Courtesy of Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases (http://www.ereleases.com)
P.U.!
Do you smell that? Something stinks, and it’s not the month old bread you left
on top of the fridge (well, it may be that, too. Go throw it away). Your
campaign has been sitting around for way too long and it’s starting to go
crusty and turn funny colors. For some reason, you’re just ignoring it as it
dies.
Even the best campaign in the world goes stale
at some point. Public relations is just too dynamic to sit still for too long.
The public changes its opinion constantly and just because your brilliant idea
worked at one point in the past doesn’t mean it will always work. Indeed, it most
likely will not! Lucky Strikes, anyone?
So
how do you keep an otherwise ok campaign from going rotten over time? There are
a few things you can do to freshen things up around the place while maintaining
your brand.
Put Your Mind in the Future
When
a PR campaign starts going bad it’s generally because the company running it
has stopped looking to the future. We’ve all seen commercials run on for way
too long, or worse yet, when a company keeps making the same kind of ads that
just become painful to watch over time. They don’t seem to understand why
nobody cares anymore.
Their
marketing woes are just like your stale PR efforts. Once something started
working you switched to “present” mode. Before the campaign worked, you kept
dreaming of the day customers would become invested in the company due to your
work. But as soon as success came you settled in and stopped innovating.
Switch
back into “future” mode. Instead of enjoying your current success and lying
still, imagine how much better things would be if you tried something else.
Yes, it involves some amount of risk, but so did starting your campaign in the
first place! Reclaim that adventurous spirit by switching it up a little.
Clip Off the Low Hanging Fruit
Another offender in PR
campaigns is the low hanging fruit. Public relations is a multi-faceted
organism with many branches all bearing fruit. Sometimes, those fruit dip down
and don’t perform like they used to.
The
“PR tree,” if you will, looks fine from a distance, though, so you let those
few branches sag and try to grow more fruit elsewhere. In other words, you
invest in brand new sections of your campaign and ignore the sections that
aren’t doing so well.
For
example, if you set up a Facebook page for your business months ago during a
big PR push and it doesn’t do well, you may ignore it as the rest of the
campaign worked fine. However, that low hanging fruit is dragging you down.
Customers see the Facebook page is being ignored and it makes your company look
terrible.
When
a customer checks out your company, you want them to get the “total package.”
You don’t want them to stumble upon some website or press release somewhere
that doesn’t represent the idea you have of your company. Keep it consistent by
cutting out the low hanging fruit.
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