It’s been a fair while since we last posted a Kilchurn Marketing blog, but we’re back and ready to help you successfully navigate the world of PR and marketing! We’re proud to offer the full marketing mix for our clients which means we can help you grow an audience on the latest social media platforms, uplevel your email marketing and boost traffic to your website. But we also have a skillset that despite becoming rarer, is a key element of any brand’s growth plan. We’re talking about PR (public relations if you’re new to comms terms), which is activity carried out with the aim of controlling how information about a person or company gets out to the public, especially to the media. Effective PR can do anything from helping you sell out a new product in hours to positioning your brand’s founder as an expert in their field. In this blog, we’re sharing why knowing your ideal customers inside out is a key element of a successful PR campaign. Let’s get started:
Targeting the right media outlets
When you know your ideal customer, you can sit down and research the media outlets – magazines, newspapers, websites and even radio and TV – that they follow and trust. Do they love sitting down with a magazine, or are they more likely to be reading content on a website? In today’s digital world, we also look at the influencers and social media accounts that a client’s customers engage with. This knowledge means you can create a targeted PR campaign with the key outlets, journalists and content creators. That makes you more streamlined and efficient and increases your chances of getting your message in front of your target audience in sources they view as credible.
Tailoring your messages
Once you have created a list of the media outlets and content creators you want to target, it’s time to identify and refine the message you will share. This is another area where it’s very helpful to know your ideal customer because you can ensure that you tailor your messaging so that it resonates with their specific interests, needs and preferences. This increases the likelihood that your PR pitch will catch the attention of journalists, who want to write articles that their readers find helpful, interesting or challenges their point of view. Carefully written and pitched messages will grab their attention and resonate with them, and that leads to more press coverage that gets your brand in front of your ideal customers. For example, if your target customers are professional sports horse producers they will be interested in very different content to a pony-mad 12-year-old who’s learning about the horsey world!
Building brand trust
In a similar vein to its role in helping you create effective messaging, knowing your audience will help you build trust and credibility via PR. When you know your ideal customers – and the journalists writing the articles they read – you can create content and campaigns that speak directly to their pain points and aspirations. This tailored approach will help establish your brand as an authority and trustworthy source within your niche or industry. In time, you’ll find that journalists come to you for expert comment on key issues in your sector.
Using resources efficiently
PR seems simple on the face of it – you write a press release, gather images and pitch your press release out to journalists. But PR can be surprisingly resource intensive, particularly now that there are so many digital channels, content creators and traditional media channels. Building up a trusted relationship with journalists takes time, as does the process of ensuring your messaging, pitch and images are tailored to each media outlet. You could also find yourself managing a comms crisis when an influencer your brand works with behaves badly or liaising with podcasters about speaking opportunities for your client. Knowing your ideal customer helps you allocate your resources more efficiently by focusing on the channels and platforms where your target audience is most active and receptive.
Adapting to change
There’s another business-boosting benefit to keeping your finger on the pulse of your audience and making sure you review your perfect customer every year or two… it’s because their preferences and behaviours can change! That means you may need to adapt your PR strategy over time, and it will also influence your marketing messaging too. That way you ensure your brand stays relevant in a dynamic media and comms environment. For example, if there’s an exciting new social channel that younger audiences are using, brands selling to teenagers need to be early adopters.
So, to summarise this blog: it doesn’t matter what sector you operate in, how well you know journalists or how much time you spend on PR, if you’re not clear on who your perfect customers are, you’re not making the most of your efforts. Plus, that knowledge will supercharge all your marketing efforts, from your social media posts to your homepage copy and everything in between. So, take an hour or two and really dig down on your customers. They will thank you for it!