Going for gold: How to plan and execute an Olympic PR strategy

The Olympics are up and running, and the gold medals are already flowing in for Team GB. Anyone who witnessed Tom Pidcok’s remarkable victory in the men’s mountain bike event was treated to an astonishing performance. The pure race drama acts as an apt analogy for the twists and turns that many businesses have been riding through over the last year. When it comes to PR efforts, to go for gold, companies need to adopt agile tactics, show resilience, and choose their strengths. 

Pick a lane 

There may be an array of qualities about you, your business or your product, and you don’t know what to publicise or how to do so. Having a key message to differentiate is crucial to a workable PR campaign. Your coach (aka PR advisor) should help you with this by assessing the competition and analysing the gaps, as well as the areas you can own. Making this decision requires a two-fold awareness strategy, honing in on your niche and core messaging while also understanding current market trends and your customers’ pain points: what are your strongest qualities and what will best resonate with your audience in the current landscape? 

And it’s not just your key message that will see you beating the competition. A compelling PR strategy requires a variety of skills and services, encompassing social media, SEO optimisation, events and executive profiling, alongside securing traditional content campaigns to educate your audience. Clearly, this is when a good coach comes into its own.

Timing and strategy

The media agenda is constantly shifting in line with local, national and international news and events, and your PR strategy has to work around it, as well as be agile to maximise results. You don’t want to exert wasted energy on content when it’s not going to be timely or drowned out by other stories. There can also be huge chances missed by not preempting relevant events, missing out on trending stories and ensuring you are at the forefront of your industry.

Every day, countless national news stories compete for attention, while even more businesses strive to be featured. Journalists have a vast network of contacts, experts, and analysts at their disposal. To break into national news, you must critically assess whether your story is relevant on a national scale and whether you have the right elements to support it. Is it contributing something new and insightful to the conversation? Can you hit that PR podium with a killer national story? It’s hard work and needs preparation over sometimes many months. Much like the greatest Olympic athletes, you need to be quick out of the blocks to jump on press inquiries and win the prize press position.

If you know you can’t compete at this level, then shifting your focus to trade publications and other channels might be a more strategic move, as you build upon your national narrative. Sometimes it’s best to build your brand in your industry first. Staying attuned to the media landscape and ensuring you have a compelling story (especially with third party endorsement) means you have more chance of boosting your online and industry presence, and can still deliver incredibly impactful results, particularly when it comes to lead generation.

You have to be in it to win it

Of course the champions are blessed with innate talent, and a genuinely compelling product or story will do half the work for you. But complacency can leave you missing out on the golden prize; and if you aren’t promoting yourself, it’s pretty guaranteed your competition will be. Remember, for most stories, how they are told is going to make the difference. Being approachable, personal and accessible can form a large part of building a brand. You may never be in the Simone Biles category of PR awareness, but you’ll have less far to fall. If you do, take a lesson from her resilience for your campaign; she’s a good example of bouncing back, too. 

If you want to learn more about how PR can help you go for gold, get in touch here.