The dog days of summer have arrived and either 1) you are on vacation, 2) your whole office is on vacation, and/or 3) business has slowed down with so many people out of the office. Your PR program doesn’t have to come to a screeching halt! Here are three ways to get some mileage out of the summer.
Ramp up outreach to journalists
While you might assume reporters are mailing it in for the summer due to vacations, outlets still have content to fill. And with so many of your PR colleagues out on holiday as well, that means less competition for ink. You might think that everyone is checked out from consuming media during the summer (i.e., nobody is reading or watching the news), but that couldn’t be further from the truth. With more free time on their hands, most people will be watching more TV and/or reading more publications.
Leverage moments in time
Summer is full of holidays and other big moments. With Labor Day, back to school and the end of summer being prime travel season, consider pushing news out that hooks into these moments in time. For instance, Voxus client fraud prevention company iovation analyzed data from its online travel clients to see what kind of insight it could glean around travel fraud in both 2015 and 2016. Its findings spurred media coverage in key national and security media outlets like the Los Angeles Times, Dark Reading and SC Magazine. Besides the earned media, this data provided fodder for its sales and marketing team to do outreach to current clients and prospects.
Plan to plan
Instead of just staring out the window and waiting for work to fall into your lap during the sunny summer months, use the downtime to really dig into your PR program. Take a look back at the past six months to a year. What worked and what didn’t? What does the rest of the year look like from a product and corporate perspective? What are the moments in time that your PR team could and should use to build campaigns? Now is the time to plan…and not when you don’t have enough time in the day to get to all of your work.
Being a Northwesterner, it’s hard not to look out the window and decide every day is a play day. While the summer is a good time to unwind, it is also an essential season to execute and set your PR program up for success in the future.