Start Fresh With Improving Your Public Relations Effort

The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to look at your business’s current public relations efforts and focus on areas where you can improve. Whether your business is large or small, analyzing your PR activities and making necessary changes will strengthen your connections with your target audience(s) and improve your overall communications.

With the majority of our communication taking place digitally, regularly evaluating and reenergizing your business’s digital PR efforts is key to your success.

5 Steps To Energize Your PR Efforts

1. Reconnect with your audience.
   Your audience should remain at the center of your strategy at all times. If you do not know or understand who you are communicating with, you will not be able reach your audience successfully.With so many communication channels available online, it is easy to lose focus and want to reach your audience at every opportunity. Instead, research which channels your audience is most active on. You might need to focus more on blogging and less on social media, but before you truly understand where your audience spends time, you will not be able to reach it successfully.
2. Strengthen your social media presence.
   Social media channels give you a unique opportunity to engage your audience directly and create a two-way conversation. Creating conversations with your audience gives you the ability to learn more about them and build goodwill.Also, stay consistent with your social media schedule. An uninteresting and rarely updated social media account makes a business appear disconnected and can do serious harm to its online presence. A strong social media presence and following allows you to stay connected with your audience(s) and makes communicating with them easier.
3. Become more creative with your content.
   With the wealth of content styles and formats available today, it’s important for our PR efforts to reach our audiences in ways that are of interest to them. While a company blog may work well for part of your audience, consider transferring the blog information into a fact sheet or infographic to reach a greater part of your audience.
4. Measure your PR efforts.
   While measuring your PR efforts can be tricky, it is important to set goals for yourself and detail how you will gauge your success. Audience building, lead generation and increased brand awareness are all positive effects of energizing your PR efforts. Once you have determined what success means to your business, you can then choose the appropriate system of measurement.
5. Communicate clearly.
   Clear communication is a powerful tool. Without a strong ability to convey your business’s news in an interesting and understandable way, your information will not be cohesive or captivating. Clarify your writing and communication by focusing on who you are communicating with, what you need to tell them, and why it is important for them to know. Identifying these key factors will enable you to communicate your message in a clear, concise manner.

No matter the size of your business, optimizing your current PR efforts will help focus your communication efforts and reconnect you with your target audience(s). Start the year in a constructive and proactive way by taking these simple steps to create positive changes for your business.