PR professionals spend countless hours curating content, ensuring consistent messaging, and engaging with stakeholders across various channels. This process, while effective, is often time-consuming, requiring a keen eye for detail and a deep understanding of the brand’s voice and values.
Generative AI is a game-changing technology revolutionizing how PR strategies are developed and executed. By analyzing datasets and identifying patterns, these AI models can generate compelling narratives, craft targeted messaging, and respond to emerging issues swiftly and professionally. In fact, nearly 64 percent of PR professionals worldwide are leveraging this technology to write copy for social media.
This technology not only streamlines content creation but also enhances the ability to analyze and adapt strategies based on real-time feedback and data insights—helping professionals stay ahead of the curve.
Are you struggling to start your generative AI journey in the PR landscape? Read on to explore how to integrate this model into your PR strategy, ensuring you deliver more effective and impactful campaigns.
Understanding generative AI
Generative artificial intelligence refers to models designed to create human-like text. These are trained on vast datasets of text, images, videos, and more. One of the most prominent examples is OpenAI’s GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models.
Generative AI has numerous practical applications across various industries:
- In customer service, AI can generate automated responses to customer inquiries, providing timely and accurate support.
- In content creation, it can assist writers and marketers by generating ideas, drafts, and even complete articles or advertisements.
- In entertainment, it can create new forms of interactive media and personalized content experiences.
Additionally, generative AI has significant potential in scientific research, design, and education, where it can aid in data analysis, product design, and personalized learning experiences.
3 ways generative AI transforms PR strategy
1. Content creation
Content creation is a fundamental aspect of any PR campaign. It serves as the primary vehicle for communicating key messages, promoting products or services, and engaging with target audiences.
Traditional PR campaigns often rely on manual content creation, which often involves extensive research, drafting, editing, and revisions. Plus, these can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, especially when dealing with tight deadlines or complex messaging requirements.
Generative AI streamlines this process by automatically generating compelling press releases, blog posts, social media updates, and other content pieces. Additionally, you can use an AI search solution—which uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms—to quickly retrieve relevant information and provide data insights, both of which can enhance the generated content by ensuring it meets predefined criteria and objectives.”
For example, a tech company is preparing to launch a new product. Instead of spending hours drafting the press release from scratch, the PR professional can input key messaging points, product specifications, target audience demographics, and other relevant information into a Generative AI model. It then crafts a polished press release in minutes, highlighting the product’s features, benefits, and market impact.
It may include engaging headlines, concise descriptions, compelling quotes, and relevant statistics to capture the attention of journalists, influencers, and other stakeholders.
This way, PR teams can reduce the time and effort required for content creation, allowing them to focus on more strategic activities such as campaign planning, media relations, and relationship-building. Further, AI-generated content can help maintain consistency in messaging across different communication channels and ensure adherence to brand guidelines and standards.
2. Personalized pitches
Media pitching involves reaching out to influencers and other key stakeholders to secure media coverage for a brand, product, or initiative. PR professionals manually research each media contact to understand their interests to craft tailored messages. However, with limited time and resources, they could only personalize pitches to a certain extent, leading to generic communications that may not resonate with each individual.
With generative AI, PR professionals can analyze past articles, social media posts, and other public data to gain insights into media contacts’ preferences and generate personalized pitches tailored to each recipient.
This frees up valuable time and resources and ensures relevance and resonance across diverse audiences. Plus, PR professionals can significantly increase the chances of their stories being picked up and amplified through media coverage.
Overall, they can build stronger relationships with media contacts and establish themselves as trusted sources for future stories and opportunities.
3. Crisis management
During times of crisis, quick and effective communication is crucial for safeguarding a company’s reputation and maintaining stakeholder trust.
Generative AI can assist PR teams in quickly analyzing the situation, relevant data, and historical context and crafting timely responses to mitigate potential damage. These responses include statements, social media posts, press releases, and FAQs that address customer concerns.
This accelerates the response process and allows PR teams to swiftly communicate with stakeholders and the public. Further, generative AI can quickly translate and localize crisis communications, ensuring that information reaches all retailers, suppliers, and consumers in their preferred languages — minimizing confusion and overall brand damage.
Let’s take an example:
A viral social media post has spread backlash against a major company, accusing it of unethical business practices or insensitive messaging.
The PR team leverages a generative AI tool to continuously monitor social media conversations and sentiment around the crisis. Then, it asks the AI model to draft an initial response acknowledging the situation and outlining the company’s stance. Such as:
“We are aware of the concerns raised on social media about [issue]. At [Company Name], we take these matters seriously and are committed to upholding the highest ethical standards.
We are reviewing the situation and will provide a detailed response within [timeline]. Our goal is to maintain open and transparent communication with our valued customers.
We appreciate your patience and understanding as we resolve this matter. Further updates will be posted on our official channels.”
The PR person can quickly review and approve this draft response for posting across the company’s social media channels, website, and other platforms — acknowledging the issue, while buying time to develop a more substantive response.
Implementing generative AI in PR strategy
While generative AI offers numerous benefits for crafting impactful PR strategies, it’s important to follow best practices to ensure responsible and effective use of this technology.
1. Choose the right tools
Selecting the appropriate Generative AI tools is essential for achieving optimal results in PR campaigns. Evaluate factors such as model accuracy, customization options, integration capabilities, and scalability when choosing a generative AI solution.
Additionally, consider factors like data privacy, ethical considerations, and regulatory compliance to ensure responsible use of AI technologies.
2. Incorporate human oversight
While generative AI offers automation and efficiency benefits, human oversight is crucial to ensure the quality, relevance, and ethical standards of AI-generated content. Establish review processes, editorial guidelines, and quality assurance protocols to validate AI-generated outputs and make necessary revisions or adjustments as needed.
By combining AI automation with human expertise, PR teams can achieve the best of both worlds in content creation and PR strategy execution.
3. Ethical considerations
As with any technology, there are ethical considerations to keep in mind when using generative AI. It’s important to ensure that the data used to train the AI models is free from bias and that the generated content does not promote harmful stereotypes or misinformation.
Final thoughts
The rise of generative AI presents exciting opportunities for PR professionals to craft impactful strategies that resonate with their target audiences. By leveraging this model to create compelling narratives, identify emerging trends, and craft targeted messaging, PR professionals can stay ahead of the curve and deliver effective campaigns that drive real results.
However, it’s crucial to approach the use of generative AI with a responsible and ethical mindset, ensuring human oversight, fact-checking, and transparency throughout the process.
