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What's the most efficient way to reach an audience with PR messages?

First and foremost, you need to put in the time and research upfront to truly understand who the target is and what media they consume. Ketchum's proprietary media usage survey, Media Myths and Realities, historically has shown a disparity between the media that professional communicators use to reach stakeholders and the media their audiences actually consume. Research can help close this gap by enabling PR practitioners to use the same disciplined approach to media planning that has long been standard for advertising — identifying key media and ranking them based on a target's preferences. By using this as a guide in developing a media strategy, we can be much more targeted in our outreach, which eliminates wasted effort (and ultimately reduces costs). For example, while developing the strategy for a campaign aimed at the C-suite, we found through our media planning approach that we could reach more people in our target audience through Good Morning America and BusinessWeek.com than through the Wall Street Journal, defying assumptions.

Research can help close this gap by enabling PR practitioners to use the same disciplined approach to media planning that has long been standard for advertising — identifying key media and ranking them based on a target's preferences. By using this as a guide . . . we can eliminate wasted effort.

A second step in efficiently targeting media is to make messages available in multiple formats, text, images, video, audio and various digital tools. This not only provides information in formats that various media outlets, from broadcast to bloggers, want to receive it, but it also reduces the work a PR team needs to do because all of the formats can live online. Rather than team members making hundreds of pitch calls, journalists seeking out information on a topic can easily find it, and everyday consumers can share it through social networking sites.

Finally, even when budgets are tight, it's essential to have an integrated media mix. One cost-effective way to deliver a message through multiple channels is to target outlets that drive the media agenda, such as wire services and outlets like TechCrunch, the Huffington Post and the New York Times. With people consuming media through multiple channels, it's critical that brands have an intimate understanding of what those channels are. They also must remember that simply pushing content out is not enough. Brands will have the greatest success delivering their messages only when those messages and stories are relevant enough and compelling enough to drive conversation and discussion.