You already know about the importance of SMART goals for your PR programs: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely (we’ll discuss each of them below). But what you might not know about your objectives is the most important thing—the indispensable thing: Everyone who matters must agree on them.
Agreement on goals from all the stakeholders on your PR program and its measurement is vital. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how brilliant your SMART goals are; your PR program will likely meet resistance. Doing measurement is hard enough without someone dragging their heels because they “weren’t consulted” or sniping from the corner office because they “didn’t think this was the right way to go anyway.” In this article, I will guide you on how to set your PR goals.
Key Points
- PR goals are specific objectives that a company aims to achieve through public relations efforts.
- SMART goals are important because they help you focus your PR efforts on what matters most for your organization and your stakeholders.
- The SMART acronym and its corresponding goal framework are credited to George T. Doran.
- To set up your PR goals you need to abide by these steps: know your business goals, understand the audience you want to reach, check your strengths & weaknesses, set clear goals, decide what’s most important, assign KPIs (key performance indicators), and match your PR goals to your business goals.
What Are SMART PR Goals?
SMART PR goals are specific objectives set for public relations (PR) activities that are designed to be clear, achievable, and measurable.
It helps you define what you want to achieve with your PR campaigns, and how you will measure your progress and success. For example, a SMART goal for a PR campaign could be to increase website traffic by 20% from organic search in the next six months by securing 10 media placements in relevant publications. This goal is specific (what, how, and where), measurable (20%, 10 media placements), achievable (based on your resources and capabilities), relevant (aligned with your business objectives), and time-bound (six months).
Here’s a breakdown of what SMART stands for in the context of PR goals:
Specificity Breeds Success
The specificity of goals is the cornerstone of an effective PR strategy. Instead of generic aspirations, such as “increase brand awareness,” PR professionals are encouraged to articulate precise outcomes. Picture a goal like “generate 20% more media coverage in the next quarter,” a statement that defines success and provides a clear path forward. Specific goals act as the north star, guiding PR campaigns with precision and intention.
Measuring the Immeasurable
Measuring success is often elusive. However, the SMART criteria introduces a practical solution by emphasizing measurability. Establishing key performance indicators, allows PR teams to quantify progress. Whether it is gauging social media engagement through likes, shares, and comments or tracking the success of a product launch through media coverage metrics, measurable goals provide the much-needed yardstick for evaluating the impact of PR efforts.
Attainability
While ambition fuels innovation, goals must be grounded in reality to be achievable. The SMART framework encourages a realistic assessment of resources, budget constraints, and team capabilities. Striking a balance between aspiration and feasibility is about setting realistic targets and fostering a positive and motivated work environment. Achievable goals empower PR professionals, ensuring milestones are celebrated and fostering a culture of success.
The Relevance — Aligning with Organizational Objectives
A PR strategy is most powerful when it aligns seamlessly with an organization’s broader goals. The relevance of goals to the overall business strategy cannot be overstated. A relevant goal contributes directly to the business’s success, enhancing its reputation and market presence. Whether it is supporting a product launch or managing a crisis, a goal aligning with the company’s mission ensures that PR efforts are impactful and integral to organizational success.
Timing is Everything
Setting a timeframe for goals is not just advisable — it is imperative. The time-bound aspect of the SMART criteria injects a sense of urgency and accountability into PR campaigns. Deadlines serve as catalysts for action, prompting timely evaluations of progress and allowing for swift adjustments to the strategy when necessary. A well-defined timeline ensures that PR strategies remain dynamic, responsive, and in tune with the ever-changing landscape.
Where Do SMART Goals Come From?
Goal-setting theories and studies have been around for quite some time, but we have George T. Doran to thank for the SMART acronym and its accompanying goal framework. Building on existing goal-setting theory, Doran published his method in 1981 for use in business and management.
When he came up with the framework, many US businesses weren’t effectively setting goals or implementing successful planning processes. Doran used his framework to ensure managers had a solid template for creating meaningful, detailed objectives, such as increasing profitability and setting team benchmarks.
