Need a Better PR Strategy? Here's What One Actually Includes
Most brands don't have a bad PR strategy. They have no strategy. They are just activity. They send pitches when they remember to, chase whatever coverage seems exciting that week, and post a placement when they land one. It feels like PR. It produces occasional results. But it isn't a strategy, and that's usually why the results stay occasional.
A real PR strategy is something different: a deliberate plan that connects clear goals, consistent messaging, the right audiences, and disciplined timing into a system that compounds. After 13 years and thousands of placements, I've seen the same pattern hold: the brands that get consistent, meaningful coverage aren't the ones working hardest at random activity. They're the ones working from an actual strategy. Here's what one actually includes.
It starts with objectives, not activity
The first thing that separates a strategy from busywork is a clear objective. Not "get more press." It’s a wish, not a goal. A real objective is specific and tied to a business outcome: establish the founder as a recognized authority in a category, drive qualified traffic ahead of a raise, reach a specific audience that advances the mission.
Every strong PR objective answers four questions: What specific outcome do we need? Why does it matter to the business? How will we measure success? What's the timeline? Vague goals produce vague results. When you know exactly what you're trying to achieve, every other decision, which outlets, which angles, which timing, gets easier, because you can measure it against a real target instead of chasing coverage for its own sake.
It's built around specific audiences
One of the most common mistakes I see is brands trying to reach "everyone." That's a strategy for reaching no one.
A real strategy names its audiences specifically and not just customers, but every stakeholder group that matters: potential buyers, journalists, industry influencers, investors, and the talented people you want to recruit. Each of those groups consumes different media and responds to different messages. Once you know exactly who you're trying to reach, you can identify where they actually pay attention and what would genuinely resonate with them. A brand that knows its audiences can put the right message in the right place. A brand pitching "everyone" is guessing.
It runs on one consistent message
Here's where most brands quietly fall apart: their messaging changes depending on who's talking. The founder says one thing in an interview, the website says another, the social posts say a third. To an audience, and increasingly to the AI systems learning from all of it, that inconsistency reads as noise.
In my PR Playbook, I teach a framework I call the Message House to solve exactly this. Think of it like a house with three levels. The roof is your main message, the single most important thing you want every stakeholder to know. The walls are three to five sub-messages, the supporting points that reinforce that main narrative. The foundation is the specific facts and proof points that make each sub-message credible. Once you've built your Message House, everyone on your team can speak from it, whether the CEO is on a podcast or an intern is writing a caption and the core story stays consistent everywhere. That consistency is what turns scattered mentions into a coherent brand people actually remember.
It uses timing deliberately
A strategy doesn't just decide what to say. It decides when. Random pitching ignores the single biggest factor in whether a story gets covered: whether it's timely.
Strategic timing means building your outreach around real windows: the awareness days and seasonal moments your brand genuinely connects to, planned weeks ahead when editors are scheduling coverage, and the breaking news in your industry that you're ready to respond to within hours. When we ran a campaign for an organization focused on youth wellness, we deliberately aligned it with Mental Health Awareness Month, Distracted Driving Awareness Month, and other relevant periods and that timing was a major reason the campaign generated billions of impressions. The story mattered, but the timing is what opened the doors.
It's measured, then adjusted
The final element is what separates a strategy from a hope: a way to know if it's working. Activity-based PR never measures anything beyond whether coverage happened. A real strategy defines its metrics up front and reviews them regularly.
That means deciding, before you launch, which metrics actually matter for your objectives: qualified traffic, referral conversions, share of voice in your category, how AI tools describe you and then reviewing them on a regular cadence. Markets change, and what's working shifts. The brands with real strategies review and refine quarterly based on results, doubling down on what's working and cutting what isn't. A strategy you never measure isn't a strategy. It's a guess you never checked.
From activity to strategy
If your PR feels like effort without traction, the problem usually isn't that you're not working hard enough. It's that you're working without a strategy and doing activities instead of executing a plan.
The fix isn't more pitching. It's stepping back and building the actual structure: objectives tied to business outcomes, clearly defined audiences, one consistent message across everything, deliberate timing, and honest measurement. Put those five elements in place and your PR stops being a series of disconnected attempts and becomes what it was always meant to be: a system that compounds, where each placement builds on the last and the whole thing moves you toward a goal you actually defined.
That's the difference between doing PR and having a PR strategy. One feels busy. The other builds something.
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