How to pivot a PR campaign

Like many ventures in life, sometimes things just don't work out. This can be the same with PR campaigns.

You can put all of the ideation, research and implementation time into an idea for it to simply not work out as well as you thought it would. 

This is where pivoting comes in handy!

A digital PR tool in its own right, pivoting allows PRs to take content which didn't make a huge impact on its first round of media pitching and make it work for you. 

As a result of pivoting some of our own campaigns at Motive, we have gained some fabulous coverage, built high authority links and boosted SEO for our clients. 

When you pivot a campaign, you are updating all of the content to work for you right now. This might be updating the data, pulling out a new angle, hooking it onto a seasonal period or awareness day or use it as reactive content to something cycling the news agenda.

There are a few tips we recommend to ensure positive campaign pivoting: ‍

Create evergreen content

The best way to make sure your content is going to work for you long term is by creating evergreen ideas. This is content which is essentially ‘always on’ and the concept of the content can be updated on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis. Examples of evergreen content are non-seasonal stories, listicles, how-to guides and thought leadership pieces. As with every campaign, the content must be insightful, relevant and topical for your target audience in order to truly drive results. Find out more about evergreen content here. 

‍Media lists 

Pivoting a campaign can mean using the base of an idea and research but making it work for a range of different audiences. For example, if you are working on a press release about ‘Scariest driving routes in the UK’, you could regionalise the story to make it work for regional publications across the country, ‘Most dangerous roads in the North East’, “Most dangerous roads in the Midlands’. These different pivoted angles will need specific targeted media lists to reach their intended audience and maximise media coverage. 

‍Media monitoring

Once a campaign has launched, it is important to monitor news titles for stories around the same subject.  One of the most successful ways to pivot a campaign is to re-outreach to media contacts once the topic of your campaign is trending - and making this the news hook in your pitch. 

To find out how we can help you boost your online coverage through PR campaigns, please get in touch. 

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