Mid-Year Check In: How to audit, adjust, and strengthen your digital PR strategy

The first half of the year always flies by. One minute, you share your annual digital PR strategy with the C-suite, and the next, it’s time for your mid-year break. 

If you’ve been in public relations for a while, you’ll also know that ambitious content calendars, media outreach goals, and storytelling plans can easily drift off-course as market dynamics shift and unexpected opportunities arise.

This is why the start of Q3 is the perfect moment to refresh your strategic communications strategy. Before the end-of-year rush begins, the world’s best PR teams take the time to reflect, measure, and recalibrate. It’s the perfect time to sharpen focus and strengthen your digital PR strategy for a powerful second half.

This article offers a practical six-step framework to help you take stock of what works, what needs to shift, and how you can set things up to end your year on a high.

(PS: New to the world of public relations? Read our article on the fundamentals of building a digital PR strategy first.)

6-step mid-year digital PR strategy check-in

1. Reevaluate your current PR goals

Your public relations strategy should be a dynamic document, not a static blueprint. The goals you set in Q1 reflected the business context at the time. Does that context still hold?

The first step is to compare your original plan with your current progress. It’s essential to look deeper than “Did we hit the mark?”

Ask yourself and your team:

• Are our goals still aligned with business priorities?
• Are they still SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound? (If you need a refresher on a solid framework for setting and measuring PR goals, now’s a good time to pause and have a read.)
• Have industry shifts, new competitors, or economic changes impacted your brand’s focus?

This exercise will help to ensure the second half of your year is guided by current realities, rather than outdated assumptions.

2. Re-evaluate your target audience and messaging

Your audience isn’t static, and neither are the messages that resonate. Use your mid-year PR audit to review engagement across channels: Who reads your press releases, shares your content, and covers your stories? This audit can reveal new or unexpected segments.

Check in with your sales and customer success teams: What do customers talk about at the moment? What language do they respond to? What has changed over the past six months?

Then ask:

• Are our messages still landing with journalists and other key stakeholders?
• Has our audience evolved in terms of priorities or pain points?
• Do we still tell the right stories in the right ways?

Strong communications strategies evolve with their audiences. This step helps to ensure yours does the same.

3. Public Relations audit: Measure earned and owned media results

A thorough review of your communications approach should involve data insights.

To truly measure your PR success, you need to look holistically at both your earned and owned media performance. Go beyond simple coverage volume and dig into the metrics that reveal true impact.

For earned media performance, analyze the quality and context of:

• Share of voice: Use a media monitoring tool to track your brand mentions versus two to three key competitors over the last six months. How do you stack up against those that compete for the same slice of the pie?
• Sentiment: Classify top-tier coverage as positive, neutral, or negative. What is the tone of the coverage? Are you being positioned as an innovator, a follower, or something else?
• Key message pull-through: Review your top 10 media placements. Were your core messages included in the coverage? If not, why not?
• High-tier placements: Have you secured coverage in the media outlets that matter most? Check your coverage against the predefined list of preferred outlets you created in your annual plan. What’s your hit rate?

For owned media metrics, take a look at your own data. Dive into your newsroom analytics, for example, to understand your audience’s behavior:

• Traffic and engagement: Which press releases or blog posts drove the most views? What about social media? For example, you might find that a data-driven report received five times more views than a press release on a product launch. This insight is critical for optimizing your digital PR content mix.
• Referral sources: Where did your audience come from? For example, you might discover that a specific industry newsletter is your number-one traffic driver, or that a single LinkedIn post from your CEO drove more visitors than a week of other activities. This tells you exactly where to focus your distribution and executive communications efforts.
• Content downloads: Which resources were most popular with journalists and other press room visitors? For example, if your media kit was downloaded far more often than your case studies, ensure it’s 100% up-to-date and includes your latest messages and assets.