Doran’s original acronym stood for Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-related, focusing on delegating tasks in a corporate structure. It has since been adapted to fit a wide range of personal and professional ambitions.
Fast-forward to the present and thousands of organizations and individuals use the SMART goal-setting method to achieve all manner of organizational and life goals.
Why is SMART PR Goals Important?
SMART goals are important because they help you focus your PR efforts on what matters most for your organization and your stakeholders. It also helps you communicate your goals clearly and consistently to your team, your clients, and your media partners. Moreover, SMART helps you monitor and evaluate your progress and performance, and adjust your strategy and tactics if needed. By using SMART, you can demonstrate the value and impact of your PR campaigns, and justify your investment and resources.
How to Set PR Goals
For your PR marketing strategy to be successful, it needs direction. Without it, you’ll end up spending a lot of time trying everything instead of focusing your efforts on the tasks that will help elevate your reputation.
Set SMART PR marketing goals so your plan for achieving them is easier to create. This framework ensures that your goals aren’t generic and are instead substantial enough to put a plan behind.
Don’t overwhelm yourself with lots of goals. Instead, stick to SMART PR marketing goals that you can dedicate the time and effort to achieving. Here are steps to set up PR goals:
#1. Know Your Business Goals
For PR to move a company’s business goals forward, these goals should be the primary focus of the initial PR planning process. Depending on the scope of the PR project, these goals may be for the business or individual as a whole, a specific product, service, line of business, or even a short-term or seasonal campaign.
Pernod Ricard, the world’s second-largest wine and spirits group, for example, brought us on specifically to bring awareness to its CSR work through its Responsib’All Day initiative, wherein its 19,000 employees take the day off to volunteer at one of many regional philanthropic initiatives across 70 different countries.
Although they may not be involved in the implementation of the PR strategy, it’s never a bad idea to involve founders, executives, or other visionaries in the conversation about business goals. These spokespeople will often be able to provide a higher-level overview of their mission, whereas others within the organization will have a more intimate understanding of the individual nuts and bolts that will get them there.
As your business goals change, your PR goals should evolve alongside them. Once a company has brought visibility to its brand among a particular consumer or business audience, its goals might shift to center around engagement rather than awareness.
#2. Understand the Audience You Want to Reach
Influencing audience behaviors is critical to most SMART PR goals—whether that’s getting them to purchase a product, changing their opinion about something or someone, or generating awareness of a previously unknown topic.
To do this, companies need to first define what audiences are most important to their campaign. Rather than simply defining whether the campaign is B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer), PR strategies should instead focus on specific groups including customers, employees, investors, or the general public.
Beyond identifying these types of audiences, SMART PR goals should specifically identify key personas within that audience. With consumers, for example, is there a particular demographic that your brand wants to target? Specific markets or regions that are more important than others? Do they fall into a specific income bracket?
From there, companies can more easily build their understanding of how their target audience thinks including what’s important to them, where and how they consume information, what drives their purchase decisions, and more.
#3. Check Your Strengths & Weaknesses
Dedicating the appropriate resources to a PR project or campaign will directly influence companies’ ability to set and meet their PR goals. This requires knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and evaluating where you may need to improve before moving full speed ahead into launching the campaign.
For example, your PR campaign may be based entirely on building a brand around the company’s founder. If this individual isn’t comfortable speaking with the press, however, they could jeopardize the campaign. There may be another spokesperson who is stronger in public speaking and can handle live and in-person media opportunities, while the primary focus of the PR campaign can shift to written and recorded opportunities for the founder.
This is just one of many ways that companies can determine how best to play into their strengths and minimize their weaknesses to make the biggest impact on their PR goals. Here are a few other areas to evaluate before getting started:
- Is your company already known in your target market, or do you need to build additional awareness first?
- If you’re pushing a product or service, is it ready for market?
- Do you have any examples of your work in action (e.g. customers who are willing to talk about their experience with your brand, case studies, or other external references)?
- What else is happening in the market that could positively or negatively affect your campaign?
