Holiday Flicks to PR Tactics

At Berkeley Communications, our top priority is helping our clients achieve their desired outcomes. This could be anything from securing coverage with top-tier media targets to reaching a certain number of monthly users. We have a wide variety of strategies in place, all designed to guide our clients towards their end goal.

To put this in movie terms, at Berkeley we are the supporting character who helps guide the protagonist in subtle but important ways. Let’s take National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation as an example (forgive me, I am already in a festive mood). This might be too niche of a Christmas movie for some, but for the Turner family, it is a holiday staple (thanks Dad).

For those who have not seen the film, let me walk you through the plot… As the holidays approach, Clark Griswold is determined to have the perfect family Christmas; the tree, the decorations, the dinner – the whole shebang. Clark Griswold makes it his mission to give his family the best Christmas ever – while also expecting a large bonus – but in true Lampoon’s fashion, things don’t go so smoothly.

However, as chaos ensues, the supporting characters are there to mitigate the damage. Clark’s single objective is to deliver the best Christmas for his family, but his focus on this leads to further issues, and it is the other characters who guide him through these obstacles – whether this is through his wife’s (Ellen) level-headed, guided approach to the holiday or Eddie’s (Clark’s cousin-in-law) unconventional, calm approach which eventually gets Clark his work bonus.

Now, I am not suggesting that we at Berkeley will go to the same extent to guide our clients to their end goal (in the film Eddie kidnaps Clark’s boss to teach him a lesson about not going through with promised Christmas bonuses…we draw the line at kidnapping).

But we do ensure that our clients avoid encountering such obstacles – that is the role of us, the PR agency, to provide the guidance needed to break through the news and share our clients’ stories. Whether it’s crafting the perfect message or developing a strategic plan, we are dedicated to helping our clients reach their goals and achieve success in their respective industries.

Similar to PR, we work with our clients to deliver the end goal the have set their sights on. We align ourselves with each client’s desired outcome and establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Then, with these in place, we hold quarterly review sessions to monitor performance and evaluate the impact of our combined strategy.

This is backed by a presentation with an overview of relevant statistics i.e., the number of pieces of coverage we have secured, backlinks, average domain authority and the overall readership number. Of course, every client is different, so each session will be broken down to reflect this and highlight the KPIs that are most beneficial to them. But the overall consensus is that we want to continuously improve our approach and ensure that we go above and beyond.

Then we analyse what worked well during the quarter and what we could do to improve further, taking into consideration the feedback provided by our clients and using it to enhance our approach for the next quarter.

Having recently finished our Q3 review sessions, we are busy adapting approaches and ensuring we offer our clients the support they need (to avoid them facing the chaotic holiday period experienced by Clark) and will deliver the results they want to see in time for our Q4 review session. Then, it is time to focus on 2024.