Spring is the best time of year to get yourself into the habit of prioritizing.
The weather is getting nicer and while winter may have weighed you down, spring is a time of renewal. Many of you may be spring cleaning your home and office of all its clutter. But have you looked at your PR to do list lately? This is the best time of year to spruce it up. Here are 4 tips to spring cleaning your public relations efforts.
- Prioritize – As small business owners, we feel that every email and project is important. However, the fact is we need to prioritize our to do list. Spring is the best time of year to get yourself into the habit of prioritizing. If you don’t rank the importance of your to-do list, you’ll end up doing what you find easiest while delaying the consequential stuff. Disorganization and lack of deliberation produce stress and mistakes. The answer is prioritizing!
- Read – Sounds simple enough, but reading for small business owners can become overwhelming. Many of us put reading on the bottom of our to do list until we have “more time.” Unfortunately, as we all know, time can slip away from us. That’s why this spring you should identify what general news, trade journals or social media outlets you need to be looking at everyday. Then schedule at least an hour of your busy day to reading those items. Break it up if you have to, but make sure to do it. Keeping up with the news will not only keep you informed but it can also help you come up with ideas for your company’s next public relations campaign.
- Media Lists – We’ve all been there. You took the time to build an amazing media list and now you’re done with it. Not so fast my friend. Your media list is one of your most critical public relations tools and though you think may be done with it, it’s in a constant state of flux. Reporters change beats, move on or publications shut down altogether. Spring is the best time to go back through some of those lists and see what the status is of your contacts. Even if you know a contact is still good, it doesn’t hurt to check in with the reporter to see if they are working on anything you can help them with. Once you’ve done your check in, make a note on your list of the month and year. Making that small note can help you make sure your media lists are more reliable and it makes it easier to update as needed.
- Communication – When was the last time you checked in with your newsletter recipients? Don’t assume everyone on your list is reading what you send. Spring is a great time to find out what you can do to improve your communications. Tools like Survey Monkey make it easy to conduct a quick free survey that can provide your business with invaluable insights. You can ask a few simple questions like, “Do you read the newsletter?” “Why or Why not?” “How can we improve our communication with you?” Once you know you know the answers, you can tweak your newsletter to provide better information to your readers.
Finally, there are many other areas you can review on a regular basis, but one of the most important things you can do is to give yourself regular check-in points. Put an ongoing mark in your calendar to do some spring cleaning and review your general to do list. By doing this the same time every year you can assess what needs to be changed, what can stay the same and what other things your company can improve.
What would you add to this spring cleaning to do list? What do you think is a “must-do” on your company’s public relations list? Let us know!
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