Goals and tactics and strategies–oh my! In order for any public relations program to be successful and drive business results for a company, all of these pieces need to thoughtfully intertwine. But, setting PR goals, aligning tactics and developing strategies is an extensive process, and can even sound a bit intimidating. How do you set PR goals? How do you decide what tactics should be a part of your PR program? How do you know your PR goals are successful?
We’ve developed a guide to take you through every step.
How to Craft Effective Strategies
PR Goals: Setting the Destination
When most people think about PR goals, they think about media coverage. And, what company doesn’t want media coverage?
But PR goals need to be more than just a number of media hits. They need to align with a company’s business goals–like growth plans, revenue goals and exit strategies.
Your PR program will, of course, result in media hits–but when PR goals and business goals align these media hits will be more than quantitative. They’ll be stories that tell the messages you want out in the market and those that are precisely relevant to the audiences you want to reach. This is where you’ll see your PR program drive the needle for your business.
What are PR Goals?
PR goals are specific objectives that a company aims to achieve through public relations efforts. These goals are designed to drive visibility, enhance reputation, improve communication with the industry and key stakeholders, and support overall business objectives. PR goals are curated specifically to an organization based on their business goals, but a few PR goals include:
- Build Overall Brand Awareness: Many companies look to PR to increase the visibility of their brand, products, or services. This typically happens when a company is newly launching or has a new product/service. PR efforts can grow the familiarity of a brand among consumers and key audiences so they begin to recognize the brand and the products and/or services they offer–and continue to think about them.
- Be Known in the Market as ____: Companies have a vision for how they want to be seen in the market. For example, they want to be known as innovators or the leader in their industry. How companies want to be seen in the market will typically change as their business changes–and PR can shift along with it.
- Grow Recognition in a Specific Geographic Market or Industry: Companies regularly enter new geographic markets and industries–and look to PR to drive visibility where they haven’t had it before. Through PR, companies can drive awareness in these new spaces–and drive new business as a result.
- Enhance Reputation: Beyond building awareness and shifting how a company is seen in the market, PR can also improve an organization’s reputation. This is typically a goal when companies are working through a larger crisis and want to address negativity in the market.
- Expand Executive Visibility: Executives are the face of the company–and many companies want to hyperfocus their brand around specific executives. PR can amplify the unique expertise and opinions of C-Suite executives and other leaders to boost their visibility–and the company’s–in the market.
These goals show up in the data, too. In our survey of 250 marketing executives, the top PR goals for the year ahead are brand awareness (44%), lead generation (35%) and market credibility (35%).
How to Set PR Goals?
In order to set PR goals, it’s important that you first answer fundamental questions about your business like:
- What are your growth plans?
- What are your revenue goals?
- Who do you want to be speaking to? (type of industry, company, role, etc.)
- Do you have an exit strategy that you’re working toward?
While these bigger, more anecdotal business goals can feel nebulous at first, they need to be understood in order to create PR goals.
PR goals will go beyond securing a specific amount of press hits, and align directly with where your business wants to go. For example, if you’re looking to enter the retail industry, a PR goal might include creating visibility to the use case a company has for the retail industry. Or, if you’re looking to up your CEO’s visibility among investors, a goal might be to make the CEO a thought leader.
And PR goals aren’t set in stone–in fact, they shouldn’t be. They should change and evolve as your company and business goals do. For a step-by-step version of this process for business-to-business companies, see our guide on how to set B2B PR goals.
Example of SMART PR Goals:
SMART is an acronym that comprises Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound techniques. Utilizing SMART goals is a method for clearly outlining your PR campaign’s objectives, establishing a means of quantifying your progress, and evaluating your success.
Example of a SMART goal would be:
- Secure 5 pieces of media coverage in retail outlets in a week about a new retail technology
PR Tactics: The Execution Plan
With PR goals in place, the next step is execution. You know your end goal–now how will you get there?
Building a PR plan is like putting together a puzzle. There are many pieces that work together to reach a goal, each with a specific purpose. In PR, those pieces are tactics.
What are PR Tactics?
PR tactics are the activities that a company does in order to reach a PR goal, whether that be building brand awareness, shifting a company narrative or building out executive visibility–or anything else. They represent the execution of a PR program.
