Last week, we talked about hiring a PR specialist. One of the first considerations we mentioned is that quality in this field doesn’t come cheap.

For entrepreneurs and SMEs, the benefits of public relations can’t be underestimated, so it may require some upskilling in the field to try and secure better performance on a budget.

Today, we’re going to look at the competencies and qualities associated with a great PR specialist, to provide a personal development guide for those looking to master the field on behalf of their business. If you have every wondered how to become a public relations specialist, read on.

Doing so will allow small businesses to punch above their weight when it comes to PR, and attract attention to their brand. Mastering public relations will also help businesses create better content for audiences and influencers. Then, when the business has grown to be able to afford a PR consultant, you will be able to communicate with them on their level about your needs and objectives.

First, we’ll look at the core competencies of a PR specialist, and how sharpening these aspects of your own game can help you fuel your business’ growth.

PR Competencies

Channelling Creativity Into Touchpoints

Creativity is essential, but it comes to nothing if it isn’t harnessed appropriately. The big difference between adequate and great PR specialists is the ability to be highly skilled in producing content for different touchpoints.

Creative writing is perhaps the most important of these, as written content is proliferated across websites, blogs, and every major form of social media. What’s more, interpersonal communication is now increasingly via email and messenger services. It’s important to understand that simple grammar errors of factual discrepancies can undermine and discredit your company when making a first impression.

Marketing requires a very different kind of creativity to content production. You must identify the important aspects of the brand, what matters to audiences, and use empathy to create motivation in audiences based on what matters to them. This psychological underpinning is what gives creativity it’s affective force.

What’s more, it is not enough to do these two things at once. PR specialists create Campaigns – organized and strategic medium to long term plans that mean each bit of messaging feeds into the other across multiple touch points together, causing the message to resonate in the audience’s mind.

Understanding how this reinforcement works is the difference between mediocre and outstanding results.

Communication

Every PR specialist must be a great communicator. We talked about writing above, and touched on empathy, but communication takes these two concepts and explodes them considerably.

A PR specialist must know how to communicate a brand – this requires shaping the kind of conversations that occur around the brand, which in turn contribute to the image people have in their minds when they think of the business. It’s about promoting the values, acknowledging the challenges and getting people excited about the long-term vision. All of this requires eloquence, delivered in simple terms ordinary consumers can understand. A PR specialist is a spokesperson and brand champion for your business.

What’s more, a PR specialist must be able to effectively develop relationships. Communication exists on an individual level. To recruit journalists and influencers to the cause, a PR specialist must be affable, approachable, open and engaging. These qualities can be developed over time, but it takes a practiced conversationalist to be relaxed when the stakes are high.

Finally, this communication needs to be seen and heard. That requires a network, something PR consultants spend years developing. If you’re an entrepreneur or SME, PRWIRE Asia can help crafting the conversations that take place about and around your business, through the effective use of press release communication. This takes advantage of a pre-established network of over 300 media outlets.

Digitalization

PR has become an increasingly digital discipline. Online visibility is now an absolute prerequisite for success over the long term, as more and more people get their news, entertainment and information online.

Unlike traditional PR, which mainly focuses on print media and broadcast media relationship management, digital PR works across multiple channels that include a wide range of different digital media, to maximize exposure to an expansive range of audiences.

Digital PR competency is entirely different to print, and requires a different set of skills. Understanding SEO and inbound marketing are essentials in the 21st century, and being able to maximize the shareability of a brand is increasingly important to its success. Virality in marketing can have greater success than traditional methods – understanding what makes content shareable online will be a big difference maker.

Up To Date

Most important of all for a PR specialist is to have their finger on the pulse of current events. In South East Asia, there are constant developments in the economy across multiple regions, and all of these can have significant effects on business, while providing many opportunities to take advantage of.

In order for messaging to be compelling to consumers, it has to be relevant and current. Understanding what’s happening in the world around the business is the most basic requirement for tailoring content appropriately.

As such, a PR specialist must spend real time digesting and understanding the latest news. They must spend time thinking of how this affects customers and the business, and how to convey the relationship between the brand and the event in a compelling way.

Major brands have caught on to the mobile marketing trend in Hong Kong and Singapore recently, using creative and interactive marketing tools to engage newly tech savvy users in novel ways. Nike battled the elements – with personified adverse conditions taunting runners to keep going, while Tesco created virtual stores for people to shop online.

These responses may be beyond the scope of small businesses, but serve as examples of how fast action in response to emerging news stories can dominate both the market and the media.

