When diving into the PR and marketing pool for your event or expo you really need to be clear about the objectives. For a successful event PR campaign, you’ve got to ask yourself a few key questions before proceeding with any tactics:

1. Who’s interested?

A lot of the information coming out of some public relations agencies isn’t of value to anyone beyond a small handful of media contacts. Developing a broad range of creative angles will increase the media’s interest in what you have to say.

2. How does your target audience prefer to receive information?

Are they people who get more of their information online instead of from the daily newspaper? Are they frequent radio listeners? Do they watch the evening TV news? Skew your campaign toward those places where the largest percent of your target audience congregates.

3. Is yours a “headlining” story for the media used most often by your target audience?

When developing a creative and newsworthy angle, you want to keep in mind the media outlets you are targeting. Your press release should be story-ready for the specific reporters, producers and hosts. For instance, if your audience reads a national daily newspaper, and you have nothing that will catch the interest of the journalists at that newspaper, the story won’t run and your PR campaign will begin to sink.

As publicists, we have to know the water’s depth. Then we can confidently dive in with our plan, populated with lots of creative ideas.

Pulling it together

Our publicist team is currently working on strategies for this year’s Body Mind Life Expo, taking place March 17-18 at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Before we ever contact the media, we’ll have clarified the demographics and psychographics of the campaign’s target audience; we will have identified event highlights to get reporters excited; we will have developed story angles that include our marketing partners; and we will have created a list of the media outlets that best fit our content. There are numerous other questions you might want to answer before rolling out a campaign.

Last year, our PR strategy resulted in several TV, print and radio placements. Strategy can make the difference between hitting your head on the bottom or gliding in for a swim!!!