If you were to ask what a PR team does on a daily basis, the majority of what they’re working on are these specific PR tactics. This includes everything from writing press releases to securing media interviews to hosting events.
There are a handful of PR tactics that companies can tap into, but it’s not necessary to tap into them all at once–if at all.
How to Develop PR Tactics?
There’s a wide array of PR tactics that teams are regularly working with every day. Not everything has to start with a press release. The tactics are like a toolbox: there is a science to choosing which PR tactics to use to drive the PR results you want. The full list below covers the tactics we use most; choose the ones that serve your goals, not the ones that sound the most fun.
A List of PR Tactics
These are the PR tactics we reach for most, with the levers of media relations nested where they belong. No program runs all of them; the tactics table in your strategy decides which ones serve your goals.
- Press Releases: Whether it’s for a new product, a change in company leadership or a campaign (the list goes on..), press releases are a way to get your carefully crafted news out to the media and key stakeholders at a wider scale.
- Product Launch Campaigns: coordinated announcements that turn a product release into a market story rather than a feature list.
- Partnership and Milestone Announcements: customer wins, integrations, funding and growth milestones that show momentum, building brand credibility over the long term.
- Media Relations: the sustained work of earning coverage in the outlets your target audience actually reads. It’s a common misconception that press releases drive coverage. Media relations is what drives coverage, and there are lots of different ways to do it.
- Media Pitching: tailored story ideas sent to individual journalists who cover your space. The goal of the pitch is to hook the reporter and give them the story angle and the highest value information.
- Exclusives and Embargoes: offering one outlet the story first, or briefing several under embargo, to earn deeper coverage for planned news.
- Media Briefings: This involves setting up a 1-1 interview or a briefing document on a company.
- Press conference: These are used when there is a large interest in a news item, company, political event or local or national government announcement.
- Newsjacking: A company won’t always have news to write a press release about or pitch to the media. Finding trending industry and business news topics to latch companies and executives onto to share their unique POV is another way to get them talking in the market.
- Customer Success Stories: Customer success stories are an opportunity to showcase how your company provides value for your customers. These stories come from the POV of the customers themselves and provide much more validation about a company than you can do alone. This includes showcasing a problem that a customer had–and how they were able to solve it by working with your company or using your products/services.
- Data Stories and Original Research: surveys, indexes and reports a company develops and owns. Journalists need data, and done correctly it is not packaged as self-promotional, so journalists are highly interested in it.
- Thought Leadership Programs: developing executives into recognized voices on the topics your buyers care about, across contributed articles (also called bylines), interviews, and social platforms.
- Speaking Engagements: panels, keynotes and upcoming industry events that put your experts in front of the audiences and reporters who cover them.
- Podcasts: long-form interviews that build credibility with niche audiences. Podcasts have become a more powerful tool as they are often transcribed and are accessible by traditional search and AI.
- Awards: Awards give another piece of validation to a company for a product, an executive or even the workplace. There’s many niche, industry-focused awards as well as larger business awards. Awards are high value in the sales process as they show consumers or prospects that the company is “the best” and validated by a recognized body.
- Publicity Stunts: high-risk, high-reward creative moments designed to earn outsized media attention. When they fit the brand, they work; when they don’t, they become the story.
- AI-Engine Visibility: making sure ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude describe your company accurately when buyers ask. Traditional media makes up roughly 43% of the sources ChatGPT says it references for its answers, which makes earned coverage the tactic that feeds every AI answer about you.
What is the Relationship between PR Goals, Tactics, & Strategies?
You can’t have one without the other. PR goals, tactics and strategies all work hand in hand as part of your larger PR program. PR goals are what make sure you’re driving forward towards success with your PR tactics and strategies. Any company doing PR needs to make sure that all three are always working together–as well as keeping up with evolving business needs and goals.
PR Strategies: The Big Picture
Think of PR strategies as the big plan that all of your PR work lives together under. While PR goals are what you’re working towards with your tactics, PR strategies are what makes it all make sense together. It’s like the master plan that can help guide decisions and opportunities–all in support of your PR goals.
What are PR Strategies?
A PR strategy is the overarching way in which you’re achieving your PR goals. These strategies loop together all of the PR tactics you’re working under one umbrella. A good PR strategy will help to define the narratives that your company should be putting out into the market through your tactics, to reach your PR goals.
