Please feel free to publish this article and resource box in your ezine, newsletter, offline publication or website. A copy would be appreciated at bobkelly@TNI.net. Word count is 995 including guidelines and resource box. Robert A. Kelly © 2003. Managers Who Spend PR $$ Wisely
If you are a department, division or subsidiary manager, your budget is a precious possession whether you work for a business, a non-profit or an association. So why stand by while your public relations team spends too much time and treasure on tactics like press releases, column mentions and brochures? Especially when you could be using an aggressive PR blueprint to persuade your most important outside audiences to your way of thinking, then move them to take actions that lead to your success?
The good news is, that aggressive blueprint shines
PR spotlight directly on those outside groups of people who have a large say in how successful you’re going to be – namely, on your key external target audiences. It reads this way: people act on their own perception of facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done. When we create, change or reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action very people whose behaviors affect organization most, public relations mission is accomplished.
Look at kinds of behaviors that are possible using such a blueprint. A big jump up in capital contributions, increased membership queries, new prospects showing up, more current buying and even repeat purchases occurring, and even new proposals for joint ventures.
Spending your PR $$ wisely implies that you are getting serious about your public relations by changing emphasis from communications tactics to a workable plan for reaching those outside groups of people with a large say about how successful you will be. I refer, of course, to those key external target audiences of yours.
What do they think of you, anyway? Ask your PR staff why they believe that’s important to you? Hopefully, they’ll agree that target audience perceptions usually do lead to behaviors that can help or hinder you in achieving your operating objectives. In other words, is your PR team guided by solid fundamentals rather than mechanics like special events and communications tactics?
Next, decide together, then prioritize exactly which external audiences have most impact on your operation, and let’s do some work on audience at top of that list.
Since you must monitor perceptions by interacting with members of that audience, you can elect to join your PR folks as they ask some penetrating questions: “Do you know anything about us? How do you feel about our services and/or products? Have you had any contact with our people? Did it work out to your satisfaction?”
Remember that you can also employ a professional survey firm to interact with members of your target audience. Only drawback here is considerable cost involved in taking this route versus using your own PR folks who, as we know, are already in perception and behavior business.
