In late 2018, the BlueSky team undertook research to establish how many agencies had their marketing and PR strategy for 2019 finalised. The result? Almost half (42 per cent) had yet to plan theirs. So if you’ve yet to perfect yours, or perhaps it could do with some tweaking, here are our top tips that will ensure success.
The key steps to developing a PR & marketing strategy that delivers results
- Know your objectives: You need to understand the overall business objectives in order to deliver results. Knowing what you are looking to achieve makes your approach more tailored and gives you something tangible to measure against. Are you looking to bring in more client leads? To attract more candidate applications? To hire more recruiters? And if you’re not being told these by your superiors – seek this information out. Not only will it ensure you have the necessary information, but it will also demonstrate how keen you are to do your job effectively. Once you know your goals, you can decide on the best approach to achieving these by building your strategy around your target audience.
- Who are you trying to target? One size fits all isn’t going to cut it. You need to drill down into who your targets are. What are they interested in? What do they read? What social networks do they use? What’s going to catch their attention? Blogs? Vlogs? Press? Client case studies? Only by doing this can you establish what content and material works for each segment of your target audience. They key is producing content that resonates with each and addresses their pain points.
- How are you going to measure your success? Ultimately, it’s all about taking a deep dive into the metrics you have available and then tying them back to your objectives to show senior management exactly how your PR and marketing activities are contributing to the business’s success. There is no one way fits all method for measuring return on investment (ROI) – you need to find a way that works for you and your company. For example, how do you track if the placement of passive candidates can be attributed to your marketing activities? Are they connected via social? Do they subscribe to your blog alerts? Have they downloaded a whitepaper? The list goes on, but in our experience, some of the best metrics include:
| Website traffic | Content Engagement |
| Content exposure | SEO ranking |
| Downloads | Subscribers |
| Analytics of native social channels | AVE, reach, share of voice and mentions of press coverage |
Don’t stop there
You’ve set your objectives. You know what message you’re trying to communicate. You’ve narrowed down your audience and you know where to find them. And importantly you know what type of content will work and how you’re going to measure success. So what’s left?
Recycling – here at BlueSky we love evergreen content. While it’s great having something timely that gets a big hit and pulls in tons of readers on its first and only outing, never overlook the power and ROI you can achieve from a strong piece of content that can be repurposed and reused over and over again. So whether you’ve written a blog, a press release or designed an infographic, ensure you are repurposing it into as many different content forms as possible.
In addition, don’t make the mistake of measuring your PR & marketing efforts and then not tweaking your strategy as and where required. What was hugely successful? And what didn’t work so well and why? By doing so you can tailor future content accordingly to ensure everything you are producing not only resonates with your target audience, but also delivers that all important return on investment.
