By Gini Dietrich
Happy New Year!
I missed you guys. I hope everyone had really nice holidays and you’re refreshed and ready to kick off 2016 with a bang.
For the past three years, I have blogged about our business goals and have included my personal goals. This is always a great exercise for me because it’s nice to have them written down in one spot so I can easily refer back to them.
The business trend since I began doing this is I need to coach my team better and delegate more efficiently. Apparently I am terrible at those two things because they’re on my list again this year.
So, rather than beat myself up about that, I thought it’d be more fun to talk about your PR goal for 2016.
The 2016 PR Trends
During the 12 Days of Christmas last month, we talked about the PR trends for the new year.
They are:
- Better content marketing;
- Content as product;
- Livestreaming;
- Private communities;
- Paid amplification;
- Virtual reality;
- Semantic search; and
- Measurement.
I challenge you, right now, to choose one of the eight and create a PR goal around it.
For instance, my PR goal for 2016 is to figure out semantic search and apply it to our content. Sure, I am going to be applying all eight of these, but semantic search and virtual reality are the only ones we’re not yet doing.
If I choose just one, I lean more toward semantic search.
A SMARTER PR Goal
OK, so my goal is to learn more about semantic search…and then what?
If I were to apply the SMARTER goals Geoff Livingston and I introduced in Marketing in the Round—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, evaluate, and re-evaluate—I have to get even more specific.
- S: Learn about semantic search and apply it
- M: to increase the domain authority on Spin Sucks by six points
- A: and build SEO around six very specific terms
- R: that are applicable to the PR industry
- T: by December 31, 2016.
- E: Every month, I will evaluate the DA and SEO and
- R: make tweaks and improve where necessary.
You can see what I am trying to achieve with this goal is a higher domain authority on this blog and better SEO (which translates to first page of Google results) for six priority key phrases, such as “PR metrics.”
Every month, I will review where we are, whether it’s working, and make changes to improve.
Your Homework
So that’s what I want you to do right now:
- Choose one of the eight trends above.
- Quickly write down what you’d like to do with it.
- Apply the SMARTER process to it.
- Write down your two sentence PR goal.
- Share it in the comments here (if you’re willing).
- Hold one another accountable.
We’ll come back to this blog post throughout the year and I’ll remind you what you’ve agreed to do and check in. I’ll also keep you updated on how I’m doing against my semantic search PR goal.
Together, we’ll each achieve our PR goal and kick the butt of 2016!
image credit: shutterstock
