It’s always great to be proactive and feel like you are in control of your work – not the other way around! Putting together a yearly PR calendar is a great way to achieve this. Breaking down activity into manageable monthly tasks, to keep you ahead of the editorial cycle, should help ensure that your firm doesn’t miss any obvious PR opportunities to support its business strategy.
Why you need a PR calendar
While the obvious purpose of a PR calendar is to secure media coverage on relevant topics at the right time, it can also help with providing hooks for content and social media posts. For example, the summer holidays and Christmas provide a timely reason for family lawyers to talk about child access arrangements while Valentines has long been a favourite of employment lawyers who want to remind businesses of why a workplace relationship policy might be a good idea! For accountants, the Budget and the start of the tax year are the two obvious items to plug into a PR calendar but with a bit of lateral thinking there are plenty of other hooks which give accountants an excuse to promote their expertise. Halloween might provide an ideal hook for an article on how to avoid an HMRC nightmare!
Investing some time in putting together a calendar is a great use of resource as it can be used as a template year after year.
Your calendar shouldn’t be a static document, ideally it will constantly evolve over the year as you add new ideas, respond to any changing circumstances and capture new data for example, what the lead times are at a new publication or what topics an editor is interested in.
How to create a PR calendar
First, think about what you are currently happy with and what has worked well in the preceding year? Are there journalists and/or publications with whom you have built-up a good relationship and want to continue working with? If so, don’t neglect these going forward.
Second, are there any cyclical issues that your competitors capitalised on to secure media attention previously that you would like to try and replicate this year? What topics or angles worked well for them – would these be equally relevant for your firm?
Next talk to colleagues across your business to understand their goals and what PR success looks like for them. This will help channel your activity to the right places and define your media messages. For example, by understanding the marketing team’s objectives for the year, you can support them at the appropriate time.
Now it’s time to start brainstorming with your team to nail down those hooks! Whatever goes into your calendar needs to be relevant to your business and its strategy – think about why it is included and how you can best capitalise on it?
Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
- Seasonal themes: Christmas, New Years’ resolutions, Easter, school holidays, Halloween, Guy Fawkes, Valentines
- Seasonal business themes: the Budget, end of tax year, increase in national minimum wage, other tax band/benefits changes, deadline for gender pay reporting
- New laws coming into force/court judgments expected to be handed down
- Bank and other holidays: national days such as St Patrick’s day, Mothers/Fathers/Grandparents day, May day
- Awareness days/week: Mental health, International Women’s Day, Black History month, LGBT Pride
- Anniversaries: Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, centenaries, birthdays
- Industry events: awards or listings such as Legal 500
- Internal news: events your firm will be hosting, announcements of new partners/trainees, new services, initiatives or collaborations launching
- Events relevant to your clients’ industries: conferences, awards, other events such as London fashion week
Certain topics or events might require action before or after the actual date so make sure this is flagged appropriately.
The calendar also needs to show the lead times for your ideas bearing in mind that monthly print publications can plan editorial six months in advance while for online and social media platforms it can be a matter of days or even hours.
Using a PR calendar
Once you’ve done all the hard work of putting the calendar together make sure it is circulated widely internally so everyone can see what the plan is. This should help you line up internal content writers, speakers or interviewees on relevant topics in advance.
Within any PR team make sure everyone is clear about who is taking responsibility for what.
When pitching the ideas from your calendar to journalists, explain why your article is/will be relevant to their audience at that time to stand out from the crowd.
Finally, don’t forget that the calendar is not an end in itself. As we all know, events can get in the way of the most carefully laid plans and sometimes it is necessary to be reactive to current affairs. So don’t be too restricted by what’s in your calendar – social media users in particular are more likely to engage with a topic that is already trending.
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