Year End PR Planning

With the holiday season upon us, it’s time to think about PR planning for 2025.  Many organizations have already started it as part of the budget and planning process for the upcoming year.  However, if you’re like many startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs, PR planning is a regular process that takes place on an ongoing basis throughout the year, and year end is a perfect time to do your planning to start the new year off right.

Even if you’re a smaller organization planning to use automated PR tools to handle your PR internally, it is still a good idea to obtain outside counsel to assist you with your PR planning - no AI generated program is going to reliably be able to help with that.  Generally, you will want more than a marketing expert for this task - you want someone who specializes in PR.  PR is a highly specialized segment of marketing, and you will want someone experienced in this field to help you in your planning.

Regardless of whether you’re handling PR in-house or want outside counsel, here are some things you can ask yourself as you develop a PR plan:

• What is important to you about PR?
  
• What are the top issues/trends in your industry, and how do they affect your organization’s public image?
  
• What new products or services will you be introducing?
  
• Are there partnerships/customer contracts that you can promote?
  
• Are there any newsworthy issues or topics that you can use to promote your company as expert spokespersons to the media?
  

Boutique agencies and solo PR practitioners are a great place for startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs to start to find resources to help develop a PR plan that they can implement on their own.  Larger agencies typically will want to handle both planning and execution, but boutique agencies and solo PR practitioners are more open to hybrid working relationships.  In general, avoid freelance websites - the emphasis is on low prices, without quality of work.

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