4. Audit your storytelling and content mix

Step 3 feeds directly into step 4: Your content audit. Your aim should be to tell stories through the formats your target audience values most. 

Review everything you published in Q1 and Q2: Press releases, blog posts, data reports, thought-leadership pieces, whitepapers, social media posts, case studies, and more.

Ask yourself:

• Which formats earned the most media coverage?
• Which content types drove the most engagement?
• Did we over- or underuse a single format or channel?
• Did we put our internal data, experts, and unique insights to good use?         

If your data-heavy whitepaper outperformed your product news, it’s your cue to lean into inbound PR. (Our article on how to build an inbound PR strategy could be helpful.)

Go beyond your metrics and scan the landscape

Once you’ve audited your content, it’s time to look outward. The most agile strategies are built on a sharp awareness of the competitive and media environment.

Here’s what to do:

• Analyze competitor wins: What were the biggest stories your competitors landed? Deconstruct their tactics to find white space for you to own in the next six months.
• Identify new media outlets and voices: Which new journalists, newsletters, or podcasts have gained influence in your industry? Keep your media list fresh.
• Re-evaluate industry narratives: Have the dominant conversations in your sector shifted? Align your stories with current narratives to make your brand more relevant.

This step provides the context you need to make your internal adjustments truly strategic.

5. Evaluate your tools, team, and workflow

A brilliant PR strategy can be crippled by an inefficient engine. Your tools, team structure, and internal processes are the machinery that bring your communications to life. 

The middle of the year offers the perfect pit stop for an engine tune-up:

• Assess your technology. The right tools should act as a force multiplier that automates tedious tasks and delivers sharp insights. Does your current tech stack streamline your work or create friction? Evaluate everything from your media monitoring platforms to your AI tools to ensure they truly empower your team.
  
  As part of this evaluation, consider your approach to managing and sharing your brand's stories. A newsroom can be a powerful hub for centralizing press releases, media assets, and updates. Not sure whether to build or buy your newsroom solution? Download our "Build vs. Buy" whitepaper to help your PR team make the right decision.

• Align your team’s skills with your goals. A strategic pivot requires new capabilities. As you look toward Q3, Q4, and beyond, consider if your team has the right skills and capacity. For example, if your audit revealed that data-driven stories are your biggest wins, ask yourself whether you have someone on your team who can analyze and visualize your data effectively. Identifying gaps now will allow you to plan for additional internal or external resources.
• Streamline your workflow. Nowadays, speed is a major competitive advantage. Audit your process from ideation, production, approval, and distribution to uncover any bottlenecks. If a lengthy approval process consistently kills the momentum of a timely story or post, it’s time to redesign your workflow for greater agility.

 6. Set clear, realistic goals for the rest of the year

Finally, use your audit insights to refine your PR goals for the next few months. You don’t need to reinvent your strategy, but you do need to strategically recalibrate.

Apply a simple filter: What should we stop, start, and continue doing? 

A few examples:

• We should stop producing low-impact press releases.
• We should publish one data-driven whitepaper per quarter.
• We should build relationships with more high-value media contacts.

Document your updated PR goals and KPIs. This creates alignment across your team and ensures your Q3/Q4 efforts build a strong bridge to next year's digital PR strategy.

Need help formalizing your plan? Our communication strategy template can help you get started.

Finish the year strong (with a bit of help from PR.co)

A mid-year digital PR strategy check-in is the hallmark of an agile and mature communications function. If you take the time to audit, adjust, and strengthen your plan, you shift from a reactive to a proactive approach. 

It also gives you the clarity and focus to do what matters most: Tell powerful brand stories, reach the right target personas, and drive the kind of results your C-suite would love to see. 

With PR.co’s built-in analytics, you can easily track what’s working across your newsroom, press releases, and earned media. Our real-time data gives you the clarity to fine-tune your strategy, double down on what performs, and stay focused on the stories and formats that drive real results.

You’ve made it halfway. Now it’s time to finish strong.