Whenever you hear the term “public,” what is the first thing that comes to mind? I would say the people around me. Publics play a much larger role when it comes to PR, marketing, etc. Publics help define the directions that organizations and corporations are going to take when it comes to their next campaigns.

There are many different characteristics that Strategic Planning for Public Relations talks about when it comes to publics. It is important for publics to be able to be categorized to help analyze which will be the best to target for your campaign. You should look at a few different things, which include:

  • Distinguishable
  • Homogeneous
  • Importance
  • Size
  • Accessibility

By separating these publics, it can allow for organizations to target different ones in their own specific ways. Overall, the public is involved as one of the organization’s stakeholders. Public Engagement brings this to light in their diagram where they talk about defining the territory. Finding their specific territory allows for your organization to go more in depth with each public and what you are wanting to accomplish with them. Your publics can also include your competitors. You want to examine what they are doing differently than you and how that is overall working for them. Try to come up with new ideas that set you a part from your competitors.

Stakeholders

You want to prioritize the importance of each individual public and how they fit into your stakeholders. By making this priority list, you are able to focus on the most important publics and focus less on ones that are likely to not make much of an impact in your organization. Pavilion makes a point about communicating with your publics should be chosen by how much they interact with the company or organization. You do not want to spend a large amount of time reaching for an audience that has never interacted with your company, that should come overtime.

Planning

You hopefully have a good idea about what publics are now, so you might be asking yourself how you can begin to implement the planning for your organization to analyze their publics. It is important to set out different questions that you want to answer prior to your analysis and during. Press Page helps make things a little more bearable by helping you set up your PR planning to make sure everything works smoothly. Some basic questions can help kickstart your analysis.

  • What major publics is your organization wanting to target?
  • What stakeholders are you going to prioritize?
  • Who are the main competitors?

These basic questions are going to start to set you and your PR plan up for success!

Sources

Know your audience: Publics and stakeholders. DINFOS Pavilion. (n.d.). Retrieved February 13, 2023, from https://pavilion.dinfos.edu/Article/Article/2339406/know-your-audience-publics-and-stakeholders/ 

Person, D., R., & Smith. (2017, May 18). Analyzing the publics: 5 : V5: Strategic planning for public relatio. Taylor & Francis. Retrieved February 13, 2023, from https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781315270876-5/analyzing-publics-ronald-smith 

Smith, R. D. (2021). Step 3 Analyzing the Publics. In Strategic Planning for Public Relations. essay, Routledge. 

Who are the public? NCCPE. (2018, March 16). Retrieved February 13, 2023, from https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/about-engagement/who-are-public