Planning a Successful Campaign

If you’ve come up with a list of creative PR ideas, you may be wondering how to take them to the next level.

In this blog, we’ll be exploring how to turn your creative PR ideas into successful PR campaigns:

Creative PR Ideas: What is a PR Campaign?

A PR campaign can be defined as ‘a series of planned activities designed to give a company or brand publicity’ (Meltwater, 2022). 

Whether this planning takes the form of a good old fashioned mind-map, a to-do list, bullet points in your notes app or brainstorming on a shared moodboard, each plan requires several fundamentals to be successful and align with a clients’ needs and goals.

Creative PR Ideas: Budgeting for a Successful Campaign

Perhaps the biggest factor when planning a campaign is your considering your clients’ budget. 

Pulling together a list of creative PR ideas is great, but if the resources needed don’t match the budget, you’ll find the client less receptive to going ahead with your proposals.

One of the most effective (and free) ways to increase your brand publicity is with a social media campaign. 

The likes of Paddy Power and Aldi do this particularly well, and are well known for their tone of voice and humour. All it takes is a witty tweet or crafty Facebook post, and these can get shared, liked, retweeted time and time again, spreading the messaging widely, and fast.

On the other hand, Sony paid £280,000 to Transport for London for their PlayStation 5 promotion campaign. This saw the street level tube roundels outside Oxford Circus station replaced with the ‘buttons’ on a PlayStation controller. 

They then paid an additional £40,000 to TfL to extend the time the signs were present, on top of the cost for installation and removal. For a company with a market value of $80.53 billion, this was an achievable campaign.

Creative PR Ideas: Time Management When Planning

For a campaign, the more time the better. It helps to be well prepared, have every aspect well thought out and have a contingency plan in place. It’s also helpful to allow enough time to seek out the best resources available.

For example, the Moonpig X Lorraine Change & Check Cards is a well thought out campaign and required designing, collaborations, logistics and a promotional photoshoot. 

This would’ve been planned well in advance to achieve a launch date that coincided with Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which has occurred every October since its launch in 1985. These recurrent national awareness days are great to plan a campaign around, especially as they happen at the same time every year, which gives a deadline date to work towards. 

They’re also great to piggyback off, as it helps the campaign to have more substance and gain more attention. As the topic is already being spoken about, throwing your client into the mix with a relevant campaign will help with search rankings, interaction, engagement and response. 

However, sometimes an opportunity arises to be reactive and still create a great campaign. During a reactive campaign, the less time taken, the better. If you’re one of the first to react to an adverse event, photograph, meme or viral video, the better and more original you appear. 

For example, an image of Bernie Sanders bundled up in his mittens at president Biden’s inauguration was quickly turned into a meme and shared exponentially. Many brands and social media accounts tried to hop on the bandwagon, but Ikea was one of the first and most creative. 

All it took was a simple social post encouraging customers to ‘get the look’ by promoting its fold-up seats and oven gloves (mittens) for people wishing to emulate the appearance of the 
American politician. This couldn’t have been planned for as there was no idea this image was going to be taken, or how popular it was going to be.

So, although time is a useful resource to have in planning a campaign, sometimes a lack of time can also lead to just as effective campaign creation.

Considering Resources When Planning a Campaign

It’s also worth considering your resources when planning a campaign - what’s available to you? How easy is it to obtain? 

Utilising what’s already on offer can help to cut costs, save time and avoid difficult logistics. It might be that you can call in favours too - especially if you’re planning a big campaign where other brands might receive free publicity if their products/services are used.

Budget and time also comes into play here too. If you have a small budget, then the list of resources will be smaller. The same goes for time too; you might need to keep things short and simple. 

If you have a bigger budget, more resources can be used, and better quality ones too. If you have plenty of time, the cost can be split over a longer period of time to help with cash flow, and with more time, you can look for better deals and cheaper alternatives.

Planning a Relevant Campaign

One element that underpins all of this is relevance. Is the PR campaign relevant to the business? Is it relevant to the current time and climate? Is it relevant to their target audience? Mainly, is it relevant to the business goals and what they want to achieve?

Being able to justify why you are doing what you are doing with a certainty that it will achieve the agreed goal, will allow you to determine whether your time, budget and resources are feasible to donate to the project.

If you'd like us to pull together some amazing, creative PR ideas for your brand,  please contact a member of our team.