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The Colab Brief: 030 - Q1 Planning: Because Winging It Isn’t a Strategy

Welcome to The Colab Brief

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Ash + Lizzy
December 16, 2023

The Colab Brief will return in the New Year! Wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season.

KPI. OKR. SOS. 🙀

It’s planning season, once again. As we’ve covered before, we’ve ditched the “yearlong PR strategy” in favor of a more quarterly cadence. The industry moves way too fast (especially in tech) to strategize twelve months in advance, and we always found ourselves halfway through Q2, doing something completely different from our carefully curated plan. And then we’d shed a tear. 😿

Planning more frequently has given us the flexibility to adjust to business changes while providing enough direction to make everyone feel comfy cozy. 

Here are a few things we’re thinking about as we pull together our Q1 plans. 

Read Time: 3 minutes.

Keep the Goal in Mind

At the end of the day, the goal of any team that rolls into Marketing is to help drive sales. We try to keep that in mind when we’re doing our PR plans. What can we do to reach the greatest number of people possible and drive the most traffic to the website? That’s the end goal. 

Reestablish Your Audience

“But we know our target audience!”

Yes, but who else could you target? 

Especially in the startup industry, the ICP changes often. Make sure the teams are all aligned on WHO to target in Q1 and think through any ways to expand the target audience. Is there a new vertical you can explore? A different way of communicating? A new theme? 

The new year is the perfect time to give your marketing messaging a tweak. 

Set Metrics, Focus Your Media Targets

We prefer a customized approach to the media, so setting a few “goal” outlets per quarter helps focus the pitching and gets everyone rallied around a few key reporters. And then, we tackle our metrics. Given the types of publications we’re hoping to hit, what makes sense? Our strategy is all about balancing ambition with realism—Tier 1 press may be a tough nut to crack, but a targeted vertical approach? That's where we turn up the numbers.

We set metrics around the total number of hits secured, interviews, and bylines, and then track any “behind-the-scenes” writing/planning it takes to make the whole thing come together. 

Detail the Stories

Outline your pitch angles, your audiences, and your spokespeople into a bank that gives you enough ammo to get through the quarter, absent of news. We proactively pitch constantly, and then layer in any newsworthy events or response pitching opportunities as they come along. It’s better to have more ideas than fewer, and getting signoff from the exec team at the beginning of the quarter means you don’t waste time waiting for approval mid-quarter.

As we start Q1 with plans, metrics, and a bit of comms expertise, here's to an energetic quarter ahead, brimming with media wins, exciting changes, and perhaps a touch of controlled chaos—the ideal mix for success in the PR world. 

Cheers to the planning season! 

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