5 REASONS WHY YOU NEED THE BOSS YOUR PR 2018 PR & SOCIAL MEDIA PLANNER
The feedback so far on the planner has been so amazing - those of you that have already got your copy are loving how it's enabling you to plan for the coming months.
Take that haven't, take a look at a few reasons why you might want to join these ladies...
Forward planning is critical in many areas of business, but it's sometimes difficult to anchor your planning and projections in reality.
PR and social media is no different, but where do you start? Scan through your 2018 diary or planner and I'm betting that it doesn't tell you when you need to start approaching press for Father's Day coverage or offer up ready made PR opportunities? Have you ever felt the guilt of a week or two flying by without sharing any content on your social or communicating with your customer base? Do you struggle to be consistent with your content?
It happens to us all and these are among the reasons why I have created the Boss Your PR Media Planner. Here are 5 fabulous points that might just convince you that this could be your forward planning saviour for 2018:
1. Take the pain out of generating social media content
When you are a 'one woman band' or running a small team, the last thing you can feel like doing is trawling for content and agonising over what to create to share on Instagram or Facebook. Having over 900 national awareness days, events, initiatives and cultural dates to hand means that skeleton content can be created and scheduled easily and weeks or months in advance.
Also, with anywhere between 50-100 key dates and events each month, you'll never be short of ideas and inspiration. If you are an artist, you could visit one of the many exhibitoins listed and share your thoughts and images with your followers. If you are an interiors brand you could visit or exhibit at one of the interiors trade shows and share your experience while promoting and securing new business. If you run a bar or cafe, some of the many food/drink related awareness days, celebration days or charity initiatives could provide you with the opportunity to create some great promotional activity and drum up interest in your brand.
2. Pull out relevant PR opportunities through 2018, ensuring that you have time to plan and execute activity
With something like the example above, a bar or cafe capitalising on a food/drink awareness day/celebration day, forward planning is the critical advantage of this planner. Work through it with your red pen and highlighter and pull out those opportunities that could provide yourself with a great PR or promotional hook and ensure that you give yourself enough time to plan and execute in the most effective way.
Your brand might have organic principles at its heart - if this is the case, then something like Organic September would give you a great opportunity to target the press to share your story. You could issue a press release providing details of your reasons for working in an organic way, as well as specifics on how you achieve this and how you feel it benefits customers and the local and national economy. You could also use it as an opportunity to educate your customers and social media following on these aspects.
With any PR activity, it is important to understand lead times of the media - long lead is typically 3-6 months in advance and short lead works anywhere between 2-12 weeks in advance in basic terms. Long lead is mostly monthly media and short lead is weekly magazines/newspaper and online. If you find a PR hook you want to target, work backwards from the date in order to give yourself the correct lead time from which to start working on your PR opportunity.
3. Give yourself the luxury of time to …. promotional activity
If you are going to pin some promotional activity around an awareness day or some such, the forward planning using this resources will allow you the time to take a far reaching approach to making the most of it. You can factor in the time to create blog content, hone your offers, share through a structured email marketing campaign, plan and optimise your social media activity in the run up and around the promotion and promote directly to your customers and clients.
A well thought out and well planned promotional campaign can work wonders for any brand, so do it right. Whether you are launching something new or wanting to increase interest in a product you already offer, finding the right promotional hook makes you topical and your content instantly more shareable. This is how campaigns go viral - timing!
4. It's affordable and you'll save money
We've all done it. I've done it. Spent money on resources that we thought were game changers but we didn't invest our time in them, we weren't at the right stage of our business journey, or we simply couldn't get to grips with the product or service.
Trust me when I say, this is different. Not only will you save time by cutting out the hours on the internet looking for inspiration or content, searching for calendars and lists of suggestions, but you will also save money and make money.
For just £30 you will get content inspiration for the whole year. This is not designed to be a time vacuum. You don't have to invest time in breaking anything down or learning anything new. It is simply a resource for you to dip into to plan the weeks/months ahead. Cutting the trawl time and speeding up your content creation and social media scheduling. You might actually start to enjoy these aspects more!
You don't need to spend money on other services - sign up to pay monthly amounts for access to a database, or pay for other downloads - this will give you everything from awareness days to red carpet events to exhibition openings to sporting occasions. Also, if you outsource any aspect of your social media management or content creation, being able to streamline your brief will most likely save you money by way of cutting the time the jobs you've outsourced take.
5. Ultimately, increase sales and reach a wider audience
By being able to streamline and plan your content and marketing more effectlively, your engagement with your audience will improve, as will brand loyalty and regular posting will grow your audience, thus growing sales. There's a lot to gain from spending £30!
We all strive to reach the right audience, our ideal client, and as many of these as possible. So, it's about finding the most cost effective, and time effective ways of doing this.
Consistent content - engages and grows an audience - engenders loyalty - increases sales - encourages repeat purchases.