The Importance of Planning

 

Cosanna Preston

Any Public Relations professional will attest to their clients’ eagerness to get their name out there, promote their latest campaign and ultimately see their name in the headlines of major newspapers. But what impact does that have? How much of it is just noise? And how much of it is read/heard/seen and understood, or better yet cared about, acted upon? The short answer is that it’s pretty hard to tell. Measurement is not easy and it’s getting harder (but hopefully more accurate) as the global Public Relations industry says no to Advertising Value Equivalents (AVE).

Where am I going with this? As our audiences become more tuned in through an increasing number of media channels we need to think harder about how we reach them and how we reach them effectively. Sure we can tell our clients that we achieved millions of naira in value for placing their stories in the newspaper but what should really matter is who read the story, what did they think, and most importantly, what did they do with that information. That’s the importance of planning.

We can’t get into the head of every reader/listener/viewer or monitor each one to see how they take in and use the information (though there are increasingly better ways to monitor and measure without owning your own CCTV outfit, but we’ll leave that for another post). What we can do is work from the other end. We can plan. We can make sure we fully understand what the client wants to communicate. Then we break it down, turn it around and package it in a way that the audience will care, and more importantly act.

If we can’t monitor their response as effectively as we’d like, then we better make sure that what we put in front of them has a very good chance of success. And that means understanding your target audience: what they like, don’t like, what excites them, what interests them, what their hobbies are, what their lifestyle is like etc. It also means understanding what information they need from you to participate in the campaign. So if our campaign is, say, a product promotion, we need to make that promotion accessible and suitable to the lifestyle of our target. We then need to give them information about the promotion in language that makes sense to them, excites them and ultimately encourages them to participate in that promotion.

If we do our planning and research ahead of time, we know that our campaign will be developed to ensure participation. We might not be able to measure every single reaction to the newspaper articles and radio hypes that follow but we will know that they are placed on the right channels, in the right language that they have a very high chance at succeeding. That’s the importance of planning; getting it right from the start so you know that your campaign is not just about noise, but about impact.