For understandable reasons, there’s training around, often free, for owners of small businesses to learn how to use public relations tools to get their business into the media themselves.
Most give good basic advice and allow them to pitch their story to media they’d like their business to be in, with some success.
But much of what’s taught falls into the category of codifiable knowledge – things which are easy to define, write down and pass on.
The Problem
The problem is many of the things required to maximise your success in media relations, and, more importantly, achieving your target business and communication Outcomes, are tacit knowledge – things you won’t find written down in a course because they’re often learned through experience, or tradecraft passed on by experienced professionals to new colleagues they’re training.
Which is why asking a qualified and experienced public relations professional to handle your story helps you maximise the benefits – because they bring years of tacit knowledge in this specialist skill to your story.
Here are some of the things they bring which a course can’t teach you:
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Ability to identify the things happening in your business which media would be interested in and why
To be blunt, what’s exciting you about your business may only be of interest to you, your colleagues and close stakeholders. Maybe not even your family. Your news may not qualify as ‘News’ or a feature to anyone else.
An experienced public relations professional can tell you how your story rates on what I call the ‘So What?’ scale – whether it can be easily dismissed with that response.
No matter how interesting you find it, if it doesn’t interest enough people who use your target media, their editors won’t run it – because they’re job is to publish things their audience is interested in. Unless you pay to have it published. Then the audience will still ignore it and you’ll have wasted money on the paid placement.
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Whether they’re newsworthy, features or paid content.
Not everything is a News story. There are lots of criteria for what makes something News. But it’s not the end of the world if your story isn’t News, because it may be a feature instead. Or a letter.
There are lots of opportunities for media coverage beyond News and an experienced public relations professional can tell you where your story fits, if it does have sufficient interest for media.
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Publication in which media will be most likely to help you achieve your target Outcomes.
This brings us to the important point that getting coverage in media is not an End in itself – it’s a Means to the end of achieving your target business and communications Outcomes.
So getting coverage in the media most likely to help you maximise your Outcomes is more important than getting any coverage anywhere. A story in The New York Times is useless if it’s unlikely few or any of its readers are likely to do what you want because your business is not relevant to them.
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Which media will be interested in it.
And which not to waste your time on. It’s great to have goals, but they have to be realistic or you’re wasting your time.
No matter how much you care about your story, national, or even regional, media aren’t going to be interested in unless it meets certain criteria. Things like relevance to their audience and how much money is involved. Which they don’t have in a convenient list on their website.
An experienced public relations professional can tell you which media outlets, if any, will be interested in your story and why, based on their experience and research.
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How to frame your story in a way which will appeal most to your target media.
There are lots of ways to tell the same story. But some work best for media – to fit into the storytelling forms they already use and prefer.
An experienced public relations professional can work out which will maximise your chance of coverage in your target media. And maybe write different versions of the story using different framing for different target media.
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How to write your news release to make it easy for media to use it.
There are free guides available to teach you how to write a news release. But there are many ways to write your story.
The best way is as your target media would write it themselves – so they’re more likely to use it because your release will allow them to simply copy and paste it into their system and edit it lightly. That’ll save them time and stress – incentivising them to use it – as the demands on them these days are extreme and, sadly, growing.
Writing a story the way media would is a skill which has to be learned. Which is why it’s one of the first things journalists are taught at journalism school. And something public relations professionals learn as part of their basic training if they haven’t come from a journalism background, which many, including me, do.
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When to set your target publication date and whether to embargo your news release.
For every media story there’s an optimum time for it to be published in order to maximise its opportunity of leading to your target Outcomes.
When that is will depend on lots of factors including when you are doing something it’s announcing, how much notice your target audiences may need to plan to act in the way you want and what days your target media use stories about certain topics and when they’re being pitched more competing stories – lessening your chances of coverage.
Setting an embargo for publication on your news release asks media not to publish it before the date and time you’ve requested. This allows you to send it to all of your target media before that date, including ones who need more notice than daily media because of their production schedules e.g. some monthly publications work three months ahead.
The advantage to you of doing that is it allows you to maximise coverage by ensuring none of them don’t use the story because someone else published it first (media don’t like to be seen to publish after rivals), so long as they all honour your embargo.
The advantage to the media is it allows them to work on the story in advance and request extra information and supporting materials such as pictures, videos or interviews, receive and process them and schedule the story for the publication as soon as your embargo date and time is reached, or as soon after that as fits in with their normal publication schedule.
Strictly, they don’t have to honour your request, but it’s a matter of professionalism that most do – because they know that if they publish it before then you may not send them stories in advance in future, leaving them having to play catch-up to rivals when your future stories are published.
An experienced public relations professional can guide you on the optimum publication date, or options, and whether to embargo your story or make it for immediate use once sent.
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What multimedia assets you need to create to support the story to maximise the odds of getting coverage in your target media.
