What is your number one piece of PR advice? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Nathan Miller, Founder & CEO, Miller Ink, on Quora:
As the CEO of Miller Ink, a strategic communications and crisis communications agency headquartered in Los Angeles, I’ve heard all sorts of ideas about the best way to pursue public relations. So often people focus on tactics – pitching an angle to a reporter, launching a social media campaign, hiring an influencer, etc. – before they have a strategy. Every situation is different, and you need to start by clearly defining three anchors that inform the strategy: objective, audience, and message.
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First, before you do anything else, you have to define your objective. What do you want to achieve? There should be a clear, realistic, and ideally, measurable, objective on which you base your PR strategy.
“I want to get good PR” is not an objective.
Second, target your audience. Who do you want to reach?
Construct a profile of this audience – who are they? Where are they based? Where what are their goals? What is their agenda? Why do they care about your organization, issue, or cause? Get into their heads as much as possible.
Third, craft your message. A strong message aligns your audience with your objective. A great message captures the what and the why of your core idea. It articulates your unique selling proposition and your vision for the future.
Once you have figured out these three key pillars of your campaign, you will have a lot more clarity about where you should be headed and you can begin to think about tactical approaches, like media relations, social media, and advertising. More importantly, you will be able to evaluate if these approaches are working based on the objectives that you have defined on the front end of the campaign.
This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
