I think i have talked about strategies in another blog that i did at the start of PR. Strategies are important to a company pretty much because if you don't have a strategy you can consider yourself getting nowhere.
In the book, the definition for strategy in public relations is:
"Strategy is a plan or method by which you are going to achieve a specific goal in a contested environment".
I wrote previously in the first few blogs thats strategies to identify competitors may not be so obvious. I used the cinema example the other time. Like what are the competitors for a cinema? The most obvious answer would be other cinemas. Whereas, in fact competition is mostly likely people's television and play-station games or the computer. These are the things that are keeping your customers away from your cinema, because of the other forms of entertainment.
Strategies are also important in other fields of PR such as when picking out the right media outlets to cover your company image and also using the right angle to gain media interest. Strategies are most important at this point because framing your story in a interesting or unique way will allow you to get media attention. Like say for instance, OCD created an interesting press release and sent it around to different magazines and newspapers. 1. The owner sent it to the mediums newspaper and magazines and 2. She wrote each press release's starting intro in different ways so that it fits the genre of the newspaper. E.g she wrote to a health magazine she would use the links between health and organizing. If she wrote to a men's magazine, she would use a different approach like how woman likes a clean organized bachelor pad instead of a messy one.
To conclude this chapter, i will write down how PRs should go about developing a strategy.
1. Research- As previously mentioned in my blogs, research in vital as it may be the success or failing of your company, depending on the amount of research and whether it was useful.
2. Analysis- There are many approaches to doing this step. One such way is SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats).
3. Goal Setting- Make a particular goal for your company such as "improving awareness of company brand" etc.
4. Setting objectives- Use the SMART approach. Objectives must be specific, measurable, achievable, result-oriented and time-frame.
5. Identifying publics or audiences- Consider who your targeted audience is for this particular campaign or event.
6. Developing Strategies- Develop a plan to reach your specific PR goal. The goal can be both long-term or short-term.
7. Devising and implementing tactics- Remember tactics and strategies are not the same. Strategy is the overall plan of what you intend to do while tactics is each particular step your going do in the strategy. For instance, a strategy may be to do surveys. Tactics would be face-to-face surveys or telephone and mail surveys.
8. Monitoring- This phase is carried out in the implementation stage to see whether changes need to be made etc.
9. Evaluation- Finally the evaluation is where you see if the plan successfully worked or f objectives were achieved.
i absolutely agree with your point on competition. it is everywhere. as PR practitioners, we have to be aware of our surroundings and think out of the box. we cannot and must not just look at things from one angle or even at a straightforward angle where just any person in this world is able to see.
ReplyDeletewe should be able to identify internal and external threats and by using cognitive thinking to find ways to avert those threats and to to attract the the target audience.