5 easy wins to kicks start your PR Calendar

Summer season is a great time for planning, often being a natural lull in business as holidays kick in, making a perfect time to sit back, reflect, and get going on future plans.

Calendar plans should be at the heart of every business plan, and it’s no different when considering your PR efforts. An easy to way to kick-start your PR planning is to build a calendar of the year ahead, an overview of everything inside and outside your business that could provide a great opportunity to plough in some PR effort and get some timely results.

As we’ve discussed in previous blogs, such as the difference between proactive and reactive PR, a PR calendar allows us to identify the key times for impact for your business and allows for pre-planning to really make the best out of those opportunities and work up lead times accordingly.

Here are five things we think are essential to cover on any PR calendar to kick-start your planning:

Industry and external events
Plot dates of industry events, conferences, awards, general events that link to your business, even if you may not be attending. General awareness of the industry you are a part of gives us eyes on the bigger picture, and also is a great way to keep tabs on your competition moving in the same market

Internal milestones
Company anniversaries, staff celebrations, key launches, planned changes in people or leadership – anything that is happening inside your business can be a great story to share. You may realise in doing this you’ve reached a key milestone, which is even more reason to shout about it.

Company targets
What goals are you looking to reach this year? Although you may not know exactly what they will be, we recommend keeping eyes on them so when they do fall, we can shout about them. Likely to be bespoke to your business, they can be anything from the big headline numbers down to number of orders, social media followers gained – whatever feels big for you.

Seasonal activity and campaigns
Here at Purple Pitch we work with clients across many different industries, who all have their pinch points in terms of key seasonal activity. Leisure clients for example, focus on lead time ahead of summer holidays to drive bookings; education clients may have eyes on the new terms in September and drive recruitment campaigns accordingly. Understanding your seasonal highs and lulls is a great way to plan effectively with the needs of your business.

5. Awareness Days
A warning – when you start looking at the full calendars for social media awareness days online, it can be overwhelming and very niche. We recommend picking a handful pertinent to your business and working up content for those, rather than making loose ties and connections that don’t make sense. Keep a lookout for annual themes or hashtags that will keep you connected with others posting on the same themes.

There is, of course, much more that goes into a tactical PR strategy in working with us, but if you come to a meeting with some of these thoughts mapped out, it’s a great starting place for us to work with you to really work on our priorities and strategically look at activity and where efforts are best placed. Book your discovery call with us here, and let’s get the ball rolling on your PR plans this summer!