Does anyone else still get the ‘back to school’ feeling come September?

We might have worked all through summer (a couple of holidays aside…) yet here we are, at the end of August, feeling excited about fresh starts, new stationery and continuing the countdown to Christmas – yep, in the PR world, Christmas starts in July.

Whether the final quarter of the year is your busiest in business or the best time to focus on strategy for 2019, here are some of our tips for getting the most out of feeling refreshed in September.

Don’t skip school

If you want to combine the back to school feeling with actually going back to school…do it! If strategically building your business’ profile or social media content has been on your to-do list for a while, use this time to look into bespoke training or workshops which will help you keep up with an ever-changing industry or develop new techniques.

Homework

(We’re just sticking with the theme here, you don’t have to do this at home).

Take a step back and look at the bigger picture – if developing your social media platforms to strategically support business growth is key for you, consider auditing your competitors.

Find out what is and isn’t working for your particular industry and adjust your strategy if required. If website sales are important for you and all of your competitors are advertising products on Facebook – why aren’t you?

Revise

January is all about setting goals for the year ahead, in April you might be looking at financial figures for the upcoming months. By September you’ve just been…busy. How often do we set goals and then just don’t have the time to check our own progress?

Write a list with proposed timings, keep it somewhere safe and check in on it regularly. Perhaps you actually ticked off ‘join a LinkedIn group’ in May, but come autumn, maybe you need a refresher of local networking events.

If your goals relate to your website, such as sales or page visits, remember to set them up as actual goals on Google Analytics so you can track and monitor progress.

Extra credit

Once you’ve attended a workshop or ticked off a specific goal, continue your development in the area by keeping up with industry blogs, following relevant hashtags to join conversations or making the most of LinkedIn groups to further discuss with your peers. Earlier this month, LinkedIn announced it was re-launching Groups by introducing it to the main LinkedIn phone app making it even easier to keep up discussions on the go.

What are your top tips for the new term? Tweet them to us at @Approach_PR.

 

(Image via Pixabay)