03 Nov How PR and Marketing is Changing in 2017 and What You Can Do to Jumpstart Your Plan

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How PR and Marketing is Changing in 2017 and What You Can Do to Jumpstart Your Plan

It’s official: now that it’s November, we’re formally gearing up for the end of 2016 and even looking ahead to the start of 2017. But how are things changing in the PR and marketing world and how will they affect your business?

We’re here to help you in knowing what PR and marketing tools are shifting and what you need to do about it. There are new trends emerging and ways you can get a jump start to kicking off your success for 2017.

Go granular. You may be used to or are currently implementing billboards, advertisements and large campaigns into your business, and there’s definitely a place for that. But 2017 will be all about going granular. Think about micro-sites and profiles for your products or services, having a voice and personality for all lines of business and really understanding the nuts and bolts of your demographics for each sector. Things will turn even more ‘social’ and not need to be as professionally polished. People are craving more scaled-down messages, which are simplified, yet, direct. Think ‘just tell us what we need to know’ as the mantra for 2017.

Get real (time). In 2016, companies used a more ‘real’ tone of voice in their messaging, but 2017 will be about being in more real time as well. Media stories, video, eblasts and social posts have very solid scheduling functionality on the backend (or what your internal or outsourced PR or marketing firm does) but this messaging will be even more genuine, so it may be difficult to schedule communications materials and social media in advance. Meaning, the public is demanding even more hyper-current details, updates and notice and that might mean relying less on having weeks of planned, pre-written messages, to having yourself or your staff reacting in more real-time. This poses both positive relationship building and consumer loyalty advantages. It also comes with disadvantages and potential PR nightmares due to decreased reaction and proofing time. Having a strategy in place early to handle this challenge will be key in ensuring success of this real-time plan.

Your PR team (whether in-house or outsourced) will need to be in alignment with producers, bloggers, and reporters but in an even more real-time manner. They will need to know the pulse of what is going on in your business as quickly as possible and be able to pitch stories quickly and effectively (meaning permissions have to be quick for them to release information). News is turning stale even quicker in the new year.

Get personal, yet mathematical. Just because 2017 will be even more reactive and personal doesn’t mean you should fly blind. In fact, 2017 will hold more demand for PR and marketing departments, whether internal or outsourced, to carry the responsibility of communicating the quantitative impact on organizations. Start now by implementing systems in which to calculate, communicate and control numerical figures of importance to your organization. So many times, it takes months just to figure out how to get the data for such information. Take that time out now and start the new year right.

Does your team need to have an influence on overall revenue, social media increases, new volunteers or donations, or even for growing a particular niche within your business? How will they know how their eblast, for example, helped do just that? Are they provided with the information to make real, correlative analysis? How will they know an increase in website visitors means a certain dollar amount for the organization? Work on building this formula (or enlist our help) to make this a very clear process. The more your team can be both personal in messaging, yet understand that their efforts have an impact on measurable items of importance means their messages won’t be pointless. It’s easy for ‘more personal’ to mean not geared to the point of calculation. Just because a YouTube video from your organization is hilarious and gets some views doesn’t necessarily mean that you can understand how it affects your bottom line. Make sure you know the impact of tactics so your PR and marketing departments will know how often to release funny videos, for example, to which platforms of communication, when and perhaps most importantly, why.

We’re hoping everyone will have a successful end of year recap for their efforts and that 2017 will mark even greater communication flow for your organization. Cheers to 2017!

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