A public relations strategy is essential for online stores. It’s an action plan that your business can implement to get publicity and coverage about what you offer. It’ll help you create, organize, manage, and measure how effective your PR communication efforts are over time.
In this article, you’ll learn five key steps you can take to create a solid PR strategy for your online store. It’ll help you leverage media channels to promote your brand to the public and create a positive public perception.
Let’s get started!
1. Define your PR goals
Clearly defined goals are the foundation of an effective public relations plan. If you don’t know what you aim to achieve, you won’t know your strategy in the first place.
You can have many PR goals. Here are some of them:
- Boost brand or product awareness by 10% in the next 12 months.
- Grow your following by 5% on Facebook in the next three months.
- Increase share of voice by 5% on Facebook.
- Increase perceived brand authority by 5% in the U.S. in the next three months.
Set specific, achievable, realistic, time-bound, and measurable (SMART) goals. So, don’t just say you want to increase your perceived brand authority. A good SMART PR goal instead is to increase your perceived brand authority by 20% in the UK in the next 12 months.
SMART goals will help you narrow down what matters most to your business and track success effectively.
2. Know your target audience
In PR and marketing, defining and understanding your audience is key to ensuring campaign success. This is because, when you know your audience, you can create messages that resonate with them and boost your eCommerce conversion rate.
In a typical PR campaign, you have two sets of audiences: the first is your target customer, which are your potential customers and current customers, and the second is the media you want to reach out to. These are the media you hope will carry your PR messages.
To know your target customer, create a customer persona, a fictional representation of your ideal buyer. You can get the data you need from your marketing department or through surveys.
As you learn about the demographics of your target audience, including their age, gender, location, and education level, go for a deeper understanding of their needs, challenges, and preferences for a successful PR strategy. As for the second audience, research the journalists or editors who will effectively reach your customer base. Google can help you here. A quick search will show you the journalists and authoritative publications in your niche.
3. Create compelling PR content
Before you can create compelling PR content, you need to go back to your PR goals again. Your goals will determine the types of content you’ll create. Will you be writing press releases, guest posts, social media posts, etc.?
Let’s assume again that your role is to position yourself as an authority in dental healthcare in five years. When creating compelling PR content, consider your research again on your target audience. You might decide to create the following content types to achieve this:
- Press releases for the media
- Blog posts
- Sponsored blog posts
So, to create a compelling press release, you need to catch the editor’s or reporter’s attention. You can do that if you have a newsworthy event or new data to share. You need that to prepare ammo for your PR actions. Besides, it’s crucial to getting results for your PR campaigns. Editors and reporters look for something new to create their content. They don’t like rehashed material or topics.
When writing your press release for the media, lead with something new and not “salesy.” For example, if you’re a company selling dental care products, you could start with “Dental cavity incidence in X city has increased to Y%, according to a new report released by [your eCommerce company].”
Check out a good example of a press release lead below:
Include supporting paragraphs and other data related to your topic. The more specific your information, the better. Avoid general statements.
Don’t forget to include the following at the end of your press release:
- Your signature
- Your “About us” or bio
- Contact details
Follow this same process to determine the topics of your other PR content.
For your blog posts, for instance, you could write about the results of your research, too. Just make sure you publish your blog post only after your chosen media have published their articles. You don’t want to give the media the impression your research results aren’t something new since they have already been published elsewhere.
You could also write about how you put together the report or focus on other findings like the causes of the increase in dental cavity incidence, for instance. Just make sure the topic options are in line with your PR goal.
4. Reach out to the Media
Let’s assume you have your press release ready. It’s time to reach out to the journalists or editors you’ve determined are perfect for your campaign.
You’ll need to write a personalized pitch. This will help ensure your press release doesn’t get ignored. The key to a good pitch is to be concise. As with your press release, you need to start your pitch with new data or a new event journalists or editors will be interested in.
Check out this template you can use:
If you don’t get a response immediately, follow up. Journalists get tons of pitches daily. Around 90% of them agree that one follow-up email is acceptable. Some 83% of them prefer the follow-up to be within the first week of the original pitch.
Here’s a sample follow-up email.
As you try out various strategic media channels, you’ll see the ones that pick up your stories over time. You can then capitalize on them and nurture your relationships with them.
5. Measure your results
You need to determine whether your PR strategy actually works, of course. The whole point of implementing a PR strategy, after all, is to achieve a PR goal.
To assess whether your strategy is working or not, go back to your goals. You can derive your key performance indicators (KPIs) from there.
For instance, if your goal was to increase exposure in your niche, your KPI could be the combined audience reach of media outlets that covered your events.
In general, here are other metrics you can measure:
- Organic media mentions
- Brand recall
- Share of voice
If you like the results you see, great! Just continue with what you’re doing. If you don’t like what you see, make the necessary changes to your PR strategy and implement it again. You’re bound to find the one that works best.
In Closing
A PR strategy is the collection of actions taken by a business to get publicity and coverage for what they offer. To create a winning PR strategy, start by defining your goals to make sure that your public relations boat is constantly being steered in the right direction.
Knowing your target audience is the next step. Then, make sure you create compelling content that will appeal to your target audience. Finally, measure your results. You want to know whether your public relations efforts are paying dividends or not. If they aren’t, make the necessary changes.
Follow these tips and your PR strategy will reap the best results for your online store.
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By Chris Norton, Founder of B2B PR agency Prohibition, former University lecturer, author of “Share This Too” and his social media training blog which is listed in the UK's top 10 PR and social media marketing blogs. |
Published June 16, 2023
