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Part 2: Implementing psychology into your PR campaign
In the previous part of my blog, I explained the history of psychology and how it became intertwined in PR on a subconscious level. In this part of my blog, I will be showing you some tips to create a successful PR campaign.
When creating your campaign, you need to first determine your target audience. Your target audience differs based on your campaign topic. This is where psychology can help clarify how and why your target audience reacts differently, based on the science of perception.
PR professionals always aim to relay information that is persuasive and effective. To know how to influence a person, you need to first learn how people form attitudes. In psychology, an attitude is a group of emotions, beliefs, and behaviours toward a particular subject, which may ultimately have an emotional impact on their behaviour. There are three basic attributes of attitude formation: emotional, cognitive, and behavioural.
When planning your campaign, you should also take into account your target audience’s different social insight, including sentiment bias, ethnic and circumstantial influences, and stereotypes. Once you understand your audience’s attitudes, you must then learn how to grab and keep their attention; a concept of cognitive psychology that establishes how we process specific information in one’s surrounding environment.
Upon grabbing your audience’s attention, you need to ensure they always remember what you introduced. In memory formation, three major processes are involved: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Memory is indeed a tricky topic, but psychology has proven that storytelling is one of the most effective tools in memory formation. This is why PR professionals often use storytelling elements in their client’s press releases.
There are several tips to help you keep someone’s attention, including simulating curiosity and pushing them to questions, introducing a pleasant surprise by replacing some of your campaign content with different ideations and visuals, affirming the relevance of a topic of importance to your audience, and telling them stories.
It is fascinating how psychology can affect your day-to-day jobs, and uncovering the secrets of psychology is a lengthy and amazing process. Stay tuned for my upcoming blogs to uncover the secret communication of the body and mind!
Antoine Boghos is Account Manager at Cicero & Bernay Public Relations, an independent PR agency headquartered in Dubai offering new-age public relations consultancy to the UAE and across the MENA region. | www.cbpr.me