This article will provide you with everything you need to know about public relations and marketing planning for your website including:

Why Is Planning Important?

Planning is critical to the success of your PR and marketing efforts because it allows you to set clear goals and objectives and determine what actions to take to achieve them. Without a clear plan, you may find yourself in a situation where you make a lot of progress towards your goals but then lose sight of them as you continue to work. This can put you back in a situation where you have to start from scratch and begin the entire process over again. Although this may not seem daunting, when you’re already in the thick of things, it can be extremely frustrating.

What Should I Include In My Strategic PR and Marketing Plan?

There are eight components of a PR and marketing plan that you need to include to make sure you’ve thought of everything.

1. Objectives & Goals

You should start by defining your objectives and goals for the plan, and ensure that these align with your strategy. Your objectives should be measurable and have a clear value proposition, while your goals should be more specific and measurable.

For example, let’s say that you’re working to establish your hotel as a leading hotel for weddings and events. Your overarching goal is to increase wedding bookings at your hotel, while your objective is to get three wedding blogs to feature your hotel and its services in an article. When you set these objectives and goals, you can see how this will guide your strategy and how you’ll be able to measure your progress towards reaching your goals.

2. Strategy

Your strategy is highly focused on defining how you intend to achieve your objectives. You should start by laying out the tactics that you’ll use to get there, such as:

• Developing content
• Creating compelling calls to action
• Experimenting with new platforms
• Using social media to gain traction
• Attracting relevant bloggers
• Determining which industries to focus on
• Determining the target audience for your content
• Using the right call to actions
• Measuring the results of your plan

After you’ve outlined your strategy, you can start to determine what tactics will be required to execute it. For example, if your strategy is to use social media to attract relevant bloggers to your site, your next step is to find out which platforms these influencers are using and begin to build your presence on these platforms.

3. Objectives & Goals (Continued)

Your objectives and goals from the previous section should inform every part of your plan, and you should make sure that each part is clearly linked to the other. For example, if your goal is to increase wedding bookings at your hotel, your objectives may be to:

• Raise brand awareness
• Generate word of mouth
• Create a positive impression
• Establish credibility
• Gain recognition
• Develop an understanding of the value proposition
• Leverage relationships
• Include a sense of partnership

These goals and objectives should be reviewed and updated at least once every quarter to ensure that they remain aligned with your strategy and that you’re monitoring the results of your plan accurately. Goals should be reviewed and reassessed at least once a year to ensure that they remain meaningful and to see how far you’ve come in achieving them.

To help you stay focused on your objectives, you should create short-term and long-term goals for each part of your plan. For example, if you want to increase website traffic, your short-term goal might be to get 200 website visits a day. Your long-term goal might be to get 500 website visits a day. You should review these goals often to ensure that you’re staying focused on what you set out to achieve.

4. Resources

The resources that you’ll need to plan a successful PR and marketing campaign include people, money and physical space. The first two are relatively straightforward, while the last is more difficult to determine. When it comes to the third, you need to consider how much space you have and whether or not you’ll need to rent additional office space.

People are a major consideration in any PR and marketing plan. You need to decide how many people you need to have actively involved in the process and ensure that these individuals have the necessary skills to carry out their roles. One important note here is that your team should be collaborative and receptive to new ideas, and should be able to identify potential pitfalls before you begin implementation. This will help you avoid wasting valuable time and resources.

5. Project Timeline

Your project timeline should be comprised of two distinct parts: the short-term and long-term. The short-term part of the plan should include the time you’ll need to implement your plan and the dates by which you’ll need to have completed specific tasks. The long-term part of the plan should set a deadline by which you’ll measure the success of your campaign. To help you stay on track, you should set weekly, monthly and end-of-project deadlines for yourself, as well as review this plan frequently with your team to ensure that everyone remains focused on reaching the goal.

6. Budget

Your budget is an important part of your plan, and should be set with careful consideration. You should include how much you’ll need for each part of the plan and how you’ll manage your funds throughout the process. To keep your budget in check, you should be careful about what you include in it and be realistic about what you can achieve with the amount of money that you have available. For example, if you only have a limited amount of funds to work with, you might want to consider reducing the number of platforms that you engage on, or the amount of content that you create.

As with any other part of your plan, you should review your budget and the timeline frequently to ensure that you’re staying on track and to adjust them as necessary. This is especially important with a limited budget, as you might find that the costs of certain tasks exceed your income. If this is the case, you might want to adjust your plan and find an extra source of income to fund it. Alternatively, you might need to eliminate some of your expenses to make more money. In any case, staying on track with your budget will help you stay focused on your objectives and be realistic about what you can achieve with the money that you have available.

7. Objectives & Goals (Continued)

The objectives and goals established earlier in this article should guide every aspect of your plan and help you keep everything connected and aligned. You should also have clear expectations about the results of your plan, as not everything will be easy to measure. When you have well-defined objectives and goals, you can be sure that you’ve covered everything and that you’ll be able to track the results of your plan’s implementation. You should review and reassess your objectives and goals at least once a quarter to ensure that they remain aligned with your strategy and to track the results of your plan’s implementation. If you’ve stayed true to the original plan, you’ll be able to measure the success of your efforts quickly and accurately.

8. Marketing Charts & Analysis

To ensure that you’ve considered all the important aspects of PR and marketing planning and that you’ve made the right decisions, you should have a clear understanding of how each part affects the other. You should build up a collection of marketing charts and analysis over the course of the year, and review these at least once a quarter to get an overall picture of how things are going and what needs to be adjusted.

These marketing charts and analysis will form the basis of your next three to six month plan, and should serve as a foundation for all subsequent plans, as well. If you’ve stayed true to the original strategy, these charts should begin to tell you whether or not your plan is working, and if anything needs to be changed to achieve better results.

To help you stay focused on your objectives, you should create short-term and long-term goals for each part of your plan, as well as review these frequently to ensure that you’re staying on track. Once you’ve reached your goal, measure the success of your plan and adjust as necessary to continue on the same path.