The most common mistakes in PR campaigns

Are you accidentally making one of the most common mistakes in PR campaigns? If so, you could be hampering your success before you’ve written your first press release.

The Roxhill Insights team are experts at campaign tracking: they evaluate media campaigns for our clients to judge how they really performed and highlight areas for improvement. This means that they see, in detail, where campaigns fall short and why.

We asked them about the mistakes that crop up most, so you can sidestep the common pitfalls and ensure your next campaign is your most successful yet.

1. Not setting out clear objectives
This is the most obvious mistake, and it’s the one the Insights Team sees most often. Before you decide anything else, decide what the desired outcome of the campaign is and how you’ll measure success. Do you want to raise awareness? Change behaviour? Drive sales? Clear and measurable objectives let you gauge what’s working, demonstrate results to stakeholders and improve next time.

When our team tracks and analyses campaigns, the most successful are centred on a core objective the client has defined precisely from the start – everything else flows from that decision.

2. Not having campaign-specific messages
A campaign needs its own messages, developed for that campaign alone rather than lifted from your general brand messaging. Develop a core set of specific messages for each one – usually four or five. These give your media outreach a clear focus, and they give you a concrete success criterion at the evaluation stage: did at least one campaign message land in each article?

3. Not having spokespeople lined up to engage with the media
Who will promote your campaign and land your messages? Coverage without a voice behind it rarely carries the messages you’ve worked so hard to develop. The strongest campaigns have spokespeople who are media-trained and drilled on the messaging, so every interview and quote is an opportunity to land a campaign message. One measurable outcome could be having at least one spokesperson quoted in each piece of coverage, hitting a key message in the quote.

4. Not targeting the right audience
This usually comes down to a lack of research before the campaign is designed. You should know exactly who you’re trying to reach. Build a profile of your ideal customer, then build your media lists with them in mind – engaging the right outlets gives your coverage a far better chance of landing in front of the intended audience. The outlets on your media lists will be built accordingly, too: you can go broad with nationals, niche with trades, or regional if your goal is brand awareness in a new area.

5. Not aligning socials with press releases and other comms
First, ask whether social media is the right channel for your intended audience at all. If it is, your social activity needs to carry the same messages, on the same timeline, as the rest of your comms. Socials running on a separate track – different messaging, different timing, a different story – dilute the campaign and waste a channel that should be reinforcing it.

6. Measuring success with vanity metrics
AVE: Advertising value equivalency is not a valid measure of a campaign. It takes no account of the campaign objectives, how the coverage landed, or the impact it had. It’s time to retire it.

Reach: Also not an accurate measure of success. Even if the campaign reached a million people – so what? Reach won’t tell you whether the audience changed their behaviour as a result.

Volume alone: Volume needs to be considered, but it’s only useful alongside other metrics: message penetration, spokespeople engagement, and positive sentiment.

7. Not taking the time for post-campaign analysis
Lastly, one of the most common mistakes in PR campaigns is not looking back to see what worked, what didn’t, and what to change next time.