9 Easy Tips for the Best Messaging and Content Strategy in PR

Running a successful PR campaign starts with the right strategy. It’s knowing exactly what you want to achieve and how you plan to achieve it. In today’s PR landscape, using content is a must. Content allows brands to deliver messages that resonate with their target audience.

However, a content marketing initiative is bound to fail if it does not have proper messaging at its core. It is therefore imperative to define both messaging and content strategy before launching any PR campaign.

Here are 9 Easy Tips for the Best Messaging and Content Strategy in PR

Brand Messaging: What You Want to Communicate

Consider key messages as the seeds from which all your communication initiatives grow. They are small pieces of information that communicate the most important concepts about your brand. They are the blueprints you keep coming back to every time you produce a press release or write a blog (this is increasingly important on the digital PR front). They are your guiding principles in making communication materials.

Across the PR and marketing world, experts are in agreement on at least six characteristics that make a successful key message:

1. The message is concise – typically a sentence or two.

2. It is easy to understand.

3. Despite its brevity, the message is worth remembering.

4. It is accurate and verifiable.

5. The audience can relate to the message.

6. The message is persuasive but never arrogant.

Developing Your Key Messages for PR Content

To develop your content strategy, you must first create your key messages. Here are steps you can follow to create powerful and compelling messaging:

1. Get to know the brand’s core. The best place to start is with your mission and vision statements. What exactly does the business stand for? What are its core values? 

The goal is to understand how a company wants the public to perceive its brand.

2. Compile your list of applicable “keywords”. From the mission and vision statements, you’ll find keywords or important words and phrases that summarize what you stand for.

Write them down by order of importance. These are the keywords that you want your brand to be associated with. 

For example, let’s say you want to be perceived as trustworthy, fun, and affordable. Those are your main keywords.

3. Create supporting statements for your main keywords. 
If you want to be seen as trustworthy, what statements can you include to support that claim? Maybe you’ve won an award or worked with some well-known clients in the past.

4. Trim your messages. An ideal key message should be a short sentence or two. Try to limit each message to one primary keyword and two supporting statements.

Distilling PR Content Ideas from Key Messages

A content strategy is a documented blueprint on how you plan to deliver your key messaging to your target audience. Remember, your key message is the core statement you want prospects to associate your brand with.

Let’s say that after following the steps above, you managed to create this key message: “Brand XYZ is a trusted provider of B2B marketing strategies. We have been in operation for more than 10 years in New Jersey.” 

Based on your key messaging, we know that you want to communicate trust to your customers. This makes it easier to derive ideas for your content marketing strategy.

We have an idea of what possible types of content and channels we can use to achieve your goal. In this case, we know that thought leadership articles are great for promoting trust. We also know that publishing them on reputable, industry-specific magazines or websites is the way to go. Both the placement, shares on social media and the link backs give a person or business authority in their space. It also gives your website increased digital authority.

Developing a Content Strategy Based on Messaging

A PR content strategy is a comprehensive document that serves as a guide on delivering the brand’s key messaging via content. It should contain, at the very least, the following components:

Goals

What’s the overarching objective that we want to achieve in implementing this strategy? Communicating the brand’s key messaging is always part of the 10,000-foot goal, but a content strategy must include more specific goals that can later be measured to determine success.

Channels

Where will we publish the content we create or curate? Some pieces of content are best published on the brand’s blog, while others are best released via local news sites.

Types

What kind of content would best communicate our key messages? Tweets definitely work differently compared to thought leadership articles or case studies.

Metrics

Based on the goals, how can we measure the success of the campaign? Do we want 1,000 views of the video? Or maybe we want publicity from at least three local, industry-related websites.

Messaging and Content Strategy: Work with a PR Firm

In summary, no content marketing campaign should start without key messaging at the core. You may opt to skip this step and take a shortcut, but you would still eventually have to do the work.

You might as well do it early in the process so you can launch initiatives that are tied together by solid key messaging. The best content strategies are guided by the clearest key messages. Yes, you can tweet that. You’re welcome.

Want to get started with your content strategy and key messaging? Contact the M studio team today! As one of New Jersey’s top digital marketing companies, we execute branding and PR campaigns for B2B and B2C clients. You can view the fintech PR work we did for AnyDay here. Or take a look at the art marketing strategies that included extensive PR outreach for Liquitex and Winsor & Newton.