PR is a living function that fluctuates on a daily basis, so having a solid strategy that aligns with your PR efforts is important to ensure its effectiveness. A PR plan designed for your business can be broad and so will need to be distilled into individual funnels to achieve maxim impact and allow you to manage it effectively. Let’s breakdown the strategy behind the PR plan and how this can be easily implemented into any PR effort so to it aligns with your company’s goals:

• Step one is to think and dream big and ensure that your PR plan aligns with your company’s mission and vision. This is when the discovery session brings everything together and outlines your official messaging, commercial objectives and target audience.
• Step two is to reach the target audience. Your target audience should already be identified in the initial discovery session and from there, the compilation of a media list and a wider communication plan can then be executed off the back of the insights unearthed in the discovery session. Decide which mix of owned, earned, shared, and paid media channels are most appropriate, depending on your target audience and budget.
• Step three is the implementation. This is where the spokespeople are defined and timelines and budget come into play. A good PR plan with a solid strategy to underpin it should include guardrails which include limits of budget and timelines. If you aren’t your company spokesperson, identify how comfortable your spokesperson is with speaking with media and how confident they are in maintaining the company line in a natural and fluent way. Content that is media friendly can then start to be curated, with each piece of material optimised for the channels it’s intended for, tweaking the format, tone and style. Best practice and style guidelines should be adhered to and the content itself can be adapted dependant on feedback from various stakeholders including other spokespeople, marketing heads and legal personnel.
• Step four is the measurement, reporting and course correcting, the final piece of the puzzle. Coming full circle, this is where the objectives set out in the discovery session are scrutinized and the effectiveness of your PR campaign is measured against those objectives. Do any changes need to be made? The way of measuring this depends on the platform but generally speaking, an analysis should be done on the volume of coverage, audience reached and sentiment. This will change based on the platform but generally speaking, reach, impressions, engagement, sentiment, awareness and potential lead conversion can give insight into the ROI achieved on any given campaign.
  
  If a company is a large and well established organisation, it may have a separate strategy department. However, if your company still in the growth phase, incorporating strategy into everything you do, especially your corporate communications, can help achieve your commercial objectives and launch you into the next stage of growth.