Here, Whiteoaks’ Chief Client Officer John Broy discusses:
- Why the month of August offers a chance for profitable introspection
- What to do if your PR is losing its edge
- Boosting PR performance with KPIs
In many industries, the few weeks after the schools break up are a quieter time, when due to holidays, the daily demands on a business are not as intense, providing an opportunity for introspection.
With less day-to-day activity, this is a chance to invest time in internal planning and the kind of strategic thinking that supports the long-term growth of your business.
In this blog we’ll consider how companies in the B2B tech sector can use the summer lull to revise their PR strategies for greater impact. It is certainly true that August provides the breathing space, because it is a time of lighter news cycles, smaller audiences and reduced activity among journalists.
Are there any signs your campaign is getting stale?
Any campaign can become stale because of outdated messaging and lack of media engagement. Content may be going over well-trodden ground that induces media fatigue and has lost relevance for audiences.
This is where there is a need for hard work – stepping outside your comfort zone to assess whether messaging reflects what makes the company unique and helps it stand out from the competition. Teams can help by coming together to brainstorm new story angles, look at existing themes, questioning how they have moved on and where you can be ahead of the curve – beating your competitors to the punch.
Take a fresh look at the media landscape
The review should also examine any changes in the media landscape that inevitably occur over the course of a PR campaign. Are the publications you target still read by the audiences you want to reach? Have publications shifted their focus to other areas? Are there any new journalists or publications that need to be added to your media list?
Taking the time to review your current media list is an extremely worthwhile task, after all if it’s coverage you’re aiming to achieve you need to ensure your contacts and understanding of what they’re looking for is kept continuously up to date.
It’s also a great opportunity to look at the type of content publications want – do you need to look at the imagery you have to support your outreach, or are key publications after video soundbites?
To maximise media relevance, it is important too, to review your PR calendar to ensure you attend or contribute to the right events, and are ready to respond to any significant announcements or trends in industry thinking that emerge.
Are the KPIs right?
To get the most success from PR, it should be aligned from the very outset with your business’ strategic goals. However, these can of course evolve over time. The summer is a good halfway point through the year to look at whether those business objectives set out at the start of a campaign still apply, for instance, are you still going after that particular target market or are you still focusing on a certain solution etc.? Getting the answers to those questions will help to ensure that your PR activity still matches up. And if those objectives have changed, then it’s only logical the approach to PR should follow suit.
This aligns to that fact that for PR to deliver it must be measurable, so you should never hesitate about revising KPIs to ensure Performance PR maintains maximum effectiveness.
For instance, if driving website traffic is becoming a priority, it might be time to shift focus to activity and measurement that reflects that, looking at a digital PR approach to combine SEO and PR best practices.
So those summer days when the living is theoretically easy present a great opportunity to run the rule over a PR strategy. The result should be more sharply-focused content, stronger media relationships and much greater impact in the second half of the business year.
If you want to audit your current PR activity and understand how Performance PR can work for you, please get in touch now to find out more.