When I was trained to design newspaper pages as a sub-editor, I was taught “Pictures lead people into pages”. That’s still true and also for web pages and social media posts – images literally grab the attention of audiences and good ones will interest them enough to make them start reading the headline and then the story, if the headline is engaging enough too.
You should send at least one image with every story you send media – because in the war for attention they fight every day it’s one of the things which will help them get engagement with their stories online and in print.
What your images should be of is also important and something which will make a difference to the strength of your pitch. Cheque presentations have always been naff and are rarely used beyond local media now. Coming up with a strong supporting image, or set of images, is something you need experience-based advice on as well as an experienced photographer to take it.
As more and more media use video to get and keep the attention of audiences, offering them relevant video will strengthen your pitch, including to commercial radio, who can clip soundbites from the audio if the video is an interview with your spokesperson – saving them having to arrange and conduct their own interview.
Some media are keener on video than others and an experienced public relations professional can guide you on which ones it will be most helpful for.
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Who to pitch.
Beyond local media, it’s not always obvious who in your target media is the best person to pitch your story to.
Send it to the wrong person and, given how busy media are these days, they may ignore it, rather than forward it to the right person, or tell you who they are.
So your big chance with a large media organisation with millions of readers may be wasted by pitching the wrong person.
Experienced public relations professionals have large networks of media contacts, keep track of who’s doing what job and have access to databases of media contacts to research the relevant people at outlets they’ve not worked with before.
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When to pitch.
When you send your pitch Is important because most journalists have a best day and/or time window to pitch them because their working schedule means they only have certain days and times when they’re able to read and respond to pitches.
Their best days and times will vary based on factors including when their print edition is published, when they hold editorial meetings to discuss which pitches to action and their working days if they’re part-time.
Knowing the best days and times to pitch each journalist is a crucial part of a public relations professional’s tradecraft and a valuable piece of industry intelligence they bring to your story.
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How to pitch them.
Every journalist has their own preference for how you pitch them – some are happy to be contacted via phone, WhatsApp or social media DM. Many aren’t and prefer only email because of the volume of pitches they get.
Pitch them via a method they dislike and you risk getting their back up and reducing your chances of having your pitch read, never mind accepted. Some might even block you.
Also, not all journalists publish their contact details in their publications or in their social profiles.
An experienced public relations professional will know, or can find out from media databases, each journalist’s pitching preferences and ensure they use them to maximise your chances of coverage with them.
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A positive existing relationship with target journalists which will at least get your pitch read.
Journalists today literally get hundreds of pitches a day. They clearly can’t read them all, so they prioritise those from public relations professionals they know who’ve previously sent stories useful to them and their readers (why it’s important to only send relevant stories to them).
One of the things you get with an experienced public relations professional is the use of their positive relationships with journalists to maximise your chances of coverage and their ability to make mutually-beneficial relationships with ones they haven’t worked with before.
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How to prepare you for interviews in different types of media.
Being interviewed by journalists for print-based media and broadcast media are quite different things and most people are nervous beforehand.
An experienced public relations professional can give you media training to prepare you for what to expect, brief you on what aspects of your story to emphasise and how to deal with any tricky questions or problems in the interview.
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How to co-ordinate your media story with your Social and Owned channels.
Journalists have for a number of years been competing with social media to break stories and get the most readers for their version. So they’re understandably unhappy if you post your story on your social media at the same time as they’re publishing it too – you’re effectively competing with them for attention and readers while you’re asking them to help you.
Doing so is a good way to lose media coverage as many journalists won’t run a story if it’s already on Social. Terry Murden, Editor of Daily Business, is one of them, as he recently posted on Linked.
An experienced public relations professional can help you co-ordinate your Social and other communications channels so as to maximise your reach, engagement and Outcomes without risking losing coverage in media with the large audiences they bring.
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How to measure and evaluate your coverage and the resulting business and communications Outcomes to the Barcelona Principles 3.0 gold standard.
Getting your media story published is great, but you need to know how effective it’s been in driving the business and communications Outcomes you should have set for it, not just how many people it’s reached.
To do that to the Barcelona Principles 3.0 global gold standard set by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC), you need a public relations professional trained in using Barcelona 3.0 Principles to set SMART goals and identify relevant, valid metrics for measuring them.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of the many reasons to use an experienced and qualified public relations professional to handle your media story, but it’s hopefully given you an idea of the many ways hiring one will benefit your story and your business.
Thinking of using best practice communication to help reach your business goals?
Get in touch with me because I’m:
CIPR-qualified (only a third of PRs are) ✅
CIPR-Accredited ✅
Highly-experienced ✅
Highly-recommended (29 client Recommendations) ✅
An MBA since 2003 – so I bring strategic business knowledge, thinking & experience to my work ✅