How PR Fundamentals Build the Foundation for Personal Success
Published on January 28, 2022, at 9:28 a.m.
by Megan Murphy.
It’s Monday morning. Rays of sunlight pry through a blackout shade as you struggle to roll out of bed.
The best way to fight the Monday blues? Start with a goal. The first step in crafting a public relations campaign strategy? Start with a goal. Implementing the building blocks of a PR strategy into daily life can serve as an outline for achieving both personal and career success.
Research
Conducting research to determine a client’s needs and wants is necessary to determine what steps must be taken to accomplish the goal of a PR campaign. Similarly, in one’s personal life, it’s important to ask oneself, “How will I reach my goal?” or “What steps do I need to take?”
If the goal of a PR campaign is to build product awareness, a personal goal may be to facilitate a new mutually beneficial relationship.
Research for the campaign goal may include finding a target audience and which platforms to utilize in order to easily reach them. For any personal goal, whether it be getting in shape, waking up earlier, choosing a career path or learning a new skill, research is an essential part of finding the tools to ensure success. If the goal is to get in shape, research entails finding a gym or workout plan tailored to your personal needs. Likewise, an app that can track dieting, such as myfitnesspal, can serve as a great resource to stay accountable.
Planning
After research has shown the best way to reach an audience, a PR professional crafts a plan that outlines how that audience will be reached and when. If the best way to build brand awareness according to research is TikTok, then the plan will state when the platform will be utilized and what content will be posted.
If your personal goal is becoming more physically fit, you will plan what time you will go to the gym that week, and what workouts may be most effective.
Implementation
Implementation means action. After composing the content to raise brand awareness on TikTok, the PR professional is ready to post it. In implementing your fitness plan, the alarm will go off at the time you scheduled, you’ll put on the exercise outfit you neatly set out the night before, you’ll tie up your tennis shoes, and you’ll hit that treadmill.
If the campaign goal also includes getting a certain amount of views on that TikTok post (because SMART goals are measurable), then the PR professional will monitor the content to see how much of the brand’s target audience is being reached on the platform. Continuing with the gym analogy, a way to monitor your progress is snapping workout photos on a cellphone or tracking workouts with a smartwatch. Milestones such as weight loss or strength gain are also metrics to record while implementing your fitness plan.
Evaluation
The plan has been set into action, and it’s time to assess. Did the TikTok campaign raise brand awareness? Have you started to see results from your exercise routine?
Nobody is perfect. Maybe the online metrics indicate that the campaign did not raise as much awareness as desired; maybe the workouts did not show intended results. What’s important is being able to identify the missteps and determine what to do better.
A week later, it’s yet again Monday morning. Just when the Monday blues are about to put a damper on the day, you think of all the possibilities this fresh start holds. You’ve set your goal — now all you have to do is research, plan, implement and evaluate your action to achieve it. Applying these essential PR strategic steps can help PR professionals achieve both career and personal success.
