The Ultimate Guide to Public Relations: How to do PR

Do you wish to broaden the appeal of your company's name? Would you like to make your company known to new customers who might be interested in trying your goods or services? Welcome to the world of public relations.

What is public relations?

Public relations (PR) is the practice of using media channels to promote your organization and cultivate a positive public perception. PR is also the process of managing your organization’s brand and communications — especially in times of crisis.

PR is how brands manage the spread of their information, so it’s like branding. The main difference is that PR focuses on communication and reputation, while branding relies on visual elements like logos, websites, and marketing materials.

Why is public relations important?

Public relations defines how a company communicates with people — customers, partners, journalists, philanthropists, politicians, and the general public. All businesses need public relations, regardless of their size or industry.

According to the Pew Research Center, only 27% of U.S. adults trust the information they find on social media. But 56% trust national news media, and 75% trust local news outlets. Public relations professionals are expert storytellers. They find strategies for how to get your story out in front of the people you want to see it, in media outlets that build trust. Why? Because, nowadays, customers want to trust the brands they do business with — and nothing builds, and fosters trust like public relations.

What is a PR strategy?

A PR strategy helps a business create, organize, and measure the effectiveness of its public relations tactics over time. It's separate from a marketing plan but should support marketing efforts. A public relations strategy may cover a full year of campaigns or address a single goal, like a product launch.

Developing an authentic PR strategy requires a collaborative approach to communication. Sharing a point of view about climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion is no longer optional for brands.

Internal and employee communications also play a more important role. 46% of PR professionals in 2021 report directly to their CEO, up from 34% in 2014. This figure speaks to the increasing importance of PR in business operations and brand perception. It can be easy to jump on one-time opportunities for media attention. But if you want to know how to do PR right, start with a public relations strategy.

How to Build a PR Strategy

1. Research internal and external brand factors.

Start with what has gone well in the past for your business, and what efforts didn't work out. This could include:

• Tracking media mentions
• Reviewing influencer relationships and results
• Evaluating social media engagement and traffic KPIs
• Review buyer personas and customer insights

Next, do some competitive analysis to figure out what is working best for other businesses in your industry. Social listening tools can help speed up this process.

As you close out your research, list any internal or external factors that could have had an impact on your brand. These might include:

• Feature, product, or pricing changes
• Distribution shifts
• Stakeholders and leadership changes
• Employee sentiment
• Legal factors
• Political climate
• Economic shifts
• Trends
• Tech advances

2. Outline your goals.

It can be tempting to jump on tactics you notice during research, but first, decide on goals. Whether you're addressing a local crisis or planning a year of public relations image-building, this step is critical. Even a short outline of goals can be enough to steer you and your team toward the right tactics.

There are a few things that every PR plan should include. First, decide who your target audience is for each campaign. Next, choose the key messages you want to communicate to that audience. Finally, don't forget to include the metrics you plan to track. Analytics tracking should be part of campaign set-up, not something you add on after a campaign launches.

Forming a strong foundation for your public relations will better enable your success than one-off efforts. Try to make each goal a SMART goal.

3. Create a timeline for your PR campaigns.

Public relations success relies on the right message at the right time. So, create a clear calendar for both short and long-term initiatives.  Be sure to note public holidays and important industry dates. For example, the end of November is an important time of year for most ecommerce businesses.

4. Select the right public relations tactics.

Once you know when and why, it's time to nail down which tactics will be the best to deliver on your strategy. This comprehensive list breaks down useful public relations tactics. It might also help to look at some PR examples for inspiration.

5. Track your results.

Once you decide on tactics, decide on how you will measure outcomes. Public relations isn't an exact science, and measuring perception can be tricky. Whenever possible, align your PR metrics with business goals. This can help you draw a clear connection between public relations efforts and ROI.

An important note: A public relations manager often guides strategy around earned media. But they can be more effective with a multichannel strategy, connecting the right topic to the right audience.

Brands manage their PR — or communication and reputation — through various media channels. A great public relations strategy usually includes three types of media.

Media: Owned vs. Paid vs. Earned

The types of public relations, which we’ll review shortly, fall into three main categories: owned, paid, and earned media. Each type works towards the same goal of building a positive brand reputation, but they use different strategies to get there. Your PR strategies should include all three, as they all provide different ways of reaching, engaging, and building trust with your audience.

Owned media

Owned media is any content that your business controls. It’s often the go-to strategy for businesses looking to build a PR campaign. Rightly so, as it’s arguably the most important type of PR-related media that you should be focusing on. This is because you have total control — unlike the other two media tactics.

Owned media includes:

• Social media posts
• Blog content
• Website copy
• Email newsletters

Owned media acts as a "home base" for your PR activity. When people write about your brand or products, they’ll likely reference (i.e. link to) your owned media in their coverage.

Paid media

It’s not uncommon to pay to promote your content in the marketing world, and it’s no different when it comes to PR. Paid media refers to paying to make your content visible. It’s standard practice to promote owned media.

