Your communication doesn’t have to go on holiday

No matter how nice it is with beach days and barbeque evenings, summer is also a challenging time for marketers and communicators. You need to maintain the target audience's interest, nurture the loyal relations you’ve built, and also try to get attention during an overall calmer period. At the same time it is an excellent opportunity to summarize the spring efforts and get ready for fall. But in all of this, you still need to take some time off. This is why we’ve summarized some points to make the important to do:s of summer easier.

Update plans and budget
A good way to sum up the first half of the year and lay the groundwork for the fall is to follow up on all the spring activities and campaigns. Go through what has gone well and what can be improved for next time. Use these insights to adjust and optimize your future communication. Use our guide to learn how to find interesting news in your company.

To stay in control of your planning and budget, it is important to update your PR- and communication plan before the beginning of fall. Update the strategy document so you are well aware of everything that needs to be done once you come back after your holiday.

Clean out the old and repurpose
Use the calm summer months to do a big cleaning of your content inventory. Go through your library of old publications, delete what is old and out of date and collect the material that can be updated and reused. Maybe some pieces have performed better and could scale up into a larger campaign or concept for fall? Perhaps a publication didn’t perform as well as you hoped, that you can try again but from a new angle? To reuse and update old material is a resource efficient way to work with content production.

Update lists
If you haven’t been checking your contact lists of journalists and influencers in a long time, it is high time to do so during the summer to have them updated for the upcoming season.

Prepare for the worst
It is always important to be ready for a crisis - even during the holidays. Since crises rarely take the season into consideration, it is important to know who to contact or call. Set up clear guidelines for how unexpected events should be handled and who to contact during the summer. Make sure to have a communicator on duty all summer.

Schedule publishing for the summer
After one and a half years of the pandemic many are looking forward to a summer that seems to offer a more “regular” vacation. Even if you treat yourself to more time off, your communication shouldn't suffer. You can schedule future publishing in your newsroom to secure a continuous flow of content even though you’re off, enjoying summer. In order to stay on your toes right after the summer you can also prepare the first publishings for the fall already. Don’t forget to have someone that checks the comments while you’re on holiday.

Our best tips to plan your communication this summer:

• Evaluate the spring and update your plan for fall
• Clean out old content, but update and reuse what you can
• Look over and update your contact lists of journalists and influencers
• Set up clear guidelines and contact lists for possible crises
• Schedule publishing during the summer

We wish you a lovely summer!