Persona’s for PR

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Perhaps the most important part of a PR campaign is reaching the right audience. No matter how much time you spend brainstorming a PR campaign, it's wasted effort if you're not targeting the right people. To identify these individuals, you can use personas. These are fictional characters with the characteristics of your ideal customer or target audience. This article will explain how to create and utilize personas for your PR strategy.

Personas and PR

We often emphasize that PR is a long-term investment focused on building sustainable press relationships. Conducting thorough research on the journalists you approach, maintaining personal contact, and then sending your message to a select group of recipients works. In fact, it often works much better than shooting in the dark and randomly approaching journalists in hopes that one will pick up your news.

Your press release achieves the best results when it is picked up by media outlets that reach your ideal target audience. Take, for example, the launch of a new product; here, you want to reach as many people as possible who are likely to purchase your product. An important factor in approaching journalists or editorial teams is that they are in contact with the audience you are trying to reach. Essentially, there are two personas to consider in your PR plan: the ideal consumer and the ideal journalist. Both are addressed in this article.

The Consumer

To know which journalists and editorial teams to contact to ultimately reach the right audience, it's good practice to first define the ideal end consumers of your PR campaigns. You probably already have an idea in mind, such as marketing professionals in the Netherlands, but creating personas can help you work even more precisely and get a clearer picture of who makes up this target audience.

• Get to know your target audience
  

The first step in creating personas is to research your target audience. This step may seem unnecessary if you're already an established organization, but to create truly effective personas, there should be as few assumptions as possible. You can gather this type of information through surveys, polls on social media, or feedback forms, but also through (group) interviews with your customers.

It often helps to have a list of standard data that you can use to categorize your personas. Think of characteristics such as age, gender, location, and occupation. Also, consider asking about hobbies and leisure activities. While this may seem like irrelevant information, in the bigger picture, these details can be crucial in defining your personas. So, incorporate as much relevant information as possible into your research when creating your personas.

In addition to general data, it's also interesting to know the specific problems that people in your target audience face and how your product could help them. This way, you'll know how to address your target audience and - if you're in the early stages of your business - whether your product aligns with market demand.

You could link the data you collect about your product or service to the more general information. You might conclude that people from different age groups or locations use your product for different reasons. In such cases, these groups need to be addressed differently.

• Utilize data
  

Collecting and analyzing customer data through online channels has added a new dimension to creating personas. In addition to the aforementioned methods, you can also use the data collected through your website, social profiles, or newsletters. Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn can provide valuable information about the individuals following your organization, their occupations, ages, and more. So, see what data you can gather from these channels and use it as additional information when creating your personas.

Write out your personas

Once you've collected and organized your data, it's time to put your personas on paper. You may have more than one persona, but make sure to limit the number to a maximum of five. Having more than five personas will likely dilute your focus.

• Your persona may include the following details:

Name: You can enter a fictional name here or a name that easily identifies your persona. For example, Ferry from Finance.

Age: Specify a range of no more than 10 years to remain specific.

Gender: Add if relevant.

Job title and employer: Include one or two job titles that represent the entire group and are also very specific. For example, Senior Finance Manager at a multinational on the Zuidas.

Hobbies: Add one or more hobbies of your persona to create a better understanding of their character.

Problem: Write down the two or three main pain points your persona faces. Make sure these are relevant to your organization.

Solution: Now, come up with solutions corresponding to the pain points that your product or service could provide.

Finding the Ideal Journalist

As a PR professional, your work doesn't stop at market research. Now that you know who your ideal end consumer is, it's time to think about how you can use PR to reach these individuals. You can do this by referring to the profiles of your personas and applying the methods below. The media you find can then be added to the persona’s profile. This way, you get a complete picture of who's in your target audience and which media channels are best for reaching them.

• Which media platforms align with the persona profile?

To find the right media, it's important to put yourself in the shoes of the persona you've created. Which newspapers, magazines, or trade journals does your persona read, and what kind of articles appeal to them? With these questions in mind, you can begin searching for relevant contacts and compiling your media list.

For this part of your research, a tool like Smart.pr is extremely useful. In the Press Filter database, you can easily look up the contact details of journalists and editorial teams and add them to your own address book. You can also filter by topics, locations, different types of media, and many more advanced search options. This way, you can easily find journalists who fit your created personas. In this article, you can learn all about building a media list using our Press Filter database.

We also offer the new Smart.pr News feature. This is a search engine where you can quickly and clearly search for news topics and the names of journalists. This allows you to conduct thorough preliminary research on what the journalist you want to approach writes about, what their tone of voice is, and whether this journalist actually writes about the interests of your persona. This way, you can be sure you're approaching the right journalists for your campaign.

Another tip for finding the right media: various titles keep data on their readers. For example, you can read here about the segments that make up the readership of NRC. Additionally, blogs like Frankwatching offer a media kit with a comprehensive overview of their audience. This allows those who are interested in a paid collaboration to know which audience they reach with their paid content. Of course, you're aiming for free publicity rather than an advertorial, but this data can certainly be useful for finding suitable media outlets.

• Found the right media?
  

Now that you have concrete personas and your media list, you can start thinking about the message you want to convey and the approach of your campaign. You can do this through press releases, publicity stunts, events, etc.