Why your stakeholders need to see your PR wins
(and not just the headlines)
When we start working with a brand for the first time, we immerse ourselves in it. We’re so committed to this, we spend a month working directly with the company, until we’re confident we’ve left no stone unturned.
Why? Two reasons: For a great PR strategy, we need to understand your brand as well as you do. We’ll find every opportunity for a unique story you have hidden away – usually ones you weren’t aware of!
Secondly, we want to ask, ‘what do your stakeholders want to hear?’. This isn’t so we can deliver a like for like message from an investors’ priority list – we aim to please but we aim to be totally authentic too. By understanding the different stakeholder groups in your brand, we can build your comms strategy in a completely tailored way and deliver the messages they need to hear.
Let’s throw in another ‘why?’. Some brands new to PR might assume the focus is on building reputation and sales (and that’s totally up there!), but they might not have considered their stakeholder comms until now. But stakeholders are people you want on your side. You need them to be informed and you need to build or maintain a positive relationship with them, and communication is absolutely essential for this. Through stakeholder comms, we build trust, maintain solid reputations and keep you at the front of their mind.
So, who are a company’s stakeholders?
In short, stakeholder groups can be vast. They can range from employees, customers, investors, local authorities, local communities and even the media (handy when you’re targeting them anyway!). Anyone who has an interest in the company can be considered a stakeholder, so it’s really important that your PR strategy has taken them into account.
What does stakeholder comms include?
A lot of people assume PR is just about media coverage. In fact, content planning alone can cover anything up to 14 different items (more, if you pair us with a digital agency for a full comms package – more info on that here).
As we mentioned above, stakeholder comms definitely informs your PR strategy and media output – we’ll take into consideration key dates in your calendar to get specific messages through to specific groups, but there are other ways of communicating too. Internal comms lets us talk directly to stakeholders. This can be company newsletters or specialist stakeholder updates to promote inclusion at every level.
Of course, we’ll never leave the media out though. Our media lists reflect a brand’s stakeholder groups – this keeps us focused on delivering the right stories to the right audience, but it also shows you that we’re committed to the best PR possible. Our media list is never one size fits all, but bespoke to your brand and your PR strategy. If we’ve used research in our campaigns, we’ll tailor your stories using the data from this to create bespoke messaging for your particular target group. This could be a group segmented by trade sector or region, for example.
A successful campaign executed this way will target the specific groups we identified at the start, and equip them with the specific info we want them to know about.
Here’s an example of how we might vary a message:
Campaign message: Your brand wants to expand its offering to benefit from a new gap in the market
Public media output: ‘Region’s businesses to benefit from an influx of local support’
Stakeholder media output: ‘Number one company in <sector> promises to revolutionise <service> for others
Internal comms output: ‘Profits forecast to increase by 25% in next 12 months with service increase’
When you see how the same message can vary for different audiences, you can see the importance of planning your audience into your PR strategy. One message will never suit everyone, so identifying key opportunities, the right timing, and the right stakeholders each time is essential for PR success.
Not to blow our own trumpet (OK, fine, we’re totally doing it), this is precisely why brands come to us for PR. Not a generalist agency where PR is tacked onto the back of other marketing focuses, but a real, deep and genuine level of attention on PR to give you your strongest comms possible.
However, we know you’ll want to pair great PR with great everything, which is why we recommend working only with specialists. It’s also why we pair with digital specialists, so we can offer that full comms package we mentioned earlier, without losing any dedicated skills.
Want to know more about how we do it? Check out our case studies here.
