With insights from our PR experts, John Kang, Mohana Ray, and Azeem Zeekrya.
One of the most powerful tools in HDMZ’s arsenal is Future State Strategy, our framework for aligning every effort behind a client’s long-term goals. This approach coordinates cross-team initiatives while guiding individual strategic planning, ultimately shaping how every department approaches its work. As a result, each team applies the framework in ways that best support its unique function and objectives.
HDMZ’s public relations team offers a strong example of how this framework improves everyday work. Here, we explore how Future State Strategy helps us achieve more meaningful results for our clients.
Using Future State Strategy in PR
Future State Strategy has many steps, and it may look slightly different from client to client. While the full process our PR team uses is complex, it can be broken down into three primary stages:
- Identify the ideal future state. We work with our clients to establish the ideal business objective or outcome they’re trying to achieve
- Assess the current state. We analyze our clients’ broader marketing communications initiatives, including their branding, their content strategy, and their PR strategy. As a part of this process, we explore any challenges that they may be facing, or obstacles that may stand in the way of achieving their goals.
- Create the plan. We study the delta between the current state and the future state, then reverse engineer a strategic communications plan to bridge that gap and reach our clients’ business goals.
Using this strategy allows the HDMZ PR team to understand the rationale behind each action it takes, from writing a press release or social post to attending a conference or including specific messaging in an interview. Knowing the “why” introduces intentionality to all of the team’s actions, and allows us to gauge whether a particular task will contribute to moving the needle in the desired direction.
Planning for the long game
PR is a long-term strategy, one that cannot be fully realized in just a few months. Creating an effective PR plan, then, cannot be short-sighted — it must be considered in terms of years. Future State Strategy helps us work with our clients to decide what they want to achieve in one, five or even 10 years. From there, we’re able to build a plan that works on the appropriate timescale.
This approach aligns particularly well with the life sciences industry, in which product development timelines often span years. Planning ahead through a forward-looking framework enables us to work with long-term pipelines and to account for how needs may shift when, for example, a drug moves from development into marketing approval.
Avoiding pitfalls
By implementing Future State Strategy, the PR plan is crafted around an ultimate goal that will deliver tangible benefits to a life sciences company, such as increased lead generation or accelerated business growth.
An important benefit of the intentionality this framework introduces is that it helps avoid a common PR pitfall: tactic-driven campaigns without a clear objective or strategy. Often, PR campaigns are conducted purely for the sake of having PR, targeting well-known outlets without any defined purpose. In other cases, campaigns center around a few select metrics or key performance indicators that are not linked to a broader business strategy. While these metrics may be helpful guideposts when used deliberately, they mean little on their own.
By implementing Future State Strategy, the PR plan is crafted around an ultimate goal that will deliver tangible benefits to a life sciences company, such as increased lead generation or accelerated business growth. Instead of using arbitrary tactics that only look good on a surface level, we ensure every action is intentional and focused on the overarching plan. In addition, the plan remains flexible enough to pivot as needed to drive the desired outcome.
Driving decisions with data
The data-driven nature of Future State Strategy helps us avoid superficial or subjective decisions. A key element of our approach is through information gathering, which ensures our strategy is based on fact rather than impulse. This provides us with solid evidence to inform our recommendations and tactics, such as which publications to target or which journalists to contact.
Additionally, using this data-informed strategy enables us to build better relationships with journalists. Rather than inundating inboxes with tangential topics, we use objective information to methodically select the right journalist for a story. Because of this, journalists have a greater trust in us and are more likely to give our pitches due consideration. Having such an established, trust-based relationship with members of the media benefits all our clients in the long term, as it allows us to gain coverage more quickly in higher quality publications.
Achieving goals
Ultimately, Future State Strategy allows us to better help our clients achieve their goals. It is a framework that clearly defines what success looks like, and what we need to do to get there. It serves as a North Star, guiding our day-to-day work and ensuring we remain aligned with our clients’ objectives when making recommendations. And it empowers an already proficient team to become even more focused and intentional.
