PR is a fast-paced, dynamic industry and, as such, can be tricky to master if you don’t take the right approach to it. For businesses new to the industry, there are plenty of pitfalls that can trip you up as you try and spread your brand message. Of course, the best way to ensure you don’t make any of these mistakes is to use a professional PR agency. However, for those who want to go it alone, there are a few tips we can offer to make sure your PR campaign doesn’t go off course.
So, what do you need to avoid to be successful in PR? Here are our top 5 tips on what not to do:
1. Failing to plan
The key to any successful PR campaign is meticulous planning, detailed schedules and excellent organisation. This should be familiar to anyone who’s worked in almost any industry. These themes are universal for business success everywhere and PR is no exception.
You should plan out how your PR campaign will unfold over the coming weeks and months, deciding on what angles to pitch when, what media to target and, importantly, backup plans in case any of this goes wrong. If you properly plan and study the upcoming media horizon, you should be able to get a steady flow of coverage and not be left waiting for a chance to be featured.
2. Uncoordinated approaches
Remember, PR is just one aspect of your communication as a whole. Other activities, such as marketing, also have their part to play in establishing and spreading your brand messaging. It’s entirely possible to run a PR or marketing campaign without considering the other, but it’ll fail to gain the maximum amount of reach possible.
You should also make sure that your PR and marketing teams are always aware of what the other is doing and ensure that they work in tandem, so that both PR and marketing activities can play off each other, getting that crucial extra reach. If you don’t do this, you’re going to end up doing just as much work for much less impressive results. It’s always important to work smarter!
3. Giving up too easily
PR is a results-focused industry. As PR professionals, we measure our campaigns based on metrics such as reach, social shares, number of articles. For many new to PR, it can be easy to panic and lose faith when you’ve been pitching all day without getting any concrete leads. However, it’s important to remember just how crowded the media field is.
Journalists are likely receiving dozens, maybe even hundreds, of pitches every day. With such a huge volume, it can be easy for your pitch to be lost. However, rather than give up there are plenty of things you could do. You could switch up your email’s subject line to make it more eye-catching. Maybe you could rework the pitch to make it of more interest to a particular journalist, or even double-check if they’re definitely the right person to pitch to at that publication. It’s always a great idea to check the news and see if there are any relevant topical hooks you can use to grab their attention.
There is also another option that often has a great success rate. Try again and be tenacious. There’s always a chance that a journalist simply missed it or you sent it at a bad time of day and they were too busy. So, it always helps to just keep pushing on to get a response. Remember, there is no giving up in PR, only taking a breath, tweaking your pitch and going straight back in.
4. Pitching unnewsworthy material
One common mistake that we often see with people inexperienced in PR is that they get mixed up between PR and marketing. Marketing is purely about driving sales, so involves a lot of product-focused material. PR however, is all about telling the story of your company and cultivating its image.
You have to give journalists a reason why they should write about your business. If you just tell them about all of your products and services and how great they are, no journalist will be interested, as they want to write news, not advertising. Instead, you need to offer them something.
Perhaps there’s a burning issue within your industry right now that your spokespeople are well-informed experts to comment on. Maybe your company has actual interesting news on which journalists will want more information. You can also write opinion articles on certain topics that an editor will want for their op-ed pages. If you do this, then it’s also important to make sure that you actually have an interesting and strong opinion that people will want to read and isn’t just vague corporate-speak.
5. Not wanting to get involved
This last tip applies to companies who have chosen to hire a professional PR agency for their campaign. Even when you seek expert help, it doesn’t mean you can’t make any PR mistakes. Some businesses out there will pass off their PR strategy to their PR agency and then wash their hands of it, hoping they will run it all by themselves. This is a great way to sell yourself short.
The more involved you are with your PR agency and the better your working partnership is, the more successful your campaign will be. If your PR experts get to know you well, they’ll be better able to capture your brand identity and instil it in all communications going forward. If you have constant communication with your PR agency and talk through what you want to achieve and your industry, you’ll come up with more and stronger pitching angles together to help maximise your coverage.
Hopefully, this blog post should help you avoid any potential PR pitfalls in your upcoming campaigns. If you still have concerns and want to talk to an expert, then why not get in touch with us today and see how we can help?
Image by Scott Graham at Unsplash.