As 2026 gets underway, many communications teams are opening their planning tools and thinking, “we should really look at that… soon.”
Resetting your PR strategy for 2026 doesn’t have to turn into a three-month internal project. With a few focused steps, you can move into the year with clearer insight, sharper priorities, and a PR plan that actually reflects where the business is heading.
1. Review your 2025 PR performance
Start with a clear picture of how your company showed up in 2025.
Review:
- Share of voice in your core markets versus competitors
- Tone of coverage (supportive, neutral, critical)
- Key themes and messages: did the stories you wanted to tell actually land?
- Geography and outlets: where did you gain the most traction?
- Spokespeople: leadership, technical experts, partners
This kind of overview makes it much easier to align PR activity with wider business strategy, something we prioritise in every PR audit and strategy we run for clients.
2. Look beyond traditional media coverage
Your reputation is shaped far beyond press articles.
In many industries, the conversations that really influence perception now happen through:
- Podcasts and webinar panels
- Conference stages and technical forums
- Short-form video and explainers on LinkedIn
- Local and industry networking formats
This includes initiatives like our Neon Nights and Morning Focus series in Stavanger, where marketing and communications professionals share ideas face-to-face, often generating just as much impact as traditional coverage.
3. Turn your website and press room into an AI-ready PR hub
By 2026, a growing share of professionals are asking questions via AI tools, not traditional search engines. Those tools summarise answers before showing links – and they rely heavily on sources that demonstrate clear, structured expertise.
For PR teams, this means your website and online press room need to work harder.
Focus on:
- Updating your company boilerplate to reflect your 2026 strategy (not your 2019 org chart)
- Refreshing leadership bios with current roles, markets and priorities
- Making press assets easy to reuse: logos, images and fact sheets in one place
- Structuring content with clear headings, summaries and FAQs so journalists and AI tools can quickly understand and quote you
The goal is simple: when someone – human or machine – asks “who can I trust on this topic?”, your official channels should appear first.
4. Build a simple PR calendar for 2026
You don’t need a complex system. Start with a single page that captures what you already know is coming this year:
- Product launches, field trials or major project milestones
- Financial results, ESG or sustainability reporting
- Exhibitions and conferences (from ONS 2026 to niche geothermal or offshore events)
- Internal milestones worth sharing externally, major hires, anniversaries, office moves
From our event and PR work, we see the strongest results when PR, marketing and sales align early around the same milestones.
Even a rough calendar gives you time to shape stories – not just announce them – and reduces last-minute scrambles when an important date suddenly appears “next week”.
5. Clean up media monitoring and alerts
Most communications teams aren’t short on information, they’re short on relevant information.
Early in 2026, take an hour to:
- Refine keyword lists around real priorities (markets, technologies, competitors, partners)
- Reset alert levels — weekly digests for most topics, instant alerts only for critical issues
- Segment coverage into usable views (investor-relevant, customer-relevant, talent-relevant)
When we built weekly media intelligence for FourPhase, the goal wasn’t more news. It was insight that “read like a colleague who understands our deals”, something the team could act on every Monday.
6. Make your PR content easy to find and aesy to cite
If you want journalists, analysts and AI assistants to reference your company, your content needs to behave like a reliable source.
We’ve seen this work first-hand. For clients like FourPhase, building a library of specialist, well-structured insights has made their content easier for both engineers and AI tools to quote and reuse.
Here, depth beats volume. A small number of evergreen pieces that people bookmark and return to will do far more for your reputation than a steady stream of thin updates.
7. Set clear, simple PR goals for 2026
Once you’ve reviewed 2025, define a small set of PR measures that actually matter internally.
This might include:
- Visibility of experts (quotes, op-eds, speaking slots)
- Engagement with key insight content
- Website traffic or enquiries generated from PR activity
The aim is to show how PR supports business strategy, not just how many headlines you generated. This is the same approach we take when running marketing and PR audits for new clients.
In Summary: a practical PR reset for 2026
A short PR “new-year reset” can give you:
- A shared, fact-based view of your reputation after 2025
- A website and press room that support journalists and AI tools
- A realistic PR calendar for the rest of 2026
- Media monitoring that cuts through noise
- Clear, meaningful measures everyone understands
