Wednesday 20 April 2016

Time to spring clean your PR?

After a long winter the signs of spring are definitely here! With daffodils and tulips popping up all over the place and the evenings staying lighter for longer, it's a great time for taking a good old look around you.

The same goes for your PR. If things are going ok it can be easy to accept a 'status quo' and keep on with the same course of action. But is 'ok' really getting you the results you need?

In this post we hand over to LexRex account manager Kate, who gives three top tips on ‘spring cleaning’ your PR.

Have a ‘spring awakening’.
Any good spring clean means a thorough look at things you don’t always get chance to consider. From time to time it is an immensely valuable exercise to reassess what you're doing and why. After all, you don't do PR for fun; it's to achieve an objective. PR mapping is a useful process that looks at each area of a law firm, how each can meet a PR agenda and how these can work together as a whole. If you use an external PR agency, get them to come up with some new ideas. It can also be a worthwhile and revealing exercise to ask a number of PR agencies to come in and showcase what they could bring to the table.

Brush up on the basics. 
Now you’ve looked at the bigger picture, it’s time to get back to basics. Are all of your current systems working the way they should be? Are you making the most out of the activity you’re currently undertaking? If there are areas you feel you could improve on, you shouldn’t deny yourself the opportunity to improve. Training can not only help to improve skills but can also improve efficiencies. There are many tools out there now that can help PR and communications professionals and training can open your eyes to these.

Consider something different. 
The days when PR was just about press releases and well-placed sponsorship are long gone. There are a whole load of things law firms can do now to raise their profile; from blogging to social media, awards to email newsletters. The key is to be consistent in your approach and integrate each activity with the other marketing and communications you're doing to create a cumulative effect.

April is not only the early days of spring, it’s also the start of the new financial year for many law firms. So if you’ve renewed your budgets and have capacity to invest in outsourced PR activity, or else want to invest in training to help improve your PR skills and efficiency, we’d love to chat to you!