Are you ready for a new and improved year for your business? Welcome to 2021! One of the most important things for any business to handle at the beginning of the new year is building a successful PR strategy. Even if you already have a PR strategy in place, you should consider making a new PR strategy or revamping your current one.
No business can survive on the same old practices forever. It’s time to change it up a bit. Let your PR skills show!
For those of you who don’t know where to start, congratulations! You’ve clicked on the perfect article. Just keep reading and we’ll let you in on our top seven tips for optimizing your PR strategy.
1. Set Realistic Yet Exciting Expectations
Every company needs goals. If you’re looking to make 2021 your business’ best year, you need goals, too.
We encourage you to reach for the stars! However, you should understand that goals are goals for a reason. You might not meet every single one.
But, with hard work and dedication, you should be able to eventually reach every goal. It might just take more than one year.
Because of this, we recommend setting both short-term and long-term goals.
2. Keep Your Target Audience in Mind
Every business needs to have an idea of who makes up their target audience. If you haven’t already made a defined target audience, it’s time to get to it.
Knowing who makes up your target audience can help you make better PR decisions.
One of the best strategies when it comes to tackling large audiences is by breaking them up into key groups. Once you’ve decided how you’re going to break up your audience into effective groups, you can work towards developing effective communication channels. You can use these to communicate specific messages.
For example, you may have a group of people who you consider to be leads. If so, you can group these individuals together and send them communication information related to sales.
3. Take a Look at Your Competition
We know that it isn’t great to constantly compare yourself to your competition, but it can be helpful. If you’re looking to stand out in your industry, you need to figure out what other people aren’t doing.
By looking at what similar companies are doing with their public relations materials, you can find a blank niche. This is somewhere in the market that is not currently being occupied by someone else.
We recommend that you take a look at 5-7 competitors. Then, evaluate their online and offline PR activities for the past 2-3 years. Doing all of this may take a while, but it will be worth it in the end.
4. Make Your Statement Attainable
Company positioning statements are extremely important. They let others know what your company intends on doing.
When you’re creating your statement, you need to have a clear idea of what you’re planning on using your company for. We invite you to think about the following:
- Identify the unique characteristics of your brand
- Think about how you can create an aura of value around your product
- Come up with ideas for making an emotional connection with your target audience
Keep in mind that a ton of different people are going to be reading your company positioning statement. This is not constricted to only your target audience.
You should work to make your statement attainable for everyone, whether they’re a part of your target audience or not.
5. Develop Effective Communication Plans
This is one of the most practical tips we have for PR communications. Every business needs a clear-cut plan for internal and external communication.
As you develop these communication plans, you should save them for future reference. If you’re doing it right, you should be creating plans that go into depth. This means that you need to figure out what you want to say, how you want to say it, what response you expect, and what goal you’re wanting to meet by sending it.
By having everything figured out and planned out ahead of time, you’ll be much better equipped to handle internal and external communications in the future.
6. Create a Social Responsibility
Every business has a social responsibility. Whether you choose to see it or not, people are looking at your business to make some kind of contribution to society.
Beyond the public attention, defining your corporate social responsibility is important to your community. Whether it’s through volunteer work or financial means, you should extend help to your community.
We suggest that you find a cause that you’re passionate about while also focusing on what your community needs. If you contribute to a cause that already has plenty of contributions, you’re not helping your community as much as you may think you are. You should try to focus on underserved areas.
7. Prepare for the Worst
When in doubt, prepare for the worst. We believe that every company should have a disaster plan in place just in case anything bad happens.
If your company is involved in a scandal or accused of perusing with bad people, you need to get your PR under control. These aren’t necessarily the situations you may find yourself in, but they are common examples.
The most successful PR strategies assume imperfection. If you think that everything is going to be perfect, you won’t be ready to handle any problems that come up.
Improving Your PR Strategy
We hope that you are pumped and excited for 2021 just like we are. These tips for your PR strategy should be making you feel ready for what’s to come.
Arguably, nothing is more important than creating a PR strategy for your small business. That’s why we are so passionate about our PR distribution. Did we mention that it comes with a return guarantee? There’s no losing when you work with e-releases!
Feel free to check out our PR services today. The sooner you start working with us, the sooner you can get your business back to making more money for you.