Qualities of A Great PR Specialist

Now we’ve talked about the skills required to be a successful PR specialist, we need to talk about the traits. The biggest thing that holds most startups and small businesses back is a lack of commitment to personal development in those who found and run them.

If you’re here to learn how to be successful in public relations, you have to understand that developing personal traits is just as important as developing skills. The success of a PR specialist is often based on their ‘charisma’ – but I find this definition unhelpful. To assist you in figuring out how to develop this magnetic personality, I’ve broken it down into five key aspects.

This way, you can work on just one of these elements at a time, folding new perspectives and approaches into your dealings with people, to help connect on a richer, more compelling level.

Clarity

There’s a concept in advanced sciences that if you don’t know how to explain a concept to a five-year-old, you don’t really understand it.

The same is true in business. Your elevator pitch will be an essential tool in your PR arsenal. It needs to feel natural, while clearly explaining the benefit to the customer and why they should care. It should illustrate a sense of momentum behind the product, through endorsements or developments, with a call to action that leaves them wanting more. All this in 30 seconds.

To do this, you need absolute clarity, and utter simplicity. To download this much information into someone’s brain in such a short space of time, you need to have distilled your message until it shines effortlessly. Even if everything you’re saying is right, it won’t matter if you’re saying too much. Say it with less.

They say all good writing is rewriting – get into the habit of simplifying all your messaging. Get a five year old excited, and you’ll get journalists and customers excited too. By practicing this process, you’ll build your ability to achieve clarity more easily, until it becomes second nature.

Integrity

People are used to companies twisting the facts to better suit their own agenda. People are tired of it. The term “spin doctor” is used to attack and undermine the profession of public relations.

This is because in an increasingly competitive and litigious environment, some companies will misrepresent, exaggerate or outright lie about situations in order to try and invent the reality in which they are on top. The most dangerous version of this practice now sits in the White House.

You need to be honest with people. You need to be transparent. What many don’t realise is that this transparency is liberating. If you hide nothing, you fear nothing. What’s more, you are forced to work in a way that is sustainable, responsible and ethical. This in turn will build immediate respect and trust from customers.

Having integrity means getting used to owning up to mistakes, focusing on actions that can be taken to challenge current limitations, while maintaining a positive outlook for the future of the company.

Rigour

Of course, you already care about your business. But does your business suffer from a lack of care for the details? Care for broad strokes objectives like expansion and growth will never be enough without care for the detail. The detail is what facilitates that growth.

Every piece of public relations material must be sweated over because you genuinely care about the results.

A good PR specialist will rigorously challenge statements to make sure they are backed up with evidence. They will examine that evidence to make sure it really holds up. They will be a devil’s advocate, never accepting ‘good enough’ ‘vague’ or ‘sweeping’ messages. They want specifics, they want targeting, and they want action.

They check and double check everything, from how well a message adheres to the short and long-term goals of a brand, to the spelling, grammar and word choice. Care for the details.

Imagination

Creativity is the secret sauce for PR success, but it can be learned. In most cases, like a painter or photographer, all you have to do is develop a unique perspective on what’s in front of you.

This perspective must still deliver the product, idea, cause, and key message to the target audience, but it must also elevate the idea and cause to something people will really care about.

For instance, Panasonic are competing with Tesla to create solar power storage. Singapore PR firm Golin Singapore wanted to demonstrate that the key benefit was the use of solar power when the sun was no longer in the sky. They could have just lit a house at night or during a cloudy day using the stored energy. Boring.

Instead, they looked to explode the perspective, adding drama and stakes to the cause. So they used the solar power to broadcast a solar eclipse in Indonesia live across the world. The sun powered a broadcast of itself disappearing – a powerful message that proved the technology – all from thinking creatively about times when the sun isn’t there. Witness the incredible award-winning idea in the below video.

Perception

A great PR person will understand how a business relates to the wider world around it – will see the connections between events on a micro and macro scale, and understand how that will affect the business. Being able to perceive relationships, identify patterns and weave them into the story of the brand is what elevates the best from the rest.

Doing so will enable your business to participate in wider conversations, creating more high profile coverage, and presenting the business as one of significance within its industry.

TAKING ACTION

Everything we’ve described is theoretical, and none of it matters without action. Fortunately, action is now easier than ever in Southeast Asia. PRWIRE Asia provides you an expert team of News PA, seasoned with PR experience, to turn your business activities into newsworthy stories and publish them on more than 300 different news websites.

Thanks for reading this lengthy post. I hope you get a better view of what it takes to become a public relations specialist. If you have any questions, do throw them at us in the comments section. If you are a PR specialist yourself, please share with us what you think are the most important traits and skills to excel in this field!