7 Unique PR Goals That Will Get Results for Your Clients
May 15, 2020Identifying and setting PR goals is the first step to creating a PR campaign. It’s important to clarify your clients’ objectives depending on where they are in their business.
Identifying the objectives of your specific campaign will help with your overall strategy for your clients. This allows you to do the right type of PR to match and align with the outcome that you and your clients are looking for.
Setting a goal will help you track the results and progress of your campaign. You want to be sure you and your client are on the same page. You don’t want any ambiguity with what their goals are and what you’re going to be doing to meet those goals.
Misunderstanding of objectives and how you’re going to work for the client is one of the biggest factors that lead to client dissatisfaction. If your client has certain expectations from you and communication is lacking, they won’t be happy.
So having these goals in place as you're building out your strategy for different campaigns and your overall PR approach is going to also get your clients bought into what you're doing and get them satisfied with your work. The overall goal is to get consistent, predictable, recurring retainer revenue.
7 Types Of PR Goals
These PR goals are broken down into two categories based on the types of clients that you serve.
The first category of PR clients is brands with physical products. For my business, the specific niches we work for are baby and kids, beauty and cosmetics, and health and wellness.
The second category of PR clients is experts. I don’t serve this type of client in my business, but you might! They could be coaches, authors, speakers, thought leaders, or founders of companies who are looking to share their knowledge and be known as an expert.
Related: How To Expertly Manage Your Client Relationships
PR Goals for Brands
When you know the client’s goals, then you can build your strategy to help you achieve those goals.
1. Promoting a Launch
One of the types of PR goals for brands would be the promotion of a new product launch.
The first thing you would do is develop the strategy and figure out the timing of when the product will launch. Your strategy includes finding the outlets you’ll be pitching and what that approach will be like, and it includes the angles you’ll use with the stories you’re going to tell.
2. Generating Brand & Product Awareness
Pitch stories that will help generate brand/product awareness and interest to help sell products.
Remember: as PR professionals, one metric we’re NOT measured against is sales. That should be communicated upfront to the client. A PR professional’s primary focus is to create consumer awareness of the brand.
An example we had for one of our clients was when they didn’t have a new product to launch, so we came up with a new way to promote an old product. They had a hair mask that was already out for two years, so we came up with the idea to heat the hair mask by microwaving it, then putting it warm on your wet hair and wrapping it with saran wrap. Now it’s a deep penetrating hair mask. They absolutely loved that idea.
You have to be creative and come up with new angles to generate interest in existing products and help drive awareness for the brand itself. This helps to build awareness and name recognition.
PR Goals For Experts
The other type of clients that have specific goals is experts. Some types of experts would be authors, coaches, fitness instructors, and chefs.
These are the goals to consider promoting for them.
1. Promotion of a New Book or Offer
For authors, they could have a new book they’re promoting. For other experts, it could be a new offering like a new course, a new ebook, or a new coaching program.
It’s where an expert would share their expertise through a sales vehicle like a book or coaching program or a group experience or VIP day.
Those are the types of PR goals experts will have. They want to sell their books or fill up their programs.
2. Establish Authority
Another goal for experts is to establish them as an authority in their space. They want to be the leader and go-to authority in their niche, so use PR to help achieve that!
You would build out your strategy around establishing them as a leader. They will want to be quoted in all the top publications and get lots of exposure and awareness in their niche.
3. Increase Audience Size
Another goal would be to increase the size of their audience. The strategies involved with that would be growing their social media presence and growing their email list.
As you establish their authority in front of their ideal target audience, they would need to have a freebie to offer like a cheat sheet or top 5 recipes. Then their email list grows as more people fill in an opt-in form for the freebie and give their email address.
4. Generate Interest in Their Offerings
You also may want to generate interest in their offerings, outside of a specific launch. Whatever they have to offer, like a one-on-one coaching call, a retreat, or a group program.
Your job as a professional is to come up with PR goals and ideas that are relevant, interesting, and have timely angles. This is what will help you stick around longer than 6 months with your clients. It’s all about learning about your clients and realizing what it’s going to take to be successful for them. That all comes back to the alignment of the PR goals with your clients.
Then, you create the strategy that will help achieve those goals. Integrate your clients’ thoughts and ideas into that strategy so that their expectations are aligned with your results.