What is the Difference Between PR Outreach and a PR Campaign?
The key to successful PR is building good relationships. PR outreach and campaigns can both help you achieve this, but what’s the difference between the two?
Firstly, it helps to know the definition of PR outreach. PR outreach is the procedure of reaching out to relevant media outlets; influencers, bloggers, journalists, etc. to pitch your product or service to them to successfully gain media coverage. For a PR outreach strategy you should create an outreach plan. This would target journalists and influencers who are relevant to your brand and involve reaching out to begin building a relationship with them.
Gaining attention and interest when pitching is another important part of your outreach strategy; email is a great way of getting in touch, but a recent survey by Fractl found that only around 20% of writers found email pitches to be of any importance to their work. So, to grab their attention, using snippets of interviews with your CEO/Ambassador/Spokesperson, referring to your contact’s previous work, including relevant statistics to keep your pitch powerful, and using eye-catching visuals can all massively help gain the attention of who you’re writing to.
Additionally, any PR outreach you do should be kept personal to your contact, made relevant to current affairs, and of course, be structured. This way your contact feels as though you’ve really taken your time and done your research before reaching out to them, and that working with you will be easier given your obvious organisational skills and awareness.
It’s important to note that PR outreach is also a huge element of a PR campaign, however, not all outreach is a part of a campaign. For example, to spread the word about your campaign you’ll have to do some PR outreach, but if you’re wanting to push one of your products to press, you don’t need an entire campaign to do so.
A PR campaign can be a lengthy series of adverts, activities, or even various research/studies and/or infographic creation which all share a common theme and purpose for a business. PR campaigns are most often scheduled to run for a predetermined period of time.
An example of the common theme shared among the individual adverts of a PR campaign is the 2021 Interflora International Women’s Day Ad Campaign. Despite IWD falling around the same period as Mother’s Day, Interflora focused on IWD for their adverts, using visuals of their bouquets to represent shocking statistics about women in the workplace such as ‘only 1 in 20 of the CEOs heading up companies in the FTSE 100 are women’.
All of Inteflora’s adverts, ranging from statistics about the gender pay gap to female representation in government had a shared purpose; raising awareness about gender inequalities.
Successful PR campaigns tend to have a clear message which is delivered cleverly and differently to customers. Another great example of this included Uber’s recent ‘thanks for not riding campaign’. Using snippets of many different people and families all safe indoors, Uber used the opportunity to shock audiences by running a campaign thanking them for not using their services. What this successfully achieved for Uber was gaining customer attention by shocking audiences with their message, showing customers how they care for their safety, and how they appreciate the hard work of the key workers during the pandemic.
Ultimately, PR campaigns and PR outreach both help achieve greater brand awareness and can increase links to your website, but the methods in which they both achieve this goal are slightly different.
Megan is a PR & Content Marketing Intern at Unearth PR
Instagram ~ @meg.selway