To persuade means to make someone do or believe something by giving them a good reason to do it or by talking to that person and making them believe it.
In the context of PR, effective persuasion is both a communications process and a skill used to convey information to a target audience that causes them to review or change their existing ideas or start opening up to new ones. This is particularly useful if you are, say, a new business with a new product or are an existing company entering a new market.
If you are a new company and want to introduce a new product, service or an idea to the market, or want to bring your new brand to a saturated industry, it’s not straightforward. Most people are not easily swayed or persuaded, including yourself I imagine.
If you have experienced the benefits of your new product or service or have a lot invested emotionally and financially in your business, it can be tempting to shoehorn your product name into every communication and extoll its virtues into every interview or editorial opportunity that comes your way. Sadly, this can have the opposite effect of persuading your audience to jump on your bandwagon. It can also put off journalists from running your story and breach the editorial guidelines many outlets have.
At a fundamental level, people generally do not like to be sold products or services, or advertised to. Persuasion is also tricky because changing someone’s mind about something means they have to admit they weren’t well informed in the first place and introducing a new concept is challenging as change is not something many people are comfortable with.
Seasoned PRs through study, experience and talent or a combination of the latter, have various strategies up their sleeves to persuade their audience. If you are interested in persuading an audience to change their beliefs, attitudes and values, a good starting point is Aristotle’s 3 rhetorical appeals; here’s a quick outline:
- Credibility. Whether it is a spokesperson or a product, it helps if they are credible at their core. Establishing credibility should be preface attempts at persuasion. A good PR will extrapolate all the relevant information that helps to build or establish their client’s credibility before attempting to persuade their audience. Excellent writing skills, understanding what it takes for an audience to be swayed, knowing how to work with both clients and journalists, creating great pitches, keeping to deadlines, acting ethically are all marks of good PR practice.
- Emotion is a cornerstone of persuasion. If your audience doesn’t care, you’re going to have a hard time getting them to listen, let alone persuading them. Pinpointing and understanding what matters to an audience and incorporating that into key messages to your audience, goes a long way in the art of persuasion. Note that this does not mean to play, prey upon emotions, rather you take into account your audience’s emotional needs in your communications and the role these needs play in their decision-making. A good PR’s interest in the client and why their news is interesting and relevant should come through in their communications, showcasing their client’s values and that they care about their audiences, relating to them, all help PRs persuade. Here, language, tone and context are critical to hit your audience’s persuasion tipping point.
- Logic is the final structure in Aristotle’s triangle persuasion and it makes sense, right? Clear cut and easy to follow logic should lie at the heart of each argument if it is to be persuasive. Evidence helps, whether in the form of scientific research or back up from an expert in the relevant field. Without proof, statements persuading an audience to simply believe that your product is amazing, are just baseless and flimsy.
An adept PR should be able to communicate the key points in any research to help audiences see the way you would like them to see your product or service. Therefore, it is important how you compose written or verbal content and what aspects of the information you put forward to capture your audience, rather than overwhelm them or worse, disengage them.
Persuasion when applied to PR is an artform but achievable with the right care. Even the basic elements above are complex and nuanced and require care and there is a fine line between subtle persuasion and hard sell advertising.
At Vitis PR, we’d love to hear about your latest project and how we can either use our experience to share your story with the correct audiences or teach you how to do it.
To learn more about how PR can help you engage with your audience, please contact us.
