Unleashing Your Public Relations Potential

Part 3
Designing a Broad-Based Public Relations and Marketing Campaign

The third in a four part series on using creative marketing and public relations to enhance your organization's industry standing, drive sales and increase shareholder value, by Raker Goldstein & Co., Inc.

Part1 : Part2 : Part3 : Part 4

Once you have selected a public relations practitioner, present your goals or "wish list" so together you can choose the best course of action to reach your marketing and public relations goals. A smart, well-designed campaign can fuel and complement any out-reach initiatives already in place in addition to being tremendously versatile. Whether your goal is to improve your organization's standing within its home-base community, strengthen communications with employees or stimulate retailer enthusiasm for your product line, public relations can be used to create and stream-line the necessary communications.

1. Enhance Employee Communications. Keeping your employees informed about corporate and internal news and industry developments is vital. You can communicate with your employees in a variety of ways: organizing special events that celebrate company milestones, writing and distributing an employee newsletter that announces new facilities and recognition programs, or organizing focus groups to better learn about staff concerns. Your public relations practitioner will be able to assess the quality and efficiency of your internal communications plan and recommend ways it might be improved

2. Taking A Public Stand. Your marketing/public relations practitioner can identify high visibility conferences, speaking platforms, workshops and symposia as well as local associations and organizations presenting synergistic relationship building opportunities for management and key personnel. Consider whether a senior manager from your company would be a good candidate for these high-profile industry gatherings that give your company a voice and industry presence to share company developments, thoughts on industry issues and trends and provide insights authoritatively on industry evolution and the role your company plays in that.

3. Neighborly Grass Roots Marketing. Whether you have a product that requires clinical research/test marketing from the immediate population, a restaurant that needs to strengthen lunch business, a retail store which could benefit from relationships with corporate gift-giving decision makers or almost any other business need, grass roots marketing can often be a useful tool in relationship building with your hometown environment. This type of marketing might combine publicity efforts with the thoughtful outreach needed to attract and cultivate relationships with people who represent a key area of business growth for your company. Creative marketing helps keeps these relationships fresh and flexible, allowing you to solidly build your business one customer at a time.

4. High-Visibility Product Placement. Ask your public relations practitioner about product placements as a means of increasing visibility. This image-enhancing practice involves working with prop houses catering to film/television and editorial photo shoots which seek products for use as props and in background footage. Your public relations pro can also help identify and align partnerships with appropriate companies to offer your product/service as a giveaway in sweepstakes contests.

5. Financial Relations Considerations. Did you know your company's image and industry standing is pivotal to the type of investor support it could receive should you decide to take it public in the future? Public relations is critical in the process of building relationships within the financial and investment communities. Ask your public relations practitioner about ways your campaign could address your short and long-term goals in the areas of reaching venture capitalists, investment bankers, equity research analysts, the financial news media and other financial industry professionals.

Designing a strategic and flexible campaign is key to helping reach your marketing and public relations goals on a variety of levels. A versatile campaign can do just as much for your rapport with employees as it can to enhance and build relationships with a variety of sales-stimulating constituencies locally, nationally and internationally.

For more information about public relations and how it can help your company, contact Raker Goldstein (www.rakergoldstein.com) at (201) 784-1818.

Part1 : Part2 : Part3 : Part 4