Creating Successful PR Communications Plans

Master the art of creating a successful communications plan with the invaluable insights from this enlightening conversation with Gini Dietrich, the founder and CEO of Spin Sucks Academy. We take a magnifying glass to the intricate art of crafting a communications plan, unearthing the critical role it plays in any PR process. Gini, with her expertise, paints a vivid picture of an effective communications plan by exploring its 16 essential elements, from strategic objectives to impactful positioning statements. 

Ever wondered how tools like chatGPT can revolutionize your communication strategy? Well, hold tight as we embark on a fascinating journey into the world of tech-savvy PR, discussing chatGPT, competitor analysis, and the importance of SMART metrics. Gini also highlights how her model can be harnessed to build trust and credibility in the process. As we navigate through the ever-changing landscape of communications planning, we emphasize the importance of setting realistic goals and the magic of inclusiveness in planning. So, buckle up and tune in to gain a wealth of knowledge and practical tips to turbocharge your PR communications plans. Don't forget to share the episode with your colleagues and remember to join us for the next edition of the Public Relations Review Podcast.

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Transcript

Announcer: 1:09

Welcome. This is the Public Relations Review Podcast, a program to discuss the many facets of public relations with seasoned professionals, educators, authors and others. Now here is your host, Peter Woolfolk.

Peter Woolfolk: 1:31

Welcome to the Public Relations Review Podcast and to all listeners all across America and around the world. Now, I am very pleased to announce that, as of September 2023, apple has ranked this podcast among the top 1% of podcasts worldwide. So thank you to all of my guests for providing the great content that makes this possible and to my audience for your continued support. Now question when considering a public relations campaign, it usually requires a communications plan. So what exactly should be included in a good communications plan? Well, my guest today has an answer for you. She is the founder and CEO of SpinSucks Academy. They provide consulting services on a select basis. Clients include 1,400 companies, government agencies and major nonprofits. They solve complex corporate communications challenges. In addition, she is the creator and patent holder of the PASO Model and Certification Communications Program. Not a surprise, she is also available as a featured speaker for your event, so I am very pleased to welcome, from New York City, Gini Dietrich, founder and CEO of SpinSucks, as my guest today. Jenny, thank you for coming on board.

Gini Dietrich: 2:57

Thank you for having me and congratulations, that's awesome.

Peter Woolfolk: 3:01

Well, it was a surprise to me too. Nobody called and told me I stumbled on it. You're like oh, look at me. It's something bright in my day, that's for sure.

Gini Dietrich: 3:16

Well, congratulations.

Peter Woolfolk: 3:17

Well, thank you so much. Now let me I'm sure you've been asked this before, but first please describe to us how you arrived at SpinSucks as your company name.

Gini Dietrich: 3:31

Well. So I'm sure you can relate to this. But when you're at a cocktail reception or you're on the plane or you're in the elevator and somebody says what do you do for a living? And you say public relations, you get probably three responses oh, you lie for a living. Or oh, you're one of those spin doctors. Or how many parties have you planned, that you've had celebrity, that, and you're like none of those things are true. And so when we were thinking about launching a blog and this was way back in the day, you know, when blogging was first started to become a thing we were like what should we call it? And one of our interns said well, you hate it when people say that you spin for a living. Maybe we could call it SpinSucks. And lo and behold, the URL was available, so it became.

Peter Woolfolk: 4:24

Well, that you know. You're absolutely right. A lot of people just do not fully understand what public relations people actually do.

Gini Dietrich: 4:32

No, they've not.

Peter Woolfolk: 4:36

But the big challenge here is that you know, and I think we've all had had the opportunities to put together communications plans some good, some not so good and others- somewhere in between. So, let's look at those things that you say are and required, any good communications plan.

Gini Dietrich: 4:55

Well, I think there are 16 things that are required in every communications plan, and it doesn't need to be 16 pages or 60 pages, but it could be a page, an executive summary, it could be two pages, as long as it includes these 16 things, and it varies everything from what you would expect objectives and goals and strategy to Good day, key challenges, situation analysis and your implementation strategy, budget measurement, all that kind of stuff, and the way we always look at it is as to your point earlier in the introduction is from a pay-per-mall perspective. Does it include also included paid media, earned media, shared media and owned media, and how do those intersect and interact with one another?

Peter Woolfolk: 5:46

Now, you mentioned there were 16 parts to it. So why don't we sort of outline what those 16 parts are?

