I’m a huge advocate of this approach and I believe that every business should be reviewing its goals and strategy every three months as well as annually.
A big part of this should be reviewing your PR strategy and what is and isn’t working. Your PR strategy is a key driver of sales into your business.
A PR agency will usually send you through a monthly report outlining the successes that they have had that month, the media coverage, content they have created, the value of their work to your business and their learnings and recommendations.
When you do the public relations and marketing yourself it’s harder to find the time to do it. But it’s worth making the time.
When you do these are the things you need to ask yourself:
1. Has your brand awareness grown?
Brand building is hard. But has your reach grown over the last quarter or year? Have your followers increased? Has your email distribution list grown? Are you getting regular enquiries from new customers?
If yes then what did you do that prompted that growth? If it didn’t why do you think that was? You need to understand the issue to be able to fix it.
2. Are your target audiences engaged with your stories?
Are people liking, sharing and commenting on your content? Are they supporting you on your journey? If not then maybe you need to think about your content creation and how you tell your stories.
3. Are you promoting your customer testimonials?
If you have gone to the length of asking customers for testimonials then you should be bleeding those reviews dry! They should be on your website, Instagram posts, Instagram stories, Facebook, in your blog and you should ask your happy customers to video their review of your product and be tagging you in it. Don’t just save them for #testimonialtuesday – celebrate them as often as possible!
4. Are you learning new things?
PR, media and social are constantly changing landscapes. If you don’t keep on top of changes then you are quickly going to fall behind.
Look out for webinars and training sessions that I am running and that others are running to make sure you learn something new to help your business every day.
5. What are your competitors doing?
You need to keep across what the rest of your industry is doing. Are they maximising opportunities that you aren’t? Have they succeeded in an area where you haven’t? It’s important to understand if they are reaching customers in a different way to you and why that might be working.
All of this can form part of a formal SWOT analysis or just an informal audit of your social media analytics and SEO over a cup of tea with a notebook. By doing this regularly you will be able to work out where you get the best return on investment for your efforts and where you don’t.
It can be hard looking in the mirror and being honest with ourselves. Especially if deep down we know something isn’t working that once did. All you need to do is take a leap and begin.
If you want some help feel free to reach out and drop me an email on alison@enlightenpr.co.uk