Time to review your PR strategy

As the year comes to an end many people will be looking forward to improvements and resolutions they can make in the new year. Whether personal or business-related, January is the month when people have a lot of drive to make changes for the better. And it is the perfect time to review your PR. What went well? What went wrong? How can you improve?

Below we’ve listed a few questions to ask yourself when assessing your PR to help you gain an understanding of what to do in the new year.

Did you have a PR plan?

PR is all about planning ahead, finding the best time to tell your story and being prepared to respond to the news as it happens. If you didn’t have a plan you may have found yourself contacting journalists too late or missing out on the perfect editorial opportunity.

To make sure this doesn’t happen again you can create a PR calendar with upcoming dates. The calendar should include both public dates and dates personal to your business (i.e. a product launch). This can help you prepare your PR in advance giving you the ability to work backwards and figure out when you need to start preparing for that particular event.

Remember: You can find all the UK public dates in the ‘Plan’ Section of your JournoLink account.

Was PR part of your routine?

PR can easily be incorporated into your daily routine without taking up too much time. Yet many small business owners often avoid PR due to the misconception of it being too time-consuming when they have other priorities in the business.  

Journalists are always looking for small businesses to contribute to features. Keep an eye out for the JournoLink media request emails and reply to them as soon as possible.

What was the outcome of your PR campaigns?

The aim of PR is to increase your brand awareness and drive sales by driving traffic to your website or customers to your store. It is important that you assess the impact PR has had on your business over the past year. Did you see a spike in website traffic after an article was published? Did you see a rise in sales when an online gift guide went live?

With PR you need to pitch to the publications with the same target audience as your business. For example, if you own a local business meaning your target audience is residents in the immediate and surrounding areas then you need to target local/regional press.

If you had a very successful piece of coverage that created an increase in sales then it is important to keep a good relationship with that journalist and publication. Keep them informed about updates in your business, ask them to meet for a coffee and interact with them on social. This way they may come back to you for another feature they’re writing.

What to focus on?

There are many different ways of gaining coverage for your business, therefore you need to find what worked best for your business. 

Whether it was a radio interview or writing an opinion piece, if you received a positive response you can then put your effort into gaining similar coverage.

In addition, if you spent your time writing an opinion piece but your business saw little return then it may be best to try other forms of coverage rather than spending hours writing another one.

When creating your strategy, focus on what went well, the types of articles that got coverage an eye out for news and trends in your sector.