Gini Dietrich: 5:53

Okay, it's the objective Goals strategy executive summary, key challenges, situation analysis, customer analysis, competitor analysis, your implementation summary, your positioning statement, your cost strategy, the pay-per-model, changing market analysis metrics, and I'm missing two. I think I had pay-per-model wrapped up into four of them. So those are the big things, right there.

Peter Woolfolk: 6:32

So it might just help, you know, for listeners, because a lot of listeners are at all stages in public relations. But just to be on the same side, just do a brief overview of what each one of those elements contains. What's that you mentioned?

Gini Dietrich: 6:48

So the objective is the what.

Gini Dietrich: 6:50

What do you want to achieve and make it measurable? So it's really the what. And when you think about as you're setting out your plan, you want to have the what, the why, the how right. So you have that built into place. So the what is the objective and then the goal. You might also be referred to them as key performance indicators, but these are the things that are going to help you reach your objective. So an objective might be that we want to add $10 million next year in revenue, which is a pretty lofty goal for PR, but let's go with it.

Gini Dietrich: 7:32

Your goal then would be how are you going to do that? You want to be able to build your plan so that it helps you achieve that objective right. So you want to be able to increase your website traffic. You want to build an email database. You want to increase engagement from fans and followers. You want to build leads and qualified leads and help sell. So there's all those pieces that go into helping that.

Gini Dietrich: 7:59

And then your strategy is the how. So how will you do it? Right, this becomes your map or your GPS. So if your goal is to build and enhance your replication to attract more clients, then your strategy will be a sentence or two that describes how you'll do that. So it's the vision of your communication plan. So the objective is the what, the strategy is the how, and then you can start to get into the plan itself. We like to have an executive summary because, for those of you who have created plans in the past, they can become overwhelming and cumbersome and you put all this work into it and it goes into a binder and it goes on a shelf and you never look at it again. So we really like to look at a one-page recap of everything that's in your plan and that's what's going to sit on your desk, it's going to sit on your boss's desk, it's going to sit on your client's desk and that's what you're going to review every month and every quarter.

Announcer: 8:58

Together Is where are we?

Gini Dietrich: 8:59

against these things, and that should include your mission and your vision, your core values, your objective, your goals, your strategies, your key messages, a list of communications tactics, and then I always like to include a list of things that you would like to do if resources open up. So, if you get more budget or something happens with one of the tactics that it doesn't work out as well, so you need to shift, I like to have a list, a form of awesome I used to call it the popcorn list so what are the things that you like to have there that you would that, if resources open up but are not part of the main plan you could do? You want to look at key challenges, right? So list all of the challenges that you can foresee. What's going to prevent you from achieving your goal? What's going to prevent you from generating $10 million in revenue?

Gini Dietrich: 9:48

And for that one it very well could be. The goal is too lossy, right, so you have to think through every single key challenge. Then do your situation analysis. So this is an identification of industry metrics, and I used to sit on a board of a company that was sold, actually in January of 2020, which was brilliant on his part the owner's part but I think it's a hard idea to really use this in account. So Every quarter when we had our board meeting, he would start the meeting by showing us industry trends, and it was so valuable to be able to understand. This is what's happening in the industry and how it's going to affect the growth of the business and how it's going to affect the marketing and the communication. So I always like to include that in there, and it's just a two or three sentence recap on what's happening in the industry, and it could be everything from remote work or hybrid work to I'm trying to think of some good inflation is a good one. You have things that are happening either globally or within the industry that are going to affect your ability to achieve your goals in the next year.

Gini Dietrich: 10:55

Next is compared to our customer analysis. So really look at who the customer is One of the things that we've started doing is creating out using chatGPT to help us create an initial brand persona. So we'll say our audience is an HR professional. They're typically between 35 and 50 years of age. They have 15 years of experience. These are their key challenges. These are the things that they're trying to achieve, and chatGPT will say okay, your brand persona is named Lisa and this is what she looks for. These are the key messages, these are the ways that she looks for content. This is the kind of stuff that affects her, and then you can take that out of chatGPT and refine it. So it's a really fun way to do your customer analysis with the use of artificial intelligence. Now you're a competitor of analysis, right?

Peter Woolfolk: 11:49

Well, let me just say right quick, because you mentioned chatGPT. I also have found that extremely useful for at least beginning to lay out the initial outline or guidance and then get in and edit it the way you need. So it's and it's so very, very quick and, for the most part, accurate. But thank goodness chatGPT.

Gini Dietrich: 12:11

Oh my gosh, it's amazing. I love it. It's funny because I have a couple of people on my team who are like I'm never using it, it's cheating. And I'm like it's not cheating, it's making you more efficient. That's like saying back in the day when we had the big bacon, big green bacon books and you had to look up all the journalists and then they put everything online and suddenly you had it in your fingertips.

