Being a PR professional means your work schedule can be crazy and sometimes overwhelming. With the productivity tips for PR processes we are about to discuss, you will get a lot done with less pressure.
Handling tasks like coming up with publicity strategies, dealing with the press, nailing presentations, and daily repetitive work is no mean feat. Being a PR professional is a heavy responsibility.
How do you handle such a sensitive role and stay productive?
Your PR processes can be managed and your productivity improved with the right tools and work plans.
Here are a few productivity tips to speed up your PR processes.
Top 9 Productivity Tips for PR Processes
These actionable productivity tips for PR processes will make your work better.
Use a PR CRM to manage your tasks
Being a PR official means you’ll handle tasks like making press releases and pitching to media and production teams regularly. Using a PR CRM tool can help you organize your repetitive tasks.
With the right CRM tool, you can organize these tasks effectively with minimal exhaustion.
These tools have customizable PR templates you can use for your pitch. This is one of the productivity tips for PR processes that eases your work and boosts productivity.
Furthermore, you get to have and maintain an organized list of all your clients and media houses as well as their history. You can track these clients and any action needed for them with ease.
Your whole team can also maintain their work in a single platform accessible by other team members. This enables collaboration and reduces time wasted on frequent check-ins and updates.
Using a PR CRM saves you time. Recent research found that using a spreadsheet to manage contacts would cost you 5.4hrs a week while using a PR CRM would only cost 3.4 hours.
Organize your tasks by priority
Planning your tasks is one of the most impactful productivity tips for PR processes. With a large number of tasks to complete in a day, organization and time management are crucial skills.
If you break down your long to-do list into small actionable tasks, it takes the pressure away. You could organize your work periodically, say weekly.
For this, you may even have a project management tool that would help you prioritize your tasks. Here is an example of what that would look like.
This way, you can set your goals for the week and have them on a list. Then you’d pick out the priority tasks, tag them, and schedule them so you don’t miss deadlines. You’d then handle your tasks one by one on priority.
You’d be able to edit the schedules, move tasks up and down your list as needed and keep track of everything from a single platform. Your PR processes would be faster.
Integrate marketing and PR functions
What is the role of public relations in marketing? The two get intertwined sometimes. Here is how.
Some of the repetitive PR processes overlap with marketing functions. Integrating the two and using marketing resources such as Hubspot could automate most of these tasks.
For instance, you can manage your social media marketing campaigns and craft PR social media posts using automated tools. These would automatically schedule posts and provide performance analytics for both departments. Also integrate your campaigns with a sales crm tool to manage your sales leads and save your time to mange your sales leads . This is one of the productivity tips for PR processes that saves you a lot of resources.
Further, you can use social monitoring tools like Determ to automate PR research and track mentions. Apart from this you can use B2B database platforms such Zoom Info alternatives to source company contacts.
What’s more, with statistics claiming social media is underused by PR agencies, you’d be making use of a powerful research tool.
Use scheduling tools
Another one of productivity tips for PR processes is to stay on top of your meetings and events using scheduling tools.
As a public relations specialist, you have constant meetings with media houses and clients.
As such, you’ll need a tool that can sync these meetings to your calendar.
That’s not all. Email scheduling is a major task too. Sending or responding to emails in real-time can be exhausting.
With an email scheduling tool, you get to compose emails when you have more time and schedule them for later. This helps during your busy days.
Scheduling social media posts using tools such as Hootsuite also saves time. You won’t have to keep up with posting dates. Instead, you’ll have these tools post things for you at a later date.
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Plan your email habits
Checking and responding to emails from time to time can be time-consuming. You can increase your productivity by cutting the time spent constantly checking your inbox.
Plan your email habits.
This means that instead of having to check and respond to emails constantly, you can organize them. Just like you’d do with your tasks, you can prioritize emails that need quick responses and tag them differently.
On a basic level, you’d put tags on emails such as important, urgent, and not urgent. This would help you sift through your inbox and respond with ease.
Alternatively, some email organization tools can provide more features. These include the ability to:
- Assign email conversations to other team members
- Track your mentions on shared inboxes
- Leave notes to other team members
- Integrate your email to other resources.
An additional useful tip would be to schedule times to check your emails to save time on the constant check-ins. Have reminders in place for when to check emails.
Have strict work-life boundaries
Your work may require you to put in extra hours or be available beyond your official time. This may leave you overwhelmed, for the most part, and without enough breaks. It lowers your productivity.
As such, you need to have strict boundaries with your clients.
This is an important tip, especially to boost your productivity. It also helps manage your relationship in other aspects besides time.
PR processes involve lots of communication between you, your client companies or public figures, media outlets, and production teams. Having boundaries helps keep these relationships within the realms of professionalism.
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It also helps establish healthy relationships with these groups of people. As a PR professional, valuable relationships are highly crucial for the success of your career.
Avoid distractions
This is one of the productivity tips for PR processes that may seem obvious, but it’s not. You can get subconsciously distracted and end up wasting time. Here’s how.
PR processes are all about image and with social media, image is no longer limited to physical situations. As a PR professional, you’ll find yourself on the internet a lot and the temptation to scroll through social media is there.
There are plenty of tools available to block distractions, such as Freedom. They can keep you from social media or limit time spent there. You can also use a time tracking software to keep track of the time spent on each sites and apps.
As a PR professional, you may also find yourself spending more time on tasks than you need to. Find ways to consciously save time. Integrate the live chat function to your website to reply your online customers queries on instant bases.
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Hold productive team meetings
Holding team meetings is also one of the major productivity tips for PR processes.
Team members can discuss their projects and progress with each other as they exchange ideas. This way, if one is stuck, they can get help.
It’s also a great way for team leaders to keep up with work updates.
These meetings need to be planned, therefore the agendas need to be discussed beforehand. This way, you boost your team’s productivity.
You can set weekly, biweekly, or monthly meetings depending on how often issues arise within your team.
Or, for instance, if your team works remotely, you may need more team check-ins than you would in a physical office. You can have written transcripts of these virtual meetings for future reference.
Stay ahead of current events
Part of being a public relations specialist is knowing current news in the industry, especially if it affects any of your clients.
Reading blogs, newsletters, social media posts, and magazines is crucial to PR processes. It makes strategizing easier and faster.
However, going through all major news outlets, social media platforms and blogs can be exhausting and time-consuming.
This is one of the productivity tips for PR processes that helps with that. You can use tools that source all the current information you need into one platform. News aggregators can save you the search by filtering through all news and picking only what’s relevant to you.
Time To Put These Productivity Tips for PR Processes Into Practice
All these productivity tips for PR processes will save you time and make your work better. PR processes, albeit overwhelming, can be expedited, or better yet, simplified.
Hopefully, this article will help you do just that, and take the load off your busy career. With repetitive tasks automated, and strenuous tasks simplified, you can now focus on marketing your client and maintaining their image.
All the best in speeding up your PR processes.
Gaurav Sharma is the founder and CEO of Attrock, a results-driven digital marketing company. Grew an agency from 5-figure to 7-figure revenue in just two years | 10X leads | 2.8X conversions | 300K organic monthly traffic. He also contributes to top publications like HuffPost, Adweek, Business 2 Community, TechCrunch, and more.
