Public relations is the driving force behind your brand’s public perception.
But, if you’re not clear about who you’re targeting and what you’re hoping to achieve, your PR campaigns won’t align with your overall business strategy.
💡 Read Digital PR Explained: Best Strategies and Tools
If you’re hiring a PR agency to help you with your campaigns, unclear goals and audience targeting can lead to troublesome experiences and unsuccessful PR efforts.
This is why PR briefs are so crucial.
They define exactly what you’re trying to achieve and how so your agency knows where to focus and how to position your brand.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of PR briefs and what you need to include to make sure everyone’s on the same page.
What’s a PR Brief?
A PR brief is a dynamic document that details your public relations (PR) strategy.
While PR briefs are often used as internal roadmaps to guide in-house PR teams, they’re also a key tool for instructing PR agencies during the campaign planning process.
The main purpose is to create alignment and clarity on your PR goals for a campaign launch and how you’d like to achieve them.
A brief includes crucial details on your business strategy, campaign objectives, and key messages. You’ll also define your timelines, budget, and measure of success.
Why’s a PR Brief Important? The Benefits
In short, a PR brief saves you from a disappointing PR campaign.
It’s a critical document that focuses PR efforts and keeps your campaign on track so it achieves its goals.
How a PR Brief Guides Your Agency
With a well-crafted PR brief, you save time. Instead of wasting time with back-and-forth discussions, you provide clear campaign goals and a defined target audience.
This aligns your vision with the agency so they can focus on relevant strategies to meet your campaign objectives.
The agency is better positioned to develop stronger pitches and proposals tailored to your needs that fit your budget and time frame.
In essence, your briefing document supports effective communication about your campaign messages and available resources so potential agencies know what a successful PR campaign looks like to you.
How PR Briefs Benefit Your Company
Clear communication reduces misunderstandings between you and your agency. If you’re on the same page about goals and tactics, agency campaigns are more likely to reflect your vision.
This reduces campaign misfires and cuts down on back-and-forth communication. Both of these improvements help save money.
With a well-defined campaign that executes effectively, you have a higher chance of success and a better return on investment (ROI).
How to Write a PR Brief: Step-by-Step
A poorly-written brief can lead to PR campaigns that don’t align with your objective and company tone. Instead, your brief should be a comprehensive document that’s clear and aligned.
Here are the key elements you need to include in your PR brief to achieve this:
1. Business Overview
A business overview is like an elevator pitch for your company.
It gives a high-level introduction to your history, market share, and unique selling proposition (USPs).
The purpose of this section is to provide context. This helps your agency get a feel for your brand identity.
Try to include information about your brand’s journey, mission, target market, core competitors, and key achievements.
For example, it might read something like:
“Heartbeat Tech develops innovative fitness wearables. We’re the number one wearables brand in the US, known for sleek designs and advanced health tracking features, with a loyal customer base of active individuals.”
*Pro-Tip: Include data about your company. This makes it easier for agencies to piece together a compelling proposal for journalists and media outlets.
In fact, 37% of journalists say they won’t cover a product unless the pitch includes data.
So, for Heartbeat Tech, you might include data such as:
“Over 2 million people use our products worldwide. On average, users have seen a 15% decrease in body fat in the last year.”
2. Business Objectives
Your business objectives are the strategic goals your company wants to achieve through PR.
By defining your business goals in your PR brief, you show your agency how you want them to contribute to achieving them.
This fosters alignment between your PR efforts and larger business strategies so that campaigns work to grow your company in the right direction.
And it works.
62% of PR professionals say that tying PR to key business initiatives drives the most value.
Specify the exact goals you’re working toward, such as increasing brand awareness, entering new markets, or achieving a profitable product launch.
Your business objective might look something like:
Increase brand awareness by 20% within the next year, establishing Fellow as one of the top three leading meeting minutes apps in the US.
3. Campaign Focus and Goals
Campaign focus refers to the specific area of PR you’re targeting. For example, this might be a product launch, brand reputation building, or crisis management.
