Best Practices for a Modern PR Campaign: Activate Your Strategy

Are you ready to take your PR campaign to the next level? With a solid strategy in place, it's time to focus on spreading your message far and wide. From creating press materials to amplifying your message through paid media, there are several key steps you can take to engage directly with your audience and ensure your campaign's success.

So far, we've covered brand, audience and industry research as well has how to leverage that research into a winning PR strategy. Now it's time to put it in motion. You’re ready to tell your brand’s story and engage directly with your audience.

In this blog, we'll dive into the various materials and strategies you can use to tell your brand's story and reach your desired audience. We'll also show you how Nexis Newsdesk can provide valuable insights and tips to take your campaign to the next level.

Create your marketing materials

With the framework set and the roots in place, it’s time to create all of the material that will help spread your campaign far and wide. These assets should fulfill the needs of your campaign’s objectives, which in turn will help you achieve your goals. Here are all of the elements that will go into a successful campaign: 

Press materials

These are all of your public facing materials. This may include news releases, an online media kit, fact sheets, infographics, videos, targeted pitches and more. Ideally, these assets should be easy to share and customize depending on who you're trying to reach. 

Social medial content calendars

A structured and well-organized overview of upcoming social media content that is regularly updated and available to all stakeholders is essential. This should be as detailed as possible, taking advantage of the unique, individual features of each channel (for example: Instagram Stories, Facebook Live, LinkedIn posts etc.). While you could plan this as you go, having a well-organized calendar will give you an idea of your complete story and where you need to fill in gaps. 

Owned media content

These assets are anything you control without a third part. This may include a new or updated website, blog posts, podcasts and longer thought leadership.

Distribute your materials

Once you’ve completed your media materials, thoughtful distribution is paramount to a successful campaign. Today, audiences are inundated with information, and it can be all too easy for your story—no matter how brilliant or beautifully told—to get lost in the crowd.

So how does one stand out? Through a combination of broad and targeted outreach.

News release distribution

The traditional news release is still around for one simple reason: it works! Today’s news cycle moves at an absurd rate, and journalists rely on releases to keep on top of their beat’s biggest news stories as they’re breaking.

Targeted one-to-one pitches

While news releases are great for achieving a wide reach, targeted, customized and personalized pitches are one of PR pros’ most effective tools for earning press coverage.

Pro tip: distribution services like Nexis Newswire® now allow you to track opens and click-throughs within individual messages, allowing you to glean who is most interested in your pitches (or when it’s time to go back to the drawing board on a specific angle).

Strategic follow-ups

Nexis Newsdesk™ includes tools that help you identify journalists covering (or not covering) your campaign, gain insights into their style and activity and contact them to shape and share the message. Whenever you see an article of interest, you can click on the journalist’s name to open a Journalist Card that provides all their relevant information. Sending customized pitches to the journalists you know are interested in your campaign is a great way to spread your messages even further

Amplify your campaign through paid media

It bears repeating: no modern PR campaign is complete without some paid media support to get your message in front of the right audience. That’s why wire services are increasingly offering paid media amplification. For example, Nexis® Newswire helps you drive the right traffic to your news releases and announcements, as well as distribute your news releases and announcements to high-traffic sites within the Google Ads network. You also can monitor how your news releases are performing.

 Key features allow you to:

• Maximize your ROI: Run a paid Google ad promoting your news release on up to five premium sites.
• Target the right audience: Target any country, state, city, and zip or postal code worldwide, and/or audiences based on different demographics. News releases can be published in up to nine different languages.
• Analyze your results: In just 24 hours you can check out a report showing you the number of clicks and the exact number of people who saw your news release. Social pick-up is also reported

With the combined tools of Nexis Newsdesk™ and Nexis® Newswire, you can put your media monitoring campaign in motion with unstoppable results.