Ten tips for the annual review of your PR activities

edited fireworks 15499943449_83992cbb39_h

Following on from our post about Building Your Brand At Christmas last week, we consider another end of year practice – reviewing the passing year and making plans for the new year. We’re not talking about making new year resolutions, many of which are forgotten by the end of January. We’re referring to reviewing the results of this year’s PR to see how you can build on this in the coming year.

There are many ways to look back over the passing year and present the results in a way that is PR savvy. How you do this will depend on the nature of your organisation and target audiences.  This Oxford academic institution presents highlights of the year in the form of a colourful slideshow which may well impress prospective students and others who want to do business with the institution. While this blog site highlights its top 10 activities in a photo-filled blog post.

This blog refers you to useful ideas contained in our blog posts of the year which we hope you can use to plan your PR and communications throughout the coming year:

What’s gone on well?  Recognise and celebrate your achievements of the year. This could take the form of a blog post highlighting your successes, supported by a tweet campaign, a newsletter or brochure for all your customers, prospects and other stakeholders.

While doing this success round-up job, consider the following questions, which take you to some of our blog posts of the year, offering tips and guidance on building your profile and engaging effectively with key audiences:

1) Are you making savvy use of social media in your PR activities? Well done if you did in 2013.

2) Do you know how to use LinkedIn for lead generation? Something to consider for 2014.

3) How are you using client testimonials? With permission and in the right context, these can be of  tremendous value for your publicity.

What didn’t go well? As you take note of what didn’t deliver the results you anticipated, think about what you could do differently in the coming year?  Again, we point to blog posts that could help you shift up a gear:

4) Is your newsletter read or dead? Your business sector may be best served by print newsletters despite the massive shift to electronic delivery in recent times. Here you will find ideas to make your print newsletter stand out.

5) What ingredients go into planning a PR campaign?  Planning a PR campaign is like great recipe -you need to assemble many ingredients and then process and blend them together to achieve the desired result.

6) What’s your perspective on customer complaints: valuable feedback or an irritant? You can get help to monitor customer feedback and take action if there are problems.

What are your PR plans for the coming year? No doubt you already have your business plan and targets in place but what about PR. What can you do to enhance or fine-tune your brand building and customer engagement based on learnings from this year’s successes and failures?

7) Do you give media interviews that deliver great messages about your business?

8) Have you thoroughly researched and hired the right PR agency to help you deliver PR that will help your business grow? Here you will find key questions and guidance to help you do just that.

9) Do you need help to develop your brand identity? You can get expert support to get the job done.

10) Finally, we encourage you to revisit the fundamentals of PR from time to time to prioritise your PR goals and activity.
(Photo by bayasaa)

Tags: