You Ask, I Answer: Most Effective PR Strategies?

In today's episode, Abby asks, what are the most effective PR strategies we should be looking at? That's a bit broad. Um here is the PR strategy, the one that is timeless, that is effective, uh, that is uh pretty much as close to guaranteed as you can get. Have news worth sharing. That's it.

Have news worth sharing. It's simple and it's difficult. Because most of the time we don't have news worth sharing. Most of the time we have things that aren't even news, right? Oh, look, we changed our logo, or so-and-so got promoted, or we want a new client.

These are all things that are important to us as business owners or as managers or executives or whatever, but nobody cares. That's boring, right? News is something that is new and that is uh remarkable, meaning that it's worth remarking about. Seth God's old quote, you have to be remarkable. If no one's talking about it, it's not news.

Here's an easy one, especially if you've got you know a decent number of employees. Um go and wherever it is your employees congregate and hang out, right? And you know, it's the water cooler, the cafeteria, whatever. Uh could be online too, you know, uh monitoring uh employees' social media, anything that they post publicly, and see what they talk about naturally. I guarantee you it's not about your company.

Uh it's not about the press release you just put out, or the story that you just put on your blog, whatever. If you can't even get your own people to care, why is anyone else gonna care? So you've got to have news worth sharing. Now, what is news worth sharing? Well, it can be anything that really is beneficial to your audience.

Um, and your products and services generally are not going to be beneficial in in a newsworthy way. They may be beneficial, but they're not news because they're not new. Um, that can be things like a study or some research you did. It can be um a qualitative uh piece of information, it can be an interview with uh somebody who isn't involved in your company, you know, some sort of uh minor celebrity or industry person. It can be uh a trend in the in in your overall industry that has suddenly changed.

A lot of people were able to make a decent amount of news uh earlier this year when the pandemic hit and you know there were a lot of uh good and also a lot of not so good uh pieces on how the pandemic was going to change certain industries. That's news that's useful, that's interesting, that's worth talking about, it's remarkable, and that's what you have to do on a regular frequent basis if you want to have an effective public relations strategy. In theory, this is why people pay agencies, because agencies uh in theory have more practice at doing this sort of thing than than uh some folks at in-house. It's not necessarily true. Um agencies are as wide and varied in quality as any other industry, as any other business.

There'll be some good ones, there'll be a whole bunch of mediocre ones, there'll be some bad ones. So the biggest challenge for you is to figure out whether this agency is any good at what they do or not. Um and some companies inherently just have more news than others, right? Uh, and when there is news, they know how to to uh push all the right buttons. Nobody really has to work all that hard um at generating news.

You know, if you work at like Tesla uh or uh SpaceX, right? You literally are doing new stuff, and yes, you have to do th the effort of you know reaching out and letting news media know that you're doing this thing, um, but the news itself is newsworthy. It is is remarkable. That's the bench test. If if your people, um, or even you yourself, you know, if you happen to be in a um some kind of relationship, uh is what you're about to write a uh news release or do a news campaign about so interesting and fascinating and exciting to you that you're talking about it to your friends, your significant other or whoever, unprompted, right?

It's just so exciting that that it's worth talking about. Then you know you've got something. If on the other hand you're working on something and he can't even bother to bring it up to your your significant other at the end of the day, it's probably not newsworthy, and therefore it's gonna be a much harder uh the uh story to make happen. There are fewer news outlets now than there ever used to be um for you know at least a decade. Uh we were doing some data research recently for uh Businesswire and found that there were eighty-five thousand uh domain names, unique domain names in news stories uh back in twenty fifteen, and we're down like thirty ish thousand now.

So you've seen a substantial contraction in the number of news outlets available. So one of the things that you have to do tactically is become a news outlet, become a publisher, be you know, have a a very large mailing list and uh and a large readership or your large YouTube channel or something that gives you reach into your audience because you are the news at that point. Um so many industries, uh particularly this year, have have run into really hard times in terms of being able to uh maintain their their business operations that uh we've seen dramatic decline in the number of functioning news outlets. Uh this isn't a long term trend. So you have to become the news.

And so tactically, uh, what can you do to build a media property that is a publisher that you then can share your news in. Plenty of companies have done this. Plenty of companies have become so large and so powerful in their media operations that they're effectively like separate companies. But the advantage is you don't have to pitch anybody. You don't have to to squeeze your news in or a ask an editor to approve your story.

You it's your outlet, so you have control over it. Um that's a a big part of making news work for you today, is you have to become the news. And that is something that companies overlook a lot. Um so d uh do that to the extent that you can. It's an investment.

Um you're talking probably two to three year investment at least, um, significant ad dollars, um, significant marketing technology dollars to build a for example a newsletter and run it well, uh, notification systems, marketing uh and remarketing uh by text message, uh retargeting ads uh that run on search, that run on YouTube. Expect to spend depending on how large you need it to be and how large your industry is, anywhere from five to seven digits, right? On building that outlet so that you are the you become the de facto news source for your industry. Um then you don't have to worry a whole lot about um having to run a public relations operation separately because at that point you are the news. But that's it at the core.

The challenge is most of the times most of what we have to share is not news, and therefore it's not going to resonate. Um it's gonna be very, very difficult to pitch. And with fewer reporters and journalists out there, um it becomes really difficult to get their attention for anything. So what you have for what you're pitching has to be really news. Um we could spend a whole lot more time on this, but uh if you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below.

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