- What does your competitor landscape look like, and how differentiated do you need to be?
- Does your target audience need a better understanding of a particular topic or subject to understand your offering?
#4. Set Clear Goals
Chances are, you’ll be measuring the success of your PR strategy long after setting your goals. This is why it’s critical to make PR goals as specific and measurable as possible to evaluate how well you’ve accomplished what you initially set out to achieve.
A B2B PR goal might look something like this: Tell these five stories with these types of media outlets and reporters, and make sure that at least 70% of our talking points appear in the coverage.
A goal for a crisis PR campaign, on the other hand, might be to generate a 75% increase in positive mentions of a company in the next six months. When in doubt, remember the SMART acronym when setting PR goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
#5. Decide What’s Most Important
For companies to make progress towards their highest priority goals—like increased sales or revenue—they may find that it’s more important for PR to start with shorter-term outcomes first. Without first developing a baseline level of awareness in the market, for instance, companies won’t see PR contribute to a noticeable increase in their market share right away.
In addition to considering the importance of companies’ internal business objectives, PR goals should account for major happenings in the larger market.
Because PR is dependent on the news cycle, it’s important to consider how external events or trends may influence the success of your PR campaign. For a retailer, a major upcoming shopping event such as Black Friday might make it more important to focus PR efforts around tried-and-true ‘giftable’ items rather than a brand-new product.
#6. Assign KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
There are many PR KPIs that companies can measure aside from the sheer number of media mentions they secure. For example:
- Sentiment of the coverage (positive or negative)
- Resulting website traffic
- Number of leads driven
- Percentage or number of talking points that appear in the coverage
- Quantity and quality of executive quotes included
- A standalone story, or mention in a larger piece
- Whether or not competitors are mentioned in the coverage
- Audiences reached (geographical, industry-specific, etc.)
Keeping a balance of both quantitative and qualitative KPIs helps ensure that companies aren’t just driving results from PR, but meaningful results that influence their business goals. Especially with the growing dependency on digital channels such as traditional web, mobile, and social media, tracking media impressions alone is no longer a substantial (or accurate) measure of PR success.
#7. Match Your PR Goals to Your Business Goals
Once companies have defined their PR goals and determined how they’ll measure against them, it’s time to (once again) evaluate how these goals will influence bigger business goals.
If companies have taken the proper initial steps to set their SMART PR goals, this might feel redundant to the work they did in the beginning to build their PR goals around their business goals.
It’s not uncommon for companies to get halfway—or to the end—of a PR project before realizing that they’ve strayed away from their original intentions. Losing sight of the final destination in the journey to get there, though, is one of the bigger disservices a company can do in its PR program.
To avoid this, cross-check your PR goals with your business goals as often as possible to ensure that every result achieved gets you one step closer—or more—to your overarching mission.
How to Write a PR Goal?
Writing a Public Relations (PR) goal can help streamline your communication efforts and ensure your goals are clear, measurable, and achievable. Below is a comprehensive template guide I have provided to help you make your work easier and faster:
Lamphills PR Goal Template Guide
SMART Goals Examples for Public Relations
Here are some examples of SMART goals for successful public relations:
#1. Increase Media Mentions
“To boost the prominence of our company, I plan to have our CEO or other executives interviewed by at least two major publications within four months. That should raise our company’s profile in the industry and attract more attention to our products and services.”
- Specific: The SMART goal is explicit as it aims to increase media mentions through interviews.
- Measurable: You can count the number of interviews regularly.
- Attainable: This statement is doable with proper planning and coordination.
- Relevant: This relates to boosting brand visibility and attracting more attention.
- Time-based: Success will be reached after four whole months.
#2. Establish Partnerships With Influencers
“I’ll create partnerships with 5 influential bloggers in the target market within two months. I hope these influencers can act as brand ambassadors to promote our products and services, which could increase customer engagement.”
Specific: The goal is evident in establishing partnerships with 5 influencers within two months.
Measurable: You should be able to measure the number of partnerships over time.
