Leaders in every industry from American Express to Procter & Gamble, from AT&T to Kraft have reached the same conclusion; public relations works, should be combined with advertising to boost your ROI and is an inexpensive competitive tool.

As rising cereal prices were drawing a lot of negative publicity, Post eliminated expensive coupon promotions to reduce their cost of doing business and substantially lowered the price of cereal. Their market share instantly jumped and a press conference and a news release was all that it took.

“The cost of acquiring a customer by PR rather than by advertising is fractional,” according to Mark Weiner, author of Unleashing the power of PR. According to Weiner, Fortune magazine’s most admired companies have PR budgets two and one-half times larger than less distinguished companies of the same size.

For a PR campaign to be effective and to win competitive advantage, you must clearly define your core message and objectives. What is your message and what do you want to accomplish using it? Who do you want the message to reach and which media penetrates those targeted customers best? Answering these questions can make the message and how it is delivered far more precise.

Remember that a PR campaign will have both an external and internal audience and must be effective for both. Your internal audience consists of the people making the delivery of your product or service possible and the delivery must be consistent with your PR message.

But how does one measure the effectiveness of a PR campaign? Track how many times your core message appears, and in how many different medias. Is the message featuring you and your organization in a positive light and is the core message appearing more frequently than it used to?

According to Delahaye, the world’s most prestigious provider of public relations research, there are only 5 types of core messages and your PR campaign should focus on only one. The categories are: Social responsibility, quality of products and services, senior management, workplace, or financial performance.

Which of the five categories, should you focus on? If financial performance is primary and you’re getting a lot of favorable publicity about social responsibility, your campaign needs adjusting.

Some of the finer measures of the impact of your PR campaign would include: Where the releases were placed. Was it the front page, radio headline or was it buried as part of a larger story? What was the extent of the mention? Was your company featured exclusively in the story and were there visuals used to create higher impact?

By carefully defining your core message and concise objectives in public relations your aim will become clear as well as the sequence of actions to achieve it. Once your core message and objectives have been defined the risk of not staying on message and focusing on the right competitive market is greatly reduced.

Increased efficiency follows because everything being done is guided by a strategy which is focusing everyone’s attention and action on carefully designed and thought out criteria. The same criteria make it easy to evaluate the competitive success gained and provide the framework for evaluation. Did the public relations campaign stay on its core message, reach the right audience and win new profitable customers from the competition?

An objective may have been to generate a minimum of 100 additional Web page visits a day and generate 20 new orders per day from those visits. Another may have been to have 50 people per day calling to ask for free information about your service. A car dealer may want 10 additional test drives per day and a restaurant may want 20 new dinner customers each evening.

Meeting or exceeding your clearly defined objectives by staying on your core message will result in sustainable competitive advantage and enable you to increase the percentage of overall sales in the months ahead while decreasing your overall marketing expenses.

“Doing your own PR is a bit like doing your own surgery,” according to Dianne Stewart APR of BSA PR & Marketing. “A good PR professional will have a wide group of media contacts to call upon, allows someone else to tell the media how great you are and will add prestige to be able to say that you have appointed a professional PR practitioner to handle your public image. This can even be a media story in itself.”

Stewart continued; “Allow a reasonable period of time to work with them before assessing the effectiveness of the campaign as PR takes time and energy to become effective. It never happens overnight and the best PR campaigns are ongoing.”

Research from Delahaye done for Miller Brewing Company demonstrated that trade advertising brought in roughly $2.20 for every dollar spent, while TV advertising earned $1.06. PR, by comparison, earned $8.00. “This is not to suggest that advertising is obsolete, only that a balanced marketing program that includes PR is more likely to achieve greater competitive advantage than a program without PR support.”

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