25 Oct Are You Navigating Your Most Complex PR/Marketing Challenges Effectively?

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Are You Navigating Your Most Complex PR/Marketing Challenges Effectively?

In life and in the workplace, we all have challenges, right? Whether you’re having to justify PR and Marketing efforts to show ROI, trying to motivate various departments to get on board with new efforts or campaigns, working to generate new creativity among your team or having trouble finding enough resources or time in the day – we understand your pain.

We have worked with hundreds of clients and developed these quick tips to help you navigate your PR / Marketing needs effectively.

#1: Find great resources. This might sound easier than it is, but we all know that navigating complex organizational challenges can be daunting; whether it’s a perception you’re tasked to help change, or becoming more involved in the community and achieving greater recognition. Businesses have limited time, funds, staff, partners and more. Staying on top of continuing education, web-based tools, and the latest in PR and Marketing trends will help you in this arena. You may have an internal PR and Marketing team that is responsible for this and we know how hard they work each day. Help them find new resources that support time efficiency, greater outreach and new skill sets by staying on top of resources available.

There are a number of free and basic tools worthy of incorporating such as 1) Hootsuite for social media, 2) Canva for graphic design support, 3) Google Alerts for media and news monitoring, 4) Feedly for bringing in new content and news ideas, and 5) Grammarly for stellar copywriting and editing assistance.

If you’re outsourcing your company’s PR and Marketing efforts, be sure your outsourced firm has the latest tools and is on top of its game. The agency likely has a wide variety of tools they pay for that are more advanced than what is available online for free. You want to ensure they’re not implementing PR and Marketing measures that were all the rage five years ago. Your outsourced PR firm should be honing in on real-time trends to produce tangible results. PR and Marketing is a dynamic, constantly changing discipline! Ask your outsourced firm questions. If they are not providing you with an activity report, they should be. Monitor the reports monthly to see how they’re incorporating new resources such as bloggers, social channels, video, metrics, media hits, and interviews into your plan.

#2: Get into a rhythm. When you need all departments, programs, and staff to fully communicate to the PR and Marketing department about what is going on in their corner of the world, we know it’s challenging to get everyone on the same page. Developing a rhythm in a meeting schedule, metrics and management will dramatically help your organization think like a PR and Marketing machine.

Say you choose 2 p.m. on the first Tuesday of the month, for example, to set your meeting rhythm. Get a representative from each pertinent department together and discuss what important details are going on in their area and talk about what you would like them to do to support your PR and Marketing campaigns. Remember, they may not have immediate ideas or buy-in. Include them in brainstorming so they are engaged and feel included in the steps to a successful outcome.

Make sure in these meetings you’re able to bring up meaningful metrics that all departments will understand. This might mean that your internal team or outsourced PR / Marketing firm needs to continually develop metrics measuring 1) changes in social media data by channel, 2) media impressions, 3) audience reach, 4) advertising value, 5) paid advertising impressions, 6) click-through rates, 7) marketing automation data, and 8) CRM data and more. (Need help in this area? We have a sure-fire metric that will clean up all your data and make this easy to understand.)

This helps everyone get used to talking about their departments and highlights amazing opportunities while understanding the meaningful impact to the organization. We’ve seen our clients achieve great success by implementing this kind of schedule.

Additionally, if you need a boost in managing the vast PR and Marketing projects from each department and initiative, there are free project management tools available. A free tool we recommend is Trello to help sort out priorities, progress, and manage overall rhythm for deadlines and team communication, providing greater clarity as well as ROI.

#3: Develop flexibility. In PR and Marketing, a one-size fits all approach doesn’t necessarily work. Meetings could work for some, while others simply need regular status updates provided by email or a collaboration tool.

Tailor your communication updates also. Some people need to read through your analysis and suggested solution of a complex PR / Marketing challenge while others want to see graphs and charts that will help them see the strategic plan.

We know that PR and Marketing is not considered a profit center or revenue generating department; it’s a cost to organizations. That’s why it’s vitally important to ensure there is flexible communication flow to all departments to support their profit generating efforts so that everyone can fully understand your department’s role within the organization. Often PR and Marketing roles are ‘mystified’ and people are unsure exactly what these departments do. This is a great way to inform pertinent department members and help with job security at the same time.

Set clearly defined goals for each department (or have them communicate this to you), and be flexible in each approach to their unique needs or situation. Looking at clear goals and then measuring against data will be a key way to ensure flexibility but also ROI in terms of supporting revenue generating systems internally.

Some departments want more media coverage while others may want an increase in social media engagement, for example. Understanding the needs (and goals) of all groups within your organization is important to be able to know how to strategically approach and respond to their needs.

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