How to "do" PR

PR, regardless of the budget available, needs three things in order to ‘hit’;

1. Strategy

2. Creativity, and

3. Determination

Without them your campaign and your efforts will die a painful, and fast, death. Sorry to be blunt ... but you’d rather we tell you like it is, wouldn’t you? Now armed with these truths you are more than prepared to use and benefit from PR.

Strategy

Without a clear strategy you will potentially find PR time consuming, you’ll get bored of it because it is so time consuming and you’ll stop. That’s a huge shame. With just a little effort each day (as little as just 15 minutes a day) you can start reaping the rewards of press coverage ... for free!

Your strategy should make it clear who you are targeting and why. Do you want to talk directly to customers / potential customers or directly to the competition? What do you want your PR to achieve for you? (Please note that tracing sales back to PR is very hit and miss, and PR is not the same as a marketing or sales campaign but it should support both. There are others who will disagree with this statement, but it makes the most sense to us both as a business that uses PR for itself and a PR agency who promote clients via PR.)

Creativity

You may be thrilled skinny that you have just won a new order for, say, providing 200 pairs of black socks, but will your readers be remotely interested? (That’s if it gets in front of readers – you’ve got to get the journalist on side first don’t forget!)

However smitten you are on your product or service, always bear in mind your audience and what they want to hear / read about. Your sales success is newsworthy but it probably needs an additional spin to make it of interest to your audience. Did you win it by providing a more innovative sock product? Will this latest business success mean more jobs / safeguard jobs? Is there an export element to your latest sales win? Is the sock in question a ‘virtual’ sock for Second Life dwellers? Some daft ideas but the points made.

Always ensure that your story is relevant to your audience and to the journalists you approach.

Over and above that, think creatively. Make sure the story is visible of course but also give it ‘curb appeal’. Journalists get literally hundreds upon hundreds of emails each and every day with press releases attached. You have probably got less than 10 seconds to make sure that your journalist reads your press release and then thinks to themselves, “I’ll publish that”. 10 seconds is not long so think creatively ... oh, and make sure your press release is spelt right, punctuated right and presented well. Nothing infuriates a busy journalist more than a sloppy press release which they think you’re expecting them to run for you, for free. Help them out and get it right.

Determination

Unless you do strike it lucky with the first publication and / or journalist that you approach you will need determination. Send out your press release by all means but follow it up with a ‘phone call and if that release isn’t for them, find out what will interest them. It’s about building relationships. It isn’t the end of the world if one piece fails to hit (you’ve got a fantastic strategy and PR Plan lined up after all) but use the ‘failure’ to learn more about those you’re approaching and what makes them tick.

Anything else?

PR is not confined to newspapers, magazines and broadcast channels (radio, TV, satellite). Online PR is relatively new and is growing massively. It’s a quick and cheap method of positively influencing an ever growing number of people. It includes social media (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc.) but it also includes blogs, forums, pod and vodcasts.