Gini Dietrich: 12:30

It's like saying that you didn't wanna go online and look up the journalists, because that's cheating. You would just keep going back to the same thing. We're just getting more efficient.

Peter Woolfolk: 12:38

I love it.

Gini Dietrich: 12:39

I'm a big fan. I think everyone should do this.

Peter Woolfolk: 12:41

Absolutely.

Gini Dietrich: 12:42

Like you do your competitor analysis. Same thing. You can throw that into chatGPT. And one of the things I like to do is take the copy from the competitor's home pages. So you just copy and paste and you say build me a competitive analysis in a graph form that shows me the differences between these companies. So you do your own company and you do maybe three to five competitors and all of a sudden you have this great graphic that shows you you guys are really good at this and your competition is really good at this, and you hear the opportunities where you can fill in those blanks.

Gini Dietrich: 13:17

So again to your point. It's not the final piece but it gives you something to start with. Then you do an implementation summary. So this is an analysis of how they'll use your competitive analysis, your customer analysis and your situation analysis to help you achieve your goals. So that's your implementation summary, your positioning statements, or they could also be called key messages if that's what you prefer. So how you'll start to communicate and how you'll stay on message. Then you'll look at a cost strategy, and I know it seems kind of strange to add cost strategy into your commerce plan, but it's really important that we look at the overall business. So in this case, the cost could affect your ability to deliver results. So you really wanna look at that and figure out what is it that we're trying to do and how will that affect our ability to reach our goals. And now that you've done all that, you can start to talk tactics. And the funny thing is, with most communicators, we like to start with the tactics, but you can see there's several things that come before that before you even start to think about tactics.

Gini Dietrich: 14:25

And here where I think you should start is with the Paypal model. So what are you doing with owned media, which is where I think most Paypal model programs should begin? And how are you using your own media? How are you using shared media to promote your own media? And how are you using earned media to give you sort of that third party stamp of approval on your content? And then how are you using paid media to reach new audiences, to boost and get to new audiences that don't already know about you? So your content plan should encompass all four of those things and when you integrate them together really well, you start to build trust, credibility and authority both online and off. So it doesn't have to be just digital. It can be offline as well. You also want to look at changing market analysis.

Gini Dietrich: 15:14

So I think that we can all agree that the past three years have been something sick to be old and we couldn't have predicted that right. But we knew like there were plenty of economists in 2019 saying something was coming. And I remember my husband coming home from a trip to DC in December of 2019 and him saying to me I'll never forget this as long as I live. He was sitting on the kitchen counter while I was making dinner and he said I think we need to start buying hoarding food. And I was like what? What do you mean? We need to start hoarding food. And he's like I think this thing coming out of China is real. And I was like you're insane. That doesn't happen in America. And he was like okay, I still think you should start hoarding food. So I did, but we knew something was coming. We didn't know what magnitude it was going to be, but those are the kinds of things that you want to look at.

Gini Dietrich: 16:12

Right, we have to look at how all of what's going on in the world is going to affect the way that we're able to do our jobs and achieve our goals. And then the last thing, and certainly not the least, is your metrics. If you did your work upfront correctly, you already have your metrics in your goals. So scroll back to your goals section in your plan and say, okay, I said we're going to do this and we need to achieve that. Now you have your metrics.

Gini Dietrich: 16:41

So make sure, when you're doing your metrics, that you follow the smart structure. Are they specific, Are they measurable, Are they attainable, Are they realistic and are they time bound. So it's not an easy assignment and it's you know, I don't. How long does it take us to talk this through? 14 minutes, and you can do this in two or three pages. You know if you have a paragraph for each one of these 16 pieces. Now you have a nice, robust plan, but I like to start talking about this in October, because the last quarter of the year is always when we start planning for the following year, and this is something you're going to have to be thinking about now, right now.

Peter Woolfolk: 17:19

Well, you know one of the things that you also pointed out. You said that a reason for communicating, or communications plan, is harder than it seems Simple, as because we see what it should be rather than what it is. So, how does one suggest how individuals or groups can make the distinction between those two issues?

Gini Dietrich: 17:42

You know it's I think. I think a couple of things. I think as human beings. Naturally we tend to be optimistic about the things that we can achieve.

