Three key areas to refresh, revitalize, and reorganize your PR strategy in 2025
A lot can change in a PR year, consider the meteoric rise of AI and the transformation of the social media world. As PR pros try to get to grips with these changes, a lot of their PR strategies are left to gather dust. April marks the start of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere and a time to spring clean your PR.
Great minds think alike, and a new Cision article, fittingly titled Spring Cleaning: PR Tactics to Refresh Your Comms Strategy, casts a spotlight on the top areas to spruce up in 2025.
Here are our key takeaways from the article:
- Roll up your digital sleeves and get to work – The 3 Ps of media outreach: personalization, patience, and persistence: It’s no secret that journalists are flooded with hundreds of pitches every day. It’s the job of the PR pro to stand out, and this is where your pitching approach needs to be looked at, by identifying what does and doesn’t work, or even trying personalized pitching to journalists. Patience is key here, but it’s well worth the wait when a journalist comes back, then it’s time to nurture them and become a trusted source – the pinnacle of PR! If all this is not working, then it’s time to update and refresh media lists, remove outdated contacts, identify their replacements, and organize by industry.
- Time to go to bargain hunting – There’s cash in the corporate content attic: At IBA, we have an age-old saying, “write once, repurpose many times” and in 2025, Cision agrees – PR pros need to do more with less to increase efficiency and maximise message reach. Repurposing content will be key, by taking one message and tweaking it into different content forms. It doesn’t stop there, though, in today’s digital era, there are a plethora of ways to amplify your content, embrace the power of multimedia, and maximize your digital presence across websites, social platforms, and SME profiles.
- Sit back and admire – Time to polish up your PR plan: Change is always occurring in PR, so keep on top of dusting down these three elements of your PR plan:
- Cleaning editorial calendars every 6-12 months can ensure PR campaigns are timely and maximize their impact.
- In the age of misinformation, treat crisis plans like they’re allergic to dust; these are living documents. One wrong move can be detrimental to brand equity, but with a crisis plan, brands can come out cleaner!
- Data is easily available in today’s digital era. It’s the job of the PR pro to clean it down to draw top-tier actionable insights from data to inform and drive your PR strategy.
And if you want to brush up your strategy with some more ideas, check out our 2024 PR spring clean, where all eyes were on data-driven PR strategies and the rise of influencer and social media marketing that should have landed you a seat at the top C-suite table and with great responsibility to move the business needle. If it didn’t, it could be the time to brush up and spring clean!
Sam Walker is PR Executive at IBA International.
