Plan your PR for 2024 in 5 easy steps
A whole new year is just around the corner, so you might be reflecting on the last 12 months around now, and planning what you can do better next year. Increasingly, our clients are telling us PR has been a major priority since finding out how successful it can be for businesses vs traditional marketing or digital spending.
In a world where we scroll through more content than we can take in each day, deeper comms like PR is showing its strength. When you need a message to not only get seen, but get understood and remembered, PR is your best friend. If it’s something you want to get on top of in 2024, but you’re not sure where to start, here’s our fail-safe guide to getting started.
Plan your whole year ahead
Can you list all of your key events, milestones and important dates in your business? When it comes to getting media coverage, it’s best to understand how long you have to get a story heard. Need a big push at Christmas? You’re going to need to be media-ready in July. Depending on what you have going on in your business, media lead times can vary from a few weeks to a few months, so knowing all of your dates to hand over to your PR agency is best for forward planning and getting the best coverage possible.
Work with specialists in ‘you’
When we say you, we mean you. Not your industry, your specific organisation. At Lucky North, our specialisms are our clients. We don’t focus on any one industry, because we don’t believe it would serve anyone to have clients all competing for the same media attention. Every business and organisation we work with is a business we have become specialised in before working with them. Our first month of a new relationship is spent leaving no stone unturned so we know your business as well as you do. With this knowledge, we can plan the PR that’s going to serve you best. That means unique opportunities, media placements we curate from scratch and your own tailored list of media contacts we use to pitch your stories to. It’s more work than others might want to put in, but it’s why we’re dedicated PR experts. Which takes us to…
Work with specialists in PR
When you start looking for PR support, you’ll come across a LOT of options. Many of them will include mentions of PR, but be careful and make sure you’re getting the right service for you. By working with a dedicated PR agency, you can be sure of what you’re spending your money on. Multi-talent agencies can offer you split services between other types of marketing, but unless your approach is to try a bit of everything, you’re better off working with the experts in your chosen comms options.
Did you know Lucky North prioritises expertise so much that we partner with other agencies? This lets you handpick your providers of other services without having to manage more than one relationship. Let us work together and we’ll make sure you’re getting the best of all worlds.
Understand your goals
This might seem obvious, but as always with our advice, it’s to go a little deeper. For instance, you might know that you want to sell more of a particular product or service, but how far have you researched the means of doing this, and is there a chance to do more? You could aim to sell more to your current audience, but have you weighed this up against targeting a new demographic? What do you know about them? The more information you have like this, the better your PR can be. When we know exactly what your goals are, we know exactly how to pitch your stories, and who to.
Think outside the box
If you’ve read any of our Meet the Team blogs, you’ll know by now that we like to have a lot of fun in PR. We love the thrill of incredible stories and even better coverage, but we won’t pass up the opportunity to do something totally different either. Ski ballet, anyone?
If this is up your street, we love to let our imaginations run wild for the best creative campaigns. So much, in fact, that we won an award recently for doing just that! Check out our win here.
‘Outside the box’ PR doesn’t have to be all about the weird and wonderful though. Sometimes it’s really effective to increase your stakeholder comms, crisis management or media preparation for interview opportunities. Would you know how to maximise the opportunity to talk to a journalist about your business?
PR covers so much more than what people imagine. If this has caught your attention and got you thinking about what your next year could look like with some PR support, you might like to get in touch for an initial chat to get to know us.
Lucky North is a dedicated PR agency based in Leeds, working with the best of the north. Come and say hi, we don’t bite.
