you have a new product or business you must ensure you publicise yourself to get the customers you need? Public relations management is a skill, but you don’t need to be an expert; you need to understand the steps you need to go through to announce a launch of your next fit product or service. So, here is a quick guide on successfully launching a PR campaign.
Understand Your Audience
The first thing to do before you take any steps on your PR campaign is to understand your audience. Who is going to want to buy your product or service? This is going to make it a lot easier to identify some other steps further down as it’s important to understand your customer and where they might be found. For example, with social media platforms, Snapchat tends to be reserved for teenagers, whereas older people can be found on Facebook. So, if you have a product that is of little interest to teenagers, you are probably wasting time and resources advertising on Snapchat. There are other platforms to consider, so you may as well work out which ones are going to be worth your time and effort. Are you going to take out physical adverts in newspapers and magazines or are you aiming for the television or a purely Internet-based launch?
Find an Angle
What makes people want to get involved with your product or service? You need to find a unique angle and decide whether you are going to tease your customers with little bits of information and then release everything or whether you are just going to go for a full-on press release notifying them that your product or service is coming to market. They want to be there when it launches. You need to aim to stand out from the crowd, as everyone is in competition in this day and age this means you need to create tag lines and marketing materials that make people want to pick it up and read on. Try and put yourself in the point of view of your customers and ask yourself whether you would find this interesting if you were to come across this PR launch. Think carefully because this is the instant gratification generation, they don’t like waiting around, they want to know what they’re looking at quickly and easily and don’t want to have to work for more information.
Writing a Press Release
Watching a press release should be done as if you were talking about the company not part of it. So that means not using terms like I and we. Instead, stick to being slightly distanced as it would be reported in the papers. Be sure to include a quote from the chief executive, and if you happen to have any endorsement from a larger company, or someone famous be sure to get them to have a say and include this within your press release. It should read as a story of interest rather than a blatant out and out advert. Again, you need to captivate the imagination of your reader, so make sure that it’s engaging and stands out from anything else they may come across that day. You can always invite local newspapers to come and review for themselves and make their own story. Most are happy to support local business and will send a reporter to have a chat with you.
Be Ready Behind the Scenes
Until you have your website up and running, thoroughly proofread and polished, there is no point starting your PR campaign. If you are going to advertise a web address for your audience to find out more, but it’s not yet ready you are going to frustrate and irritate potential customers who may well take their business elsewhere. Too often, companies get excited and jump the gun by releasing marketing information. Before the website and other supporting materials are even ready to go. The same goes for printed materials; if a customer can request a brochure from you, these must be packaged and ready to be addressed so they can go straight out the door as soon as they are asked for. The frustration of having to wait for things when they have been advertised as ready will see a dramatic downturn in customers.
Use Tools to Help
The PR campaign needs regular posting to the platforms you have chosen, and there are plenty of tools available to do this for you. You can schedule a range of social media posts across all of the platforms, and the software will ensure that they are posted as you request. This takes the pressure of having someone responsible for remembering to make the correct post every day. It also makes a lot more sense for you to have a spreadsheet of posts ready that tell a story in a logical order as just randomly posting haphazardly does not look very professional or enticing for customers.