Attainable: Recognize that nurturing partnerships is feasible with adequate time and effort.
Relevant: Working with influencers in your target market is vital for public relations.
Time-based: You have a two-month end date to achieve the goal.
#3. Improve Social Media Engagement
“I will increase online engagement by creating social media campaigns that enhance brand recognition. I want an increase of 15% in the average number of likes, shares, and comments per post within 6 months.”
- Specific: The statement is well-defined, detailing the target metric and the deadline.
- Measurable: Success can be assessed by the percentage increase in engagement metrics.
- Attainable: You can accomplish this with the correct creative execution and strategy.
- Relevant: This pertains to enhancing brand recognition and boosting audience engagement.
- Time-based: Six whole months are needed to reach this particular goal.
#4. Generate More Backlinks
“I want to increase the number of quality backlinks to our website by 10% in three months. This will be measured by analyzing our backlink profile using Google Search Console and other tools.”
- Specific: You want to boost the number of backlinks by at least 10% over three months.
- Measurable: You can track the percentage increase in backlinks regularly.
- Attainable: This is possible with the right outreach efforts and content strategy.
- Relevant: Getting more backlinks will help improve website rankings and public visibility.
- Time-based: The goal will be achieved within the three months ahead.
#5. Create Positive Reputation
“My aim is to create a positive reputation for my business in the community for 5 months. I hope to build relationships with local media outlets, engage on social media, and collaborate with influencers.”
- Specific: You’ll create a positive reputation for the business using tactics over the given time frame.
- Measurable: You could track media coverage, social media engagement, and collaboration with influencers.
- Attainable: These realistic steps can lead to building a positive reputation.
- Relevant: This goal is suitable because a good reputation is crucial for business success.
- Time-based: You have 5 months to accomplish your PR goal.
#6. Expand Client Relationships
“To build better relationships with our current clients, I will host monthly coffee meetings with existing and potential clients to discuss their needs within the next 6 months.”
- Specific: The aim is to expand client relationships through monthly client meetings.
- Measurable: Evaluate success by checking the number of hosted meetings.
- Attainable: This is a reasonable goal as such meetings allow for building better client relationships.
- Relevant: This is relevant to the public relations team as it helps build stronger relationships.
- Time-based: Goal attainment is expected within the following 6 months.
#7. Develop Storytelling Strategies
“I will create storytelling strategies that integrate our organization’s mission and values in three months. These strategies will be based on research, insights, and market trends to ensure we engage our target audience best.”
- Specific: This goal details the action (create storytelling strategies) and the expected timeline (three months).
- Measurable: Assess the effectiveness of the storytelling strategies developed.
- Attainable: Creating storytelling strategies is feasible with proper research, insights, and market trends.
- Relevant: Effective storytelling can help align the audience with the organization’s mission and values.
- Time-based: The goal statement has a deadline of three whole months.
Read also: Video Storytelling: Its Benefits to Your Brand
How to Improve PR Effectiveness
Evaluating your PR effectiveness is essential for measuring your results and improving your PR strategies and tactics. You should align your PR goals with your business objectives and audience needs, and plan and execute your PR campaigns with SMART goals and clear strategies. Additionally, you should monitor and measure your PR performance regularly and adjust your PR campaigns accordingly.
It is also important to communicate and collaborate with your PR team and stakeholders, and to communicate your PR goals, strategies, and results clearly and regularly. By doing so, you can identify the best practices and lessons learned from your PR campaigns, and apply them to your future PR efforts.
Bottom Line
In conclusion, incorporating SMART goals into PR strategies is not just a methodology; it is a transformative approach that empowers PR professionals to navigate the complexities of their field with purpose and precision. By emphasizing specificity, measurability, achievability, relevance, and time-bound objectives, the SMART framework ensures that PR efforts are strategic, adaptable, and consistently aligned with the organization’s overarching goals.
As the PR landscape continues to evolve, embracing the SMART criteria is a testament to a commitment to excellence, propelling PR strategies beyond mere communication and into the realm of strategic impact.
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