RESUMING YOUR PR CAMPAIGN AFTER TAKING A BREAK
It’s fair to say that it has been a strange 16 months for many businesses, and as the world begins to get back to normal, we’re seeing a number of companies beginning to focus their priorities towards a communications strategy, and relaunching their PR activity as a result.
We’ve put together a step-by-step guide to explore how you can resume your PR campaigns to generate awareness across your target audience, dominate the media and ensure a competitive edge.
- Define your goals
Resuming a PR campaign may appear a challenging feat, however it can instead be the perfect opportunity to reflect and evaluate on your previous PR strategies. In doing so, you can generate insight into past trends such as a decrease in audience engagement or a lack of coverage. Because of this, now is the optimal time to identify what has worked best, and this will help shape your goals.
You may find that your past PR strategies didn’t necessarily align with your business goals. With that said, it is imperative that you take some time to ensure you are placing your business goals at the heart of your PR campaign. Firstly, clearly define what it is you want your business to achieve and create PR objectives to meet these goals. From here, you can create manageable tasks to split up amongst your team. With every objective, ask yourself “how could a PR strategy help this?” and the tactics will reveal themselves.
Defining your goals and creating bite sized tasks based on these goals can make resuming your PR campaign seem a lot less daunting. To be successful it is essential that a clearly defined trajectory is set.
- Build relationships with key industry press
When it comes to resuming your PR campaign, building your relationship with the media is essential. Think of the press as the backbone of your PR campaign, whether you are looking to create a pipeline of media coverage to build credibility, or gain a competitive advantage, earned media is key to achieve the goals and objectives you identified in step one.
The first step to building your relationship with the press is to reach out to journalists with a piece of interesting news. This will act as a stepping stone to develop your conversation and you can plan further content to ensure to continue this dialogue.
Journalists receive a significant amount of pitches each day, so it’s important to ensure you build a positive rapport and ensure your pitch cuts through the noise. Some companies may not have a pipeline of news, however there is value in contacting journalists for a chat and asking them what stories they are covering. This will help you learn how you can be relevant to their publication.
Start slow throughout this process, and create meaningful relationships with a few relevant journalists instead of trying to force an unnatural relationship with lots. It is much better to have a focussed approach and contact relevant publications, as this gives you an opportunity to grow.
- Measure your progress
As you have now established clear goals and have begun launching your campaign, it’s important to regularly monitor your activity and track the progress of the campaign. This can be measured in a variety of different ways, and this generally depends on your goals.
If the campaign’s main objective is to increase company awareness, you ideally want to focus on reach. The more opportunities to see news, opinion articles, and media features about your company, the more it’ll get the business in front of its target audience. The amount of coverage the campaign achieves, and the reach of each title will be important to track throughout your campaign.
Remember, throughout this process, you should always think of resuming your PR campaign as a new beginning. As you have taken a break, it could take a while to pick the campaign backup and restart this momentum. However, it is necessary to compare your progress from the point of which you resumed your campaign, not the initial starting date.
What have we learned?
Whilst resuming your PR campaign may seem daunting, breaking it down into manageable steps can help ensure you create a thorough plan. Setting a clear trajectory through goals will ensure you can be specific in your approach to your PR campaign, and developing a bond with journalists will act as an essential tool in working towards meeting these goals. Additionally, closely measure your progress throughout your campaign to make sure you are making consistent improvements as time goes on.
We have experience helping clients resume their PR campaigns after taking a break, successfully building relationships with the press and ultimately generating awareness of their business. If you’d like to find out more, drop us a message – hello@jargonpr.com.