Paid media includes:

• Social media advertising
• Influencer marketing
• Pay-per-click (PPC)

Putting some funds toward boosting PR content is becoming increasingly popular. Since the majority of social platforms are reducing organic reach for business accounts, paid media is a fantastic way to make sure your content gets in front of the people you want to see it.

Earned media

Earned media is the tactic used to boost conversation around your brand. It’s essentially word-of-mouth and is arguably the best PR tactic to build your reputation.

Earned media is the hardest type of PR media to obtain. It takes a lot of effort, consistency, and hard work to establish it — that’s why it’s "earned."

Earned media includes:

• Mentions in industry news and reviews
• Praise from customers on social media
• High rankings on search engines

All of these media avenues provide ways to use PR to build brand awareness, generate leads, and convert those leads into paying customers — similar to your marketing. Now, let’s discuss the difference.

PR Strategies and Tactics

1. Business Events

Business events are opportunities to market your products or services and gain exposure for your brand. Whether hosted or attended by your company, events are also important sales opportunities. Events give you a chance to meet prospective customers and delight current ones face-to-face.

Speaking engagements at events are also helpful for boosting brand awareness and sharing unique thought leadership or data-driven information that can help elevate your brand.

2. Community Relations

Community relations refers to building positive relationships with the local community around your business. This could include charity work, donations, special discounts, or anything that builds a strong relationship with the community and strengthens customer loyalty.

3. Corporate and Social Responsibility

Corporate and social responsibility is like community relations, but it places a greater emphasis on ethical business practices, environmental responsibility, and philanthropy — locally, regionally, and globally. This is a critical area of PR as it directly affects the public perception of your brand.

4. Crisis Management

Crisis management is the practice of acknowledging, managing, and working to reverse negative communication and perception surrounding a business crisis. PR usually handles anything that could jeopardize or ruin your brand’s reputation.

Crisis management is an important function of PR and should be handled quickly, consistently, and strategically. With certain PR tools, you can avert crises through monitoring online chatter and quality-checking any marketing or promotional material that may be misunderstood or misconstrued.

5. Cyber Threat Intelligence

Only 41% of US businesses have an active plan for threat intelligence. But cyber security is in the top five global risks in the World Economic Forum's 2021 Risk Report. Besides the financial challenges that cyberattacks create, there is also a perception challenge. This can be devastating to a brand's reputation if it’s not handled skillfully.

These issues will call on PR’s crisis management expertise. It's also a good idea to build relationships with tech experts and thought leaders in the industry. This can give you the expertise you need to limit the reputation impact of these increasingly frequent attacks.

6. Employee Relations

Employee relations, also known as internal PR, is the practice of communicating with and cultivating a positive employee perception of your company.

This process may include dedicated employee newsletters or communications, employee perks and benefits, free training and skill-boosting opportunities, employee appreciation events, and working with unions or employee groups.

Employee relations not only keeps your employees motivated, hard-working, and loyal, but it also encourages them to advocate for your business — which can bring in both customers and more high-quality employees.

7. Influencer relations

Influencers play a powerful role in PR and marketing. According to Statista, the influencer market was worth 13.8 billion in 2021, more than double its value in 2019. That includes micro-and nano-influencers, who represent over 60% of Instagram influencers.

In many businesses, the public relations team also manages influencer relationships. Sometimes marketing, social media, and PR teams share these responsibilities. It will take hard work and experience to creatively collaborate with each influencer to make sure your brand gets the results it wants from its authority.

8. Media Relations

Media relations refers to building positive relationships with journalists, publications, and other news outlets.

This process typically includes writing press releases, organizing press releases, and scheduling interviews. Not only does this gain exposure for your business and products but it also encourages the media to market your brand for free.

9. Social Media Marketing

Social media can be both an earned and paid PR tactic. For most companies, social media can be a helpful PR (and marketing) tool —it’s an effective way to amass followers, convert customers, share your content, and resolve crises.

Whether you’re sharing a post with your audience or interacting with a single customer, your social media activity is open to the public. That’s why it’s critical to have a social media strategy that keeps your communications consistent, positive, and accurate.

What does a public relations manager do?

PR managers are responsible for building, executing, and monitoring your PR strategies and tactics. They typically handle crisis communications, write press releases, and lead a team of other PR professionals who manage your brand’s public presence. You might hire a public relations manager to handle PR for your business, or work with a PR Agency.

PR Manager Skills

Successful public relations managers have a particular set of skills. Besides being flexible and open to change, these are some of the most important skills.

Great Communication

One primary focus of public relations is building your business’s reputation. To do this, public relations managers spend a lot of their time building and sustaining relationships. Besides speaking about your company at public functions, press conferences, and other events, your public relations team is also connecting with reporters, influencers, and other stakeholders.

Writing Skills

Public relations managers should also be able to communicate well in written form. Since PR managers are responsible for writing press releases and company-related news, strong writing skills will help convey the right message to promote your company. This is especially useful for online PR where you’ll need to create blog posts, website content, and press releases to gain coverage.

Creativity

Like marketing, creativity goes a long way in the public relations world. Great PR managers are creative and know how to create a strategy that stands out from the crowd, which is important because a unique story or perspective will drive PR coverage.

