PR: Knowing Your Audience

Garth Beyer

Many PR firms either get lucky or just get by when their strategy for knowing the audience is to judge and make assumptions.

According to a survey conducted by Jericho Communications, the typical American Fortune 1000 CEO is more likely to have watched The Simpsons than to have watched all three presidential debates.

Now, PR may be in control of social media, but PR still involves meeting the target audience, becoming one of them in the real world (not just online). You must know where they (your audience) goes, where they eat, what they read, watch and listen to. A great PR Specialist assimilates herself into the audience at the same time as keeping an eye out on social media trends before initiating a PR strategy.

Familiarizing yourself with the lifestyle of your target audience allows you to pitch stories directly to them, create the publications that they will read, and direct the appearance of your product so it faces them in an unobtrusive way. It does well to note that there still must be your own passion that is put into the publication. Since you are placing your pitch in between a stream of feed that the target audience is more familiar with than the last presidential debate, how passionately you present your pitch matters considerably.

Unable to create that publication? Send a press release to the newspapers, the magazines, radio stations or TV stations that you know your audience views. Does breaking news involve your product? Your topic? Get those press releases out. As you know, PR isn’t about putting your product or a story in front of everyone’s faces, over and over and over. That’s called advertising. PR is special, it’s separate from advertising although it uses it. It’s about strategizing the perfect moment to turn a presentation public.

Syncing your pitch to your audience is just as important as getting in sync with the perfect moment. What puts the “specialist” after PR is the ability to combine the two.

Assimilate, Syndicate, and Presentate

Garth Beyer
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