Being a PR is an emotionally intense and challenging job that can be fulfilling but also unsatisfying. On the other hand, it can be inspiring, and brutally boring.
PR is underestimated by people in other industries.
Today, more than ever before, the differences between marketing, PR, and advertising are becoming negligible and that is leading the whole industry into a different direction. Once you get familiar with public relations you will see that it is a lot more complex than it seems to an outside spectator.
In order to become a PR person, I believe that you need to own a specific skill set that can be divided into two categories: professional skills and human skills. Human skills represent your personality, for instance, kindness and patience. While professional skills include things such as the capability to speak in public and the ability to write professionally.
In public relations, we’re always balancing between various tasks, deadlines, and priorities.
We are in constant interaction with our clients and co-workers and we are frequently switching between multiple projects. We are looking at multitasking as the way of living especially with the constant progress in technology which allows us to manage and deliver various assignments all at the same time.
Nevertheless, recent studies showed that the more we try to multitask, the less productive we become. Researchers noticed that the typical employee in the office is interrupted up to 6 times in one hour and as I said the more interruptions they experience the less productive they become.
If you are working in a PR agency, you certainly know that organization and efficiency are essential to your daily work. Still, it can be demanding when you have different clients to handle, meetings to attend, and your personal life as well. Luckily for us, we are living in the technology evolving times.
We can embrace new technologies that can make our work hours more productive.
For example, rather than using the same presentation platforms for your pitches, you could take them to a next level by using new digital formats. There are a lot of programs and online tools that can help you make outstanding and customizable video presentations like Haiku Deck and Sparkol.
Analytics is also very important to PR professionals.
Without it, it would be very difficult to measure success in brand development and content promotion. There are numerous tools that can help by providing customizable analytics reports and can also rank the content based on various parameters.
With the competition becoming more and more intense among PR firms, we need to investigate new fields of marketing, technology and relationship management. There are a lot of new PR trends which came along with technology development that we can pursue.
In this article, I will focus on the 3 key trends I believe will make the most impact on PR niche. Also, I will refer to one mobile application form Cometdocs document management system which can help us bring everything together.
What Are The Latest PR Trends
1. Going Mobile is the new Black.
Mobile technology has changed the way we do business, there is no doubt in that. Mobile access is possibly the most important factor one company needs to consider.
As we are constantly on the move, our mobile devices are becoming number one go-to source for seeking information. A lot of companies are harming their business by not fully optimising their website for mobile access.
Our associates, clients, reporters and all of our important contacts are using mobile devices. Some are using them to respond to emails, others to search for the latest stories, news and possible PR partnerships.
Further, all companies which want to keep up with the technological progress are investing in the mobile-friendly collaborative platforms.
They are the crucial ingredient in accessing client records, all sorts of meaningful data, as well as delivering messages. For instance, mobile CRM, which I will talk in detail later, can help you stay informed about your client’s wishes and needs with the option to respond to them at any time anywhere.
Since we are constantly on the go, the other advantage of mobile devices is that with the right apps we can do almost anything anywhere. Imagine you have a very important public statement you have to release to the press. If you are smart, you will send it to them as PDF in which way it can’t be compromised.
But what if you realize that some information can be misunderstood and you are nowhere near your desktop computer in order to change them?
In that case, you could use Cometdocs Converter Ultimate app to download that PDF statement from the cloud, your device or email clients, convert it to Word document format, edit the text and forward it to the press.
All that can be done right on your mobile device in less than 10 minutes.
2. Real-Time Tracking Technology.
If you are a type of PR person who works smarter not harder, then you probably have all kind of spreadsheets for tracking social media outputs, outtakes, and outcomes.
Outputs represent metrics that are used to measure progress and success solely based on your team’s activities.They measure whether the team managed to pull off assignment on time and did they stay within the budget.
Rather than just measuring team’s activities, social media professionals can also measure direct outcomes of their efforts, or we can call them outtake metrics. They measure your post impressions, video views and how much engagement did your content had.
The most important metrics are social media outcomes.
They represent actions people took as a result of watching or reading your post. In the other words, what impact did your social media efforts make in the world?
There are plenty of tools which can track those metrics for you in real time and represent data on weekly or monthly bases. Plus, they can also be connected with your existing spreadsheets. Most of that data is represented in Excel sheets which can be easily shared.
In order to securely send those spreadsheets to your supervisor, you will need to send them as PDF. PDF Converter Ultimate can be handy here because you can easily convert those spreadsheets to a PDF in a matter of seconds.
3. Build Media Relationships With the Help of CRM.
Back in the day, media relations were only based on writing and how convincing your pitching skills were. Don’t get me wrong, those skills are also highly valuable today. But modern media landscape requires more analytical and quantitative approach.
In order to build quality connections with reporters and journalists, PR teams will need to track various metrics. Like pitch history, open rate clicks, reporter engagement, the best time to contact and other metrics.
Without having a data-driven strategy and smart, measurable goals in place, effective relationship development couldn’t be possible.
There are plenty of CRM software on the market and most of them are providing their reports in PDF.
In order to add comments, edit or highlights some text you can use PDF Converter Ultimate app that will convert your report in the editable document in no time.
Public relation CRM is focused on centralizing reporter engagement, contact insights and pitching history into one unified system. Thus allowing PR firms to increase the response rate to pitches, better manage relationships and improve reporter connections.
In the recent years, relationship management remained the big PR trend and will for sure continue to be influential in the near future.
Conclusion
As PR professionals, we are constantly balancing between hundreds of tasks. In the recent years, we also needed to master new forms of technology in which way we could ensure our success along with the success of our clients.
No matter how many clients we have or how big their industries are, all of them are cautious when it comes to new technologies which represent a big opportunity for client promotion and successful traceable results. These technologies are only as powerful as we let them be, so without us they are basically useless.
PR professionals have to be dynamic, forward-thinking and eager to learn new things if they want to keep up with the constant evolution in technology.
About The Author
This article was written by Sandra Rodgers.