Top Examples of Successful Public Relations Campaigns

Every company can benefit from creating and executing a public relations campaign.

In fact, most companies tend to see a benefit from PR efforts, no matter their performance throughout the duration of their campaigns.

However, there are certain campaigns that have proven to be incredibly effective, and that other businesses can learn a lot from.

By learning from examples, especially the example of other’s success, companies can start utilizing the same or even similar strategies in their own public relations efforts to generate better results.

AXA

The French multinational insurance company, AXA, wanted to spread awareness to Chinese parents specifically regarding the fact that wearing seatbelts is essential for the safety of their children.

To promote this type of message, the company decided to create the video, as well as an education program that involved a number of different schools throughout the country.

Over the span of six months, over 100,000 children and their parents learned about the importance of wearing seatbelts for both parents and children throughout those educational programs.

Once the campaign was over, according to research, over 70% of the people that were involved in the programs positively linked the company with the citizenship campaign. Additionally, the number of customers that started considering getting insurance from AXA, managed to increase by nearly 10%.

That means the insurance company not only managed to spread awareness regarding the safety and importance of seatbelts, but it also managed to determine which goals the business needed to track to understand the performance of its campaign, which, in turn, resulted in more revenue for the firm.

ALS

Before the popular ice bucket challenge, very few people were actually familiar with ALS. That’s one of the reasons why the ALS Association decided to utilize a public relations campaign that would spread awareness of the illness. In turn, the association created the viral Internet challenge, titled the ice bucket challenge.

For the challenge, people were instructed to film a video of themselves pouring a bucket of ice and water over their heads, and then nominate a few friends to do the same thing and share the videos on social media platforms.

This challenge and the campaign itself became incredibly popular on social media platforms, getting viral to the point of celebrities getting involved and sharing the challenge itself, as well as spreading awareness of ALS. Before this public relations campaign, the ALS Association manually managed to raise about $3 million in donations.

However, the year that the association decided to pursue this public relations campaign, it managed to raise over $100 million in donations.

The association also managed to successfully determine which platforms would be the most effective at spreading awareness and delivering the message of the campaign, while also selecting a very creative angle that would increase the odds of the campaign going viral, as it did.