What are your goals and objectives? What is your point of difference? What makes you different from your competitor? What is it you want to achieve from your communication? Think specifically about this from the point of view of reputation and relationships.
Who is it that you want to reach? Where are they? Why them? It helps to be specific here, break your customers or clients up into key groups. You need to identify basic demographic information such as how old they are, what they do, and how much they make, but also what they enjoy, what they read or watch and how they prefer you communicate with them?
What is it that you need them to know about you? What do you want from them? What feeling do you want them to have when they experience your services?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions then some research is necessary. Getting your information wrong here can mean an incorrectly targeted campaign and therefore poor results.
From here a public relations professional can help you to identify some strategies and tactics to communicate with your target audiences that, that will achieve your public relations objectives. This is the How of the process. In terms of tactics there is literally an endless list from media relations and direct communications devices such as news and e-letters, to community meetings, online social network campaigns, sponsorship and events, lobbying, and the list goes on and often also includes quirky approaches and sometimes stunts.
An important point to remember is that a good public relations campaign should also include evaluation of the tactics used so you can constantly test, measure and change future activities.
