We love celebrating our successful campaigns, those that go viral, those that achieve amazing results for our clients (be that 50 links or 10 from publications that they really wanted to target). But we also need to talk about those moments when our campaigns don’t perform as well.
We’ve experimented a lot in the past year and one of those experiments was pausing campaigns if the piece was not receiving traction that we were expecting. Analysing what has happened, what was our approach and based on that changing the strategy.
On a few occasions, we have sat down with our clients and explained why we believe we should pause and relaunch a specific campaign and replace it with a different piece in order to still gain relevant links and coverage.
We think that honesty is the best policy, and if we think, for any reason – be that unexpected situations/news and things that are simply out of our hands, that the campaign will have a much better chance in one or two months, we’ll say it. Of course, every decision, especially when it comes to pausing a campaign, needs to be backed up with data/press feedback or other relevant information.
So here are some tips on pausing and relaunching your campaign
If your campaign is not performing as well as you expected:
- Look at your (or any online/available) event calendar and see if there are hooks in the near future that you can use for your piece.
- Go back to your on-site copy and press release to see if you are highlighting the right information. We usually write at least two/three versions of a press release with different angles – the same goes for our outreach emails. Always write a few and test which ones are getting the best reaction/are most successful. Based on that, make relevant changes and relaunch.
- Go back to your original data (whether that is public data/internal data/desk research/external acquired data) and see if you didn’t miss anything or if you can focus on something else to ensure you are giving your campaign the best chance. Based on that amend your campaign.
- And most importantly, if you can, ask for feedback. If you can aks a journalist for feedback do so! Ask them for an honest opinion, what they think about your campaign, is it missing anything? If so, what? What would they expect to see in order to cover this piece? Again, based on that make relevant changes.
- If you can’t ask a journalist or don’t have any luck when contacting them for feedback, ask other Digital PR specialists (that you don’t work with). I believe that we are a friendly industry full of people that are happy to share their tips and advice. Do contact your Digital PR friends and ask them to quickly look at your campaign and give you some feedback.
Here at Shout Bravo, we are happy to help. If you have a campaign that would benefit from a fresh pair of eyes looking at it, do get in touch. Of course, it’s all confidential – at the end of the day, we are all professionals and respect each other.
