As New Year fast approaches, it’s time to set intentions for year ahead, but while some resolutions have a defined goal (stop smoking) others are more subjective (get more visibility). It’s undeniable, however, that the clearer we are in planning, the greater our chance of success, yet goal-setting is a crucial activity often sidelined in the hurry of day-to-day. So whether you’re reading this amid the Christmas rush or in the calmer days of January, take a little time to plan your PR activities for the coming year. To help you, we’ve distilled years of experience delivering successful PR and marketing campaigns into a handy guide, and if you want us to work with you to achieve your aims, we’re here.
Our Recipe for Success
1. Set Your PR Goals
- Define specific and measurable PR objectives that align with your overall business goals.
- Ask yourself: are you a brand looking to enter new markets? Are you a restaurateur looking to increase your profile? Is there a new venture coming up, or is there a milestone you want to mark? Any of these things could act as both a motivation and an anchor for your marketing.
- Set clear objectives around what success looks like. Contact us and tell us what you want to achieve and why, and let us work out the how.
2. Stay Ahead
- An important factor in ensuring the success of a PR campaign is lead time.
- Give yourself at least 3-4 months ahead of when you want a PR campaign launched.
- Staying ahead will mean you send press releases well in time and therefore create more opportunities.
- Long-lead publications such as glossies can have deadlines for receipt of PR material that can run up to 6-8 weeks in advance of publication. This means right around now your Spring campaign needs to be ready to go!
3. Customer Analysis
- Re-evaluate and update your understanding of your target audience.
- Ask yourself: what are your customers reading? Where do they get their news, what are their favourite social media platforms?
- Knowing and understanding this will help inform your PR activity and media outreach.
4. Integrated Communication Strategy
- Are your PR activities integrated with your overall marketing and business strategy?
- Do you use a separate social media agency? Does your social media whizz know what your PR objectives are?
- Food PR were the first food and hospitality public relations agency to launch a social media agency to work alongside our clients to help leverage PR and develop dedicated social media campaigns. Contact Food Social to discuss your social media needs.
5. Crisis Preparedness
- Review and update your crisis communication plan.
- If you have no crisis communications plan, have your PR agency develop one or at least speak to us about some ‘what if’ scenarios.
7. Media Relations and Influencer Partnerships
- Use your PR to strengthen relationships with journalists, editors, and online media.
- Identify which media you have an existing relationship with. By being on their radar they will often call on you, or your PR person, for comment opinion or to appear in a feature they are compiling.
- Explore how to build relationships with media and those in your own professional field that you admire and whose work sits well with yours.
- Use Food Social to identify and build partnerships with influencers that align with your brand values.
8. Overall 2024 Campaign and Content Strategy
- Develop a comprehensive campaign and content calendar.
- Include a mixture of press releases, thought leadership pieces, multimedia content and social media campaigns.
- Emphasize storytelling to make your brand more relatable, mark public holidays, identify when specific 2023 media guides, awards and features came out so you can be ahead of the game.
9. Social Media Engagement
- Focus on authentic engagement on social media platforms.
- Leverage social listening tools to understand and respond to conversations about your brand.
- Create dynamic content that works with your PR campaigns.
10. Make a start!
- If you need help with any or all of the above, book an intro call with your preferred PR agency and see how they can help make 2024 the year your business really took off.
- You’ll be surprised how a good PR agency will offer a lot more than column inches and may indeed become trusted business partners.
- Contact Olivia directly on Food PR
Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash
