As marketing automation increasingly sits at the heart of content-led PR/marketing campaigns, building a series of coherent campaigns showcasing a core message or industry theme is becoming more important than ever.

At Agility PR, we’ve always thought in terms of PR strategy and campaigns from the point of view of effective and coherent client positioning. Campaign thinking forces you to focus on both the pressures faced by the market the client serves, and the skills, expertise and propositions they bring to ease, and ideally resolve, those pressures.

Driving success through long-term PR campaigns

Agility PR recommends working towards developing an ‘evergreen’ campaign which is likely to have a shelf-life of at least two years.

This is normally based on a ‘juggernaut’ change in the market you serve i.e. one that is taking a long time to come to pass but is, in the end, inevitable. This PR campaign is about the client positioning itself on the right side of history, predicting and ideally shaping the future, or at least envisioning what the future might look like. This is the hardest PR campaign to develop and may require the most resource to design and roll out, but once in motion you can trade on its content for several years.

Achieving ‘quick wins’ through responsive PR campaigns

Next come more opportunistic, proposition-led campaigns. These are necessarily geared to specific ‘moment in time’ market pressures, which are likely to drive deals for a specific period of time but (perhaps after a deadline has passed), demand is likely to cool significantly.

In technology PR, for example, regulatory deadlines offer clear opportunities for IT businesses to fashion solutions and articulate propositions. IT firms with Directors of Propositions or Innovations are ideal people for us to work with because it makes the process of arriving at a coherent proposition and associated messaging that much easier.

Because of the finite nature of these propositions, it may well make sense to develop at least four proposition-led campaigns per year. If you’re lucky, the campaigns can be evenly spaced through the year, but regulatory deadlines are not always that convenient from a campaign scheduling perspective.

Targeting multiple sectors through rolling PR campaigns

Where firms are targeting multiple sectors, it will make sense to build rolling PR campaigns aimed at different sectors. Depending on how deep you want those campaigns to run you may need to conduct market research, building a sector-specific campaign based on genuine insight you’ve gleaned from your own research and market observations.

Think in terms of surveys, case studies, articles and a sector-specific proposition launch with outreach to that sector’s key trade media, whether that be education, retail, leisure facilities, travel & tourism, hotels and restaurants, financial services, critical national infrastructure and so on and so forth.

It might take six months to complete a sector-focused campaign drilling to this depth. If resource allows, you can run PR campaigns facing several sectors at the same time.

Again, marketing automation helps ensure the right content is reaching the right audience in the right market. In this way, it’s possible to build a content creation and delivery engine around which more and more prospect and customer outreach and engagement activity is delivered.