Gini Dietrich: 17:50

And I remember when I started my business, I was like every year we're going to have 100% growth, we're going to double growth. Well, it's not. It's not realistic. I can say that all I want and I can set a goal to do it, but it's not realistic. It's realistic when you're doing $100,000 a year. You could probably do $200,000 a year. It's not realistic as you grow and sell your business. I can't go from $3 million to $6 million overnight.

Gini Dietrich: 18:17

I can't do that any year, unless I get funding or you know whatever I have to do. So you have to be. I think that we have to be really realistic about what it is that we can achieve and also get involvement from other people. If you are a solo person either a solo printer, that's a consultant, or a solo communications professional on the team get help from your other departments. Force a strategy session with your executive team, talk to sales, talk to accounting, like, bring in other people to help you make it realistic so that you're not saying, all Happy shiny rainbows and unicorns, we can achieve this, when in fact, there are all these other factors that you didn't realize we're going to affect the way that you were. You should create your plans.

Peter Woolfolk: 19:03

Well, you know, I think that's a hugely important issue, simply because when you have a team, sometimes you Independent upon who the person, the other persons are. There might be some people who just don't want to say anything negative because maybe they they're uncomfortable doing it, even though it might be accurate. So the idea of having some, so someone outside of that particular circle, chime in on what the, what the topic questions are, I think is a very, very valuable piece of guidance because it helps you To get things done the right way.

Gini Dietrich: 19:38

That's right. That's exactly right.

Peter Woolfolk: 19:40

Yes, so, in terms of putting together this process, how, how have people responded to it in terms of your, your six or sixteen part plans? Have you gotten feedback on that?

Gini Dietrich: 19:52

I have people think. Some people think it's overwhelming, some people Want more explanation about the difference between an objective and a strategy. It's funny because when I started my career I was at Slishman's, howard, and I'm sure I still have it somewhere. But I had a notebook piece of paper taped to my wall and it had two columns and the first column was Objective words, so words that you would use to write an objective. And I had the other column was Strategy words, so words that you would use to write a strategy statement.

Gini Dietrich: 20:28

And people would come into my office all the time and Stand there in front of that, that piece of paper, and like, use it right in their notebooks Okay, all right, all right and look at it again and write it some more and look at it and they wouldn't even talk to me and then they turn around and walk away. And I had that there to remind people that as Communicators, you have to be really smart about this. I'm sure I have it somewhere Because we, like I said, we we want to start with the taxes, because that's what's fun, right, but we, if we haven't done the hard work of understanding, of building the the map to get us there, we're not. It doesn't matter how fun the taxes are, we're not going to achieve our goals.

Peter Woolfolk: 21:08

Well, let me say this, that you know you have provided us with some very, very Great ideas, in particular to making sure that our communications plans can be effective. Would you have any sort of closing remarks or some things that other public relations people or, as public relations people, we should also consider as we put together a computer communications plan?

Gini Dietrich: 21:32

Yes, I would say it's something that should be reviewed quarterly. I actually really like to put my Goals, our goals, into a spreadsheet and then track it every quarter. So we do it every month and then we report against it to clients every quarter. But work with the team, work with your executive team or work with your clients to tweak and, you know, revise things as you go, because, as we all know, you can create the most compelling Plan ever. That's 12 months long, and then things happen that you don't expect you'll have. You'll be, you'll be tuned into what's going on with the industry and what's going on globally and what's going on inside your country that we could affect it, but you can't predict everything, so things are going to happen. So I always recommend really looking at it every quarter and, to your point, be honest about it. Is this even feasible? Or do we need to shift tactics? Or and do that now versus at the end of the year, so that we can still achieve our goals?

Peter Woolfolk: 22:39

Well, jeannie, let me say thank you so very, very much for having been our guest today on the public relations review podcast.

Gini Dietrich: 22:46

I'm sure you're in the top one Well.

Peter Woolfolk: 22:52

I'm sure they'll listen, wherever they are, the wisdom that you bring and yeah, I've also taken notes. I think it's always great to listen to people who have the kind of experience that that you have. You never know when it will come in handy.

Gini Dietrich: 23:08

Well, thank you for having me. This was a blast.

Peter Woolfolk: 23:11

Well, let me say to my listeners if you've enjoyed it, certainly we'd like to get a great review from you. You've got some program ideas? Get in touch, because We've certainly had programs that were brought to us by by listeners. So let me say thank you once again for listening to the public relations review podcast. Share this with your colleagues and be sure to join us for the next edition of the public relations review podcast.

Announcer: 23:38

This podcast is produced by Communication Strategies, an award-winning public relations and public affairs firm headquartered in national Tennessee. Thank you for joining us.