Having a PR strategy in place will not only help to inform the direction of your PR tactics but ensure that they’re all working harmoniously together to achieve the intended result.
Types of PR Strategies
There are different kinds of PR strategies that you can tap into as you work towards your PR goals, including:
- Building Momentum: In order to build momentum for a company in any market, you need to consistently be showcasing the company’s value through the lens of new products, customer wins and success stories, and more. Showcase your growth story to industry peers and current prospective customers.
- Ongoing Awareness: The recognition of your brand relies on how often you’re seen in the market–and the strong stories that you’re telling there. Sure, you might not always have news, but you should always be in the media. By driving ongoing awareness, you’re tapping into many PR tactics that consistently get your company (and potentially executives) out into the market.
- Crisis communication: This is a very specific strategy for a very specific time in a company’s life: crisis. With this strategy it’s less about driving momentum or awareness for a brand, and more about safeguarding them. This strategy includes doubling down on very nuanced narratives.
How to Create a PR Strategy
A PR strategy does not need to be complicated, but it does need to be written down. Six steps get you there.
- 1. Start with business goals. Take the goals from the top of this guide and pick the five or six that PR can realistically influence. Every decision below traces back to them.
- 2. Define the audience. Name who needs to hear from you: the industries, the roles, the outlets they read and the events they attend.
- 3. Decide what the market should believe. Write down the two or three things you want your target audience to believe about your company. Every story you pitch should install one of those beliefs.
- 4. Choose tactics that serve the beliefs. Pull from the tactics list above, and reject anything that does not advance a belief or a goal, no matter how fun it sounds.
- 5. Put dates on it. A PR plan is your PR strategy with a calendar attached: which tactic runs when, tied to the product launches, reports and events already on your schedule.
- 6. Measure against the goals. Decide upfront which PR KPIs prove the strategy is working, and review them quarterly against the goals from step one, not against coverage counts.
Building one for a business-to-business company? Our guide to B2B PR strategy walks the full process step by step, including how to write the narratives and audit what the AI engines say about you.
How to Craft Effective Strategies
Crafting the most effective strategy comes down–once again–to your PR goals, which is why it’s so important to really spend time personalizing them to your company and what you want to achieve. Here are a few ways to make sure your PR strategies are driving results.
- Set Clear Objectives: Define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives for your PR efforts. And remember, make sure they’re always aligned with your business goals.
- Understand Your Audience: Identify and understand who your target audience is and what they need to hear about your company.
- Select the Right Tactics: There’s a lot of PR tactics, many more effective than others in support of specific goals. Make sure only the tactics that will move the needle for your business are part of your strategy.
- Measure Success: Determine how you’ll measure success, and define key performance indicators (KPIs) for your PR strategy.
- Be Flexible: Your business will inevitably change, and your PR strategy will too. Be prepared to adapt as needed.
Conclusion
PR goals, strategies, and tactics are interconnected elements that function together as part of your PR program. Each part is essential in making sure that your PR program is not only successful, but successful for your specific business goals. It can feel like a lot of work to set goals, develop strategies and drive forward tactics, but each step is key to reaching those bigger goals with PR leading the way.
PR Tactics and Strategies FAQs
What are examples of PR tactics?
Common PR tactics include press releases, media pitching, bylined articles, executive interviews, newsjacking, awards, data stories and original research, podcast appearances, speaking engagements, and exclusives. The right mix depends on your PR goals: a company building brand awareness leans on ongoing media relations and thought leadership, while a company with planned news leans on press releases, exclusives and launch campaigns.
What is the difference between a PR strategy and PR tactics?
A PR strategy is the overarching plan: the goals you are working toward, the audience you need to reach, and what you want the market to believe about your company. PR tactics are the individual activities that carry the strategy out, like press releases, pitches and interviews. Tactics without a strategy produce activity; a strategy makes every tactic accountable to a goal.
How do you measure whether PR tactics are working?
Measure tactics against the goals they serve, not against coverage counts. In our survey of 250 marketing executives, half measure the value of PR by the improvement it creates across their sales and marketing channels as a whole, more than by any other method. Track the behaviors each tactic was chosen to drive, such as leads, branded search growth and pipeline influenced, and review quarterly.