We’ve had a lot of you say you have clients and prospects coming to you in need of a PR plan.
They’ve survived the pandemic slowdown, see the light at the end of the tunnel, and need you to help them refocus, rebuild, and re-EARN through a communications plan that drives real business goals.
So over the next three weeks I’ll be digging into the good, bad, ugly, and well…”rules” of building a PR plan that makes you stand out from the crowd.
Afterall, you are a Spin Sucks reader. You are above average, forward-thinking, and know a real PR plan is one that uses the PESO model to directly drive business goals.
(Last week Gini wrote a killer must-read post about how to write a plan to build your agency, so head on over there if you are your client and need to knock your own agency socks off. Let’s scale baby, scale.)
Let’s go!
(Can you tell I love planning? Seriously LOVE! So apologies for the obnoxious levels of Laura cheerleader energy rolling off this article.)
Understand the GSOT
Don’t ya love acronyms? But this one is super useful when developing your PR plan, so work with me here.
GSOT has such a great ring to it, right?
GSOT Stands for Goals, Strategy, Objectives, Tactics
These are the building blocks of your PR plan, so it’s important to understand what they are, how they are different, and how they work together.
You’ll find slight variations in explanations of these from different people, but this is what resonates best for me:
- Goals: These are your primary outcomes
- Strategy: How you will achieve your goals
- Objectives: Measurable steps you take as part of your strategy to achieve your goals.
- Tactics: Tools you use to pursue the objective associated with your strategy
Your PR plan must include all of these elements.
There is a tendency, especially if you don’t spend a lot of time flexing your strategic muscle, to create a “PR plan” (not quotation marks) stuffed to the brim with tactics and not much else.
Determine Your PR Plan Goals
Let’s start at the very beginning.
That’s a very good place to start.
The biggest mistake smart, well-meaning people make when they develop a communications plan is not first to look at goals.
It’s easy to get lost in the excitement and creativity of the plan development and the plethora of marketing tactics available for modern PR (ohhh shiny). And completely lose track of the reason we do public relations in the first place: To grow businesses.
So the first thing you must do before you even begin to think through tactics and timeline is determined goals.
These should be tied to real business results.
If you are building the strategy for a client or in-house as part of a larger organization, you need to work with the executive team to determine these goals.
This might be new for some clients, especially if they are accustomed to communications professionals who work in the fairytale land of vanity metrics, AVEs, and impressions and ride a unicorn named “brand awareness” back and forth to work every day.
Think Both Long- and Short-Term
You want to think in the long-term and then break it down to shorter milestones.
Let’s say in five years you want to make X in revenue, launch X product lines, and have 50 percent of the market in X cities,
Great!
Now we work backward and break that down first to where you need to be at the end of year one to make that happen.
Then divide that up into monthly or quarterly milestones and objectives to track.
It’s crucial you work in both the long-term and short-term space.
Things must be done in the context of the long-term but planned within the scale, realities, and agility of the short-term.
Help Your Client Help You
As a side note: if your client is struggling to understand how your planning process is different than other professionals (and why the heck you need all this information), use this same process.
I did this with my husband to help him understand what I’ do for a living since it’s SOOO different than what his communications department at work does.
So I asked him, tell me what your business goals are. the ones you measure, like with real numbers. And then we worked backward from there.
It works well. It helps even the most non-communications savvy person understand what you do, why it matters, and why you are a crucial part of their success. (Pull up a seat at the leadership table, please and thank you.)
Strategy Drives Your Goals
Your goals are your “what,” your strategy is “your” how.
A strategy is still not tactics though.
Strategy is “how” in approach, whereas tactics are “how” in action
So a SUPER general strategy statement might look something like this:
Execute an integrated communications plan which uses the PESO model to drive leads, nurture them through the funnel, and convert them to sales.
I then like to go through each media type and write out how it supports the overall strategy. This might not even be something I share as part of the official document. It simply helps me keep the purpose in focus when I work through objective and tactics.
If your plan is a play, the strategy is your plot and the different media types are the actors.
We will use owned media to…
We will use earned media to…
…and so on
Objectives Are Proof of an Effective Strategy
Let’s say your goal is to increase revenue by X dollars by the end of 2021.
What needs to happen to achieve that goal?
Objectives force you to break down goals in a specific and measurable way.
They serve as “proof” you are executing your strategy effectively (or indications you need to make adjustments).
Here’s an example:
I want X dollars of revenue.
How do I achieve that?
- How many widgets do I need to sell to do that?
- What’s the number of leads I need to bring in?
- Can I increase my conversion rate from leads to sales?
- What measurable markers do I need to achieve to reach that goal?
Objectives are always going to be centered around action verbs, such as:
- Drive
- Increase
- Convert
These objectives, in turn, determine your tactics and help you focus, so you execute your strategy in a way that drives results aligned with your goals.
Tactics Achieve Your Objectives
It is not until we’ve laid out allllll of this we finally look at tactics.
Unfortunately, tactics are where many people like to start.
What we’ve seen while coaching clients and students is that the people who struggle with PR plan development the most are those who get caught up in a few tactics and try to work backward. They develop objectives that fit tactics and then get stuck trying to make some huge leaps from unaligned or non-strategic objectives to goals.
Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t work. And in theory, everyone knows it. But it’s super hard when you’re really jazzed about a tactic you love to not want to make it fit (and feel disappointed if it doesn’t).
This is why we recommend not even thinking about tactics until you’ve set your goals, strategy, and objectives.
Tactics Are Strategy’s Action Items
To outline tactics we want to go back to the strategy we laid out, as well as the measurable objectives that strategy will drive.
What I like to do is layout each of my objectives and then build tactics that integrate together to drive each.
So let’s say you have a software as a service company and your goal is to double the number of subscribers to your service in 2021.
The objectives you’ve laid out are:
- Generate 10,000 leads
- Convert 10 percent of those leads
- Retain 80 percent of current subscribers
Then you look at the four media types and build out tactics to achieve those objectives.
Start with owned media, since that’s the alpha and omega of so much of what we do and then build out from there. Integrate each media type together and adjust as you do.
Don’t Forget PR Metrics
As you build out tactics for each media type, you’ll also build out metrics to measure those tactics and follow your prospect through your marketing funnel.
Metrics whose growth supports the objectives, which in turn support the goal.
Things like Domain Authority, keywords search rank, and website visitors and engagement are metrics you might want to measure for owned media.
Whereas, click rate, downloads, and conversion rate at certain goals or milestones would make sense for paid media
You’ll layout metrics for each media type and use them, along with your objectives to measure and analyze the progress of your PR plan.
This allows you to adjust, based on data, to keep your strategy focused, on track, and driving your goals.
What Questions Do You Have?
Because planning is in demand, I’m going to focus my next several blog posts on common struggles communications pros have when building a PR plan, especially one that is built upon the PESO model.
Leave your questions here or in our free Slack community.
Better yet! Become PESO Model certified and learn how to build your own integrated communications plan using the PESO model.