Your campaign goals are the particular objectives you’re looking to achieve.
For best results, you should phrase your campaign objectives as SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals.
Here’s an example.
This is a PR campaign for the upcoming launch of our new all-natural pet food. We aim to net 500 new customers within three months of the launch.
By doing this, you give your agency instructions on how to tailor campaigns to specifically meet your preferred outcomes.
4. Desired Media Channels
Reaching the right media outlets can be challenging.
In fact, 52% of brands say they struggle to connect with journalists at all, while 37% say it’s hard to find relevant journalists.
This is why 79% of brands that use PR agencies rely on them to build media lists.
In this section of your PR brief, you’ll identify the types of media channels you want your message to reach. This might be online magazines, news sites, industry-related podcasts, or social media influencers.
By specifying your desired media channels, you direct your agency to target the right outlets for your target audiences.
Don’t just specify the types of media channels. Give examples of media outlets that fit well with your brand.
For instance, you might write …
“We’re looking for coverage in tech publications like Wired and TechCrunch. We also aim for collaborations with business development influencers on social platforms like Instagram and YouTube.”
5. Audience Profile
This section defines your target audience. This is the specific group of people you want your campaign to reach. This is a crucial step as it helps your agency to align campaign messaging at PR strategies with the intended audience.
Use website data, social media analytics, and existing buyer data to create an ideal customer profile and buyer personas.
Describe these audience segments in this section by outlining their demographics, interests, and online behaviors.
For instance …
“The target audience for our organic seed brand consists of environmentally-conscious individuals aged 25-45. They are interested in sustainable living and growing their own food. They follow gardening influencers and actively engage with eco-friendly content online.”
6. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
According to PR professionals, the most important way to increase the value of PR is to produce measurable results.
When results are measurable, you can benchmark and compare campaigns to see what works and what doesn’t. Key Performance Indicators are the metrics used to measure campaign success.
KPIs help you track progress and assess campaign effectiveness, so you can make any necessary adjustments if things aren’t working.
In this section, you need to define quantifiable metrics like website traffic, media mentions, social media engagement, and brand sentiment analysis.
The top three KPIs that companies use are volume of coverage, reach, and engagement.
But they’re not always the most useful.
As Isa Lavahun, Digital PR Strategist and Trainer, puts it, “We should stop being so fixated with coverage volume. While it can indicate visibility, it doesn’t necessarily translate to having business impact. Instead, we should be focusing on a range of tangible metrics, such as website traffic, lead generation, new audience engagement, sales, and online visibility.”
Here’s an example of how you might outline your KPIs.
“We’ll track website traffic increase after media mentions, monitor engagement on social posts, and measure positive brand sentiment online.”
7. Timeline and Budget
In this part, you define your campaign timeframe and allocated budget.
This helps your agency understand campaign deadlines and suggest realistic strategies that work within your financial and time constraints.
For your timeline, outline key campaign milestones and deadlines. When giving budget guidance, give a breakdown of where you’d like your funds to focus.
For example, “Campaign launch date is June 1st, with press release distribution by June 15th. Influencer outreach should begin by July 1st. In total, the PR campaign budget is $10,000, with $3,000 available for press release distribution and $7,000 for influencer marketing.”
Excellent PR Briefs Lead to Successful Campaigns
A well-crafted PR brief is the key to a successful PR campaign.
By defining your business and campaign objectives, audience avatars, KPIs, and resources, your agency can better align its tactics with your goals.
To give hyper-focused guidance to your agency, it’s wise to include data in your PR briefs to help them get a picture of your business landscape.
Determ’s real-time media monitoring gives you insights into industry trends and competitor activity, while its powerful AI helps you refine your target audience and tone of voice. Plus, its precise analytics also help you set and measure KPIs to understand the effectiveness of your PR efforts.
For more impactful PR briefs and better insight into the success of your PR efforts, book a demo today.
