How PR firms can Leverage Downtime Between PR Campaigns for Strategic Success
4 Mar 2025
4 Mar 2025
With the digital media space being as crowded as it is, it’s understandable that you’d want to promote your PR campaigns with as much fanfare as possible. And that entails a lot of activity both in the lead-up to the actual campaign and in the immediate aftermath, when you evaluate results and process the learnings.
Many brands make the mistake of simply waiting until the next campaign on the calendar. In fact, these periods of downtime can be critical assets for relationship building and strategic planning — indeed, in many ways, they are key to the long-term success of your PR initiatives. At Star Squared PR, we prioritise long-term client relationships, and there are certain strategies we leverage during downtime that have consistently brought us results. Here’s what we do:
You likely already conduct performance reviews immediately after a PR campaign. However, we recommend taking this a step further by conducting detailed reviews of every campaign you’ve worked on so far, paying special attention to core metrics and how they’ve evolved.
The reason for this is simple. Your client’s success doesn’t just rest on one campaign — it’s a product of all the work you have put in over multiple campaigns. Indeed, certain metrics acquire much more value when assessed over longer periods of time for overall patterns and any sudden spikes. This helps you refine your PR playbook for future initiatives and give clients a clearer picture of where they stand.
Best Practice: In addition to studying your standard roster of metrics, try to identify any patterns that might not be immediately obvious. For instance, audience engagement on a specific channel may not have been high overall, but maybe one particular post you shared garnered a lot of responses. That might offer important insights on how you can tweak your messaging for that channel in the future.
Your team is your biggest asset, and downtime offers the ideal opportunity for them to upskill and acquire new knowledge that helps them keep pace with changing industry demands.
Of course, working on an active campaign offers a lot of opportunities to learn on the go. But there’s much to be said for investing focused time in deep skilling, such as for getting acquainted with new PR tools or deep-diving into a new industry segment. Having downtime also allows for the team as a whole to invest in structured learning and work on group assignments so that everyone is learning at the same pace.
Best Practice: Choose skills that you and your team agree on as critical for long-term growth. AI-related learning, for instance, is always a good idea in today’s market. You can bring in external experts to conduct classes, or sign your team up for an online learning course. You can also gamify the learning process to motivate your team, such as by offering a prize to whoever completes the course fastest or scores the highest marks on assignments.
While much of your content will of course be campaign-specific, ”evergreen” content plays an important role too. You can use the downtime between PR campaigns to build those content assets that you can use throughout the year.
It might seem counterintuitive to build much content in advance, given that PR is all about quickly responding to situations. But evergreen content that is industry-specific rather than event-specific plays a big role in establishing your client as a thought leader. Moreover, even a single long-form content asset can serve as a valuable resource during campaigns, when you can break it up into smaller posts or video clips and share those in between your campaign- specific posts.
Best Practice: Schedule meetings with your client specifically to work with them on evergreen assets that they can contribute their expertise to. It could be in the form of a white paper, a thought leadership series, or a podcast series — whatever they are comfortable with. And remember, quality always supersedes quantity. Even a few well-built content assets can be rich sources of inspiration and engagement going forward.
All too often, even in 2025, we see that PR and marketing teams work in silos from the rest of the organisation. The best way to overcome that? Schedule sessions that bring different teams together and get them to brainstorm.
The fact is, every department has valuable perspectives that serve to enrich your overall brand story. For instance, the product team might have core insights on why certain features work over others. Or, the customer service team might have insights on common pain points raised by the customers they interact with. Incorporating these allows you to build PR campaigns that are more closely in line with overall business objectives and that tap into data points that might otherwise have been overlooked.
Best Practice: Have clear agendas in mind for every cross-functional ideation session. For instance, you could invite them to form groups and brainstorm on future PR campaigns or to design marketing strategies for hypothetical products/events. Emphasise that the goal is to given space to each team member’s idea and to involve them all equally. There may initially be some resistance, so it’s a good idea to schedule some icebreaker games to get everyone comfortable. In conclusion, remember that it’s not so much about picking any individual strategy as it is about using your downtime to further your client’s goals, whatever they might be. Perhaps your client wants more media speaking opportunities, or perhaps they’re looking to get their brand featured as more of a content authority. Make sure to stay in touch with them at every step and to share detailed reports on exactly how you’ve been using campaign downtime for long-term growth. Together, you can turn your so-called idle time into periods of active enrichment and brand building.
At Star Squared PR, we pride ourselves on our 360-degree approach to campaign management. To us, every day is an opportunity to do better, be that responding to an immediate need, investing in content creation for the year, or simply nurturing our relationships with the media. Reach out to our team of experienced professionals today to learn more about how we can transform your brand’s PR initiatives, during campaigns and beyond.
