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The Role of Specific Audience Targeting in PR Objectives

The Role of Specific Audience Targeting in PR Objectives

The most common mistake when formulating a PR objective is to include the phrase ‘the public,’ which has no place in the communication discourse. PR depends on the relationship between multiple publics, with strategies and tactics being developed to target a specific group.

A compelling communication objective always specifies which audience is being honed in on. The phrase ‘the public’ is simply too vague to provide useful guidance for campaign planning.

It seems obvious that you would not use the same strategies and tactics to influence middle-aged subsistence farmers in rural China and young urban professionals in Paris. While these two groups are obviously different, each target audience has different values and media habits that must be considered when developing a campaign to reach them. If you do not identify a specific audience in your public relations objective, you risk miscommunicating your key messages or delivering the right information to the wrong people.

Communicating to a public is science, not an art. To select a public, firstly identify all the stakeholders in a client’s organisation that may include customers, constituents, opponents, competitors, consumer groups, employees, and shareholders. In effect, they can be any group that influences or is influenced by the actions of the organisation. Stakeholders are the potential public.

From these groups, you will select one to be the target of your campaign. You must consider all the associates concerned in this or risk omitting the one public that could be most easily influenced or that could do the most to help meet your client’s objectives.

When considering potential  stakeholders, do not forget those groups we call latent publics. These can be divided into three general categories. They are active, passive, and latent. Active publics are already taking action to either support or oppose your client’s organisational objectives. Active publics are the ones that we as public relations practitioners think of first.

Understanding and Engaging with Active, Passive, and Latent Publics

However, they are usually already committed to a course of action and are, therefore, difficult to influence. Active supporters are either helping your client, and you waste resources trying to change them, or they are already taking action against your client and may have strong opinions that are impossible to change – regardless of the creativity of the public relations sources. Passive publics, in my humble opinion, are groups that simply do not care about your objectives. Again, it is a waste of your client’s resources to support a public relations campaign directed to a passive public. Latent publics are these groups who, if given a piece of information, can be converted to active supporters or opponents. These groups who would act if properly motivated, are the best publics for most campaigns.

Ahmed Malik 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