Reaching new people and attracting more consumers is best done through public relations. There are plenty of ways that brands and corporations can land great media placements in big publications and generally get great media coverage, even with a limited marketing and PR budget.
After all, even Bill Gates once supposedly stated that he’d spend the last of his budget on public relations, and it’s for good reasons.
Purpose
Before pitching a business to a publication or an outlet, the company must understand why it’s trying to implement that PR effort into its promotional campaign in the first place. The business must get answers to several questions, such as the company’s overall goals for the next several months, how the media coverage is going to support those goals, what’s the company trying to accomplish by investing time in PR, and which products or services are going to be promoted.
Having an answer to these questions makes it easier for businesses to figure out what the purpose is behind getting media coverage, and if that reason doesn’t fall in line with the overall business strategy or company goals, it doesn’t make sense to invest in it in the first place.
Messages
Key messages are essential when implementing a PR strategy, and before creating any messaging, the company should have a few things figured out, such as the topics that the spokesperson can cover, the reasons why the story should be covered by outlets, the reasons the public should care about the story, and whether the messaging will relate to any current events.
When creating a public relations strategy, companies should always keep relevance and timeliness in mind, because the key messages should relate to what the media outlets are already covering, and they need to be along with those same topics. One great way to get a great message across is to figure out a different perspective that outlets haven’t covered and incorporate that into the company’s key messaging.
Pitching
One of the things that journalists dislike is being pitched content that’s not relevant to what they’re talking about, which means companies must find the right places to pitch their messages and stories. Knowing and understanding the company’s target audience is a great place to start when figuring out which outlets to pitch, as these are the people that already read certain publications or listen to certain podcasts, and they willingly share that information with the brand.
Knowing where the target audience spends most of its time means knowing which outlets to pitch, and this is also going to improve the brand’s success rate when it comes to getting the story picked up by the right journalists or outlets.
Additionally, this also means executing the PR strategy and not just planning all the details that go along with it, because a company won’t get any media coverage if the plan isn’t implemented after it’s created.