Strong Research Skills

Public relations is a social industry, and people might be talking about your brand without directly mentioning it. Good research skills will help public relations managers find and use these opportunities.

A public relations manager must stay up on trends and digital marketing updates. PR professionals can't operate in a bubble and must stay aware of search and social media changes for their strategies to succeed. They offer expert knowledge and a fresh perspective to maintain a presence in competitive media outlets.

Public relations managers will also need to do research when planning a PR strategy. Because they might need additional information, statistics, and data points to boost the power of their owned media, strong research skills are essential.

PR Manager Tasks

The day-to-day tasks of your PR manager can vary depending on your industry, active PR campaigns, PR team size, and other factors. However, here’s what they often include:

• Writing press releases to announce company-related news
• Creating fact sheets and media kits about the company to send to media teams for brand-building
• Giving media training to both in-house and external teams
• Attending and speaking at industry events and representing the brand at trade shows, recruiting events, etc.
• Finding and analyzing media coverage and promoting that content through owned and paid media channels

Public relations managers are also responsible for tracking and measuring their PR efforts. The following key performance indicators (KPIs) can help your public relations manager analyze and improve your PR strategies.

PR Measurement: 10 Public Relations KPIs to Track

1. Media Coverage and Brand Mentions

Brand mentions occur when someone mentions your brand. Media coverage tracks the number of earned media stories that went live. These metrics are important because they help you measure awareness of your brand and its stories.

You might see brand mentions in traditional news coverage, on other business or personal blogs, in reviews, or on social media. Some media outlets may tag or hyperlink their sources. Others may not link back to your brand or website, which means you must go looking for them. Check out the PR tools section for some helpful software tools.

2. Share of Voice

This is an essential KPI for PR. Share of voice measures competitive brand awareness. This metric helps your business understand the scale of customers in your industry and where your brand fits within it. It also tracks your brand reputation.

3. Pitch Interactions

Pitches are another important metric for PR. It can sometimes take longer than expected for a piece to go live. So, track the number of pitches you send and reply to. You'll also want to track how many email opens and clicks you get from a pitch. These PR metrics can help you create a funnel for earned media mentions. This can help you better understand which efforts are pulling in the most value, as well as the best ways to scale your strategy.

4. Sentiment

Sentiment, which is a synonym for viewpoint or opinion, measures the attitudes in brand mentions. While brand mentions and backlinks typically improve your brand awareness and SEO, sentiment is what sets apart the positive mentions from the negative ones.

You’ve probably heard the saying, "There’s no such thing as bad publicity." Whether you agree or disagree, it is good practice to be aware of negative press.

Tracking sentiment can help you understand what your audience is saying about your brand and whether you need to address any problems or concerns.

5. Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement encompasses a few types of activity: views, impressions, likes, shares, and comments.

This information shows the level of brand awareness and engagement among your audience members. It also tells you when your audience is most active, i.e. when you should be posting and interacting with your followers.

6. Social Shares

Social shares are different from social media engagement. Social shares refer to when your audience shares something from your website or blog on their social media.

This is a critical metric because it tells you that your audience enjoys your content enough to vouch for it on their social channels. It’s a very clear measure of your brand reputation among your audience.

When looking at social shares, pay attention to what types of content people share most frequently. This will give you an idea of what your audience enjoys the most and what kind of content to create more of.

7. Site Traffic

Site traffic is a sign of successful PR efforts. If people are hearing about your brand through earned media and heading to your site, your PR efforts are reaching your audience.

As you run PR campaigns, track your site traffic once press releases and other efforts go live. Use your site analytics to check your visitors’ referral sources (how they made their way to your website) and aim to replicate this in the future.

8. SEO Metrics

There are a few SEO metrics that can also help you with PR measurement.

Domain authority refers to your website’s SEO ranking and how it performs in search results.

Backlinks help you find brand mentions. With backlinks, sites that’ve mentioned your brand have linked to your website, making it easy for readers to click through and visit your website. And it’s not just new traffic you’ll benefit from when collecting backlinks — you could see a rise in your SEO rankings, too.

9. Conversions

While the volume of new customers coming directly from your PR activity isn’t easy to measure, it’s worth investigating.

You can discover where your customers came from by either surveying customers after they purchase and asking how they heard of you or by using a tool like Google Analytics to learn about your customers’ conversion paths (a.k.a. their route to purchase).

10. Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE)

AVE equals what it would cost to buy the space for an earned media placement if it was an ad. At one point this was the only KPI for public relations. But many industry professionals feel that this is an outdated KPI and an inaccurate way to measure PR.

Depending on your business, you may still want to track this KPI. In 2021 41% of PR professionals track AVE for planning, and 34% use this metric to justify fees and budgets.

Start Building Your Public Relations Strategy

With all these tactics, tools, and strategy-building tips, are you ready to start your new PR strategy? As you dig in, remember that public relations is an ongoing, iterative strategy — not a one-off task. Like marketing, it can take a while to see results. But with a solid strategy and a commitment to spreading the word about your company, you’ll soon see more mentions, backlinks, and general buzz. Then you’ll be ready for the next step to grow your business better.