Your PR strategy is your roadmap that outlines how you're going to get to where you're going. But before you start building your PR strategy, you have to define where you're going. And you do that by setting objectives. You might think that the purpose of your PR strategy is to generate as much media coverage as possible. But media coverage is not a business goal. You need to think about why you're investing your time and money into PR.
What should the business get out of it? It's worth putting some time into setting objectives because objectives keep you focused. They prevent you from going off on tangents. They help you to communicate the purpose of your PR strategy to stakeholders, and they give you something to measure success against in business, you will often hear about how objectives need to be smart, and that's as true in PR as it is in any other area of business. SMART goals are specific, which means anyone who reads the city objective was interpreted in the same way. They're measurable.
You know exactly how you will determine if the objective has been met. They're achievable, which means that they something that can be achieved by PR. They're realistic, relevant, which means that they're worth going after they meaningful to your business and time bound, which means you know, when it needs to be done by, here are some smart PR objectives. You can have a number of PR objectives, but remember that the reason for setting PR objectives is to keep you focused and it's quite Hard to focus on multiple things at the same time. So I urge you to keep your objectives to maximum three. And you really do want to pick out the most important objective and make that your primary objective.
You cannot design a successful PR strategy without first setting objectives. Objectives keep you focused and help you justify your budget requests. The best objectives are smart, and your strategy should have one primary objective, and it can have a few secondary objectives. Now that you've defined your PR objectives, you're one step closer to being able to build an award worthy PR strategy. The next step is to understand your target audience which we will cover in our next lesson.