OK—you’ve built your business or organization to a point where it’s running on a day-to-day basis, you’ve got your web site up, and you’re about to launch yourself out into the world and get some clients. Maybe you’ve written a book or organized a newsworthy event. The next step is to get some attention for it—what do you do next?
The first step is to plan a media campaign that will bring you both offline and online publicity—newspapers, trade periodicals, magazines, radio, television, e-letters, blogs, online e-zines, podcasts, v-blogs and more. You may think you only need to create an online marketing buzz, and that will be good enough, but you can maximize your impact and visibility over time if you strategically coordinate your online and offline efforts.
It’s crucial that you understand why you’re doing a PR campaign, and how it fits in with your overall marketing plan. To get the most “bang for your buck,” you’ll need to map out your entire marketing, PR and ad campaigns over a timeline. You can plan three months, six months, and a year, to begin with—or go by fiscal quarters—and roll out the various elements of your marketing campaign so they will work together to keep you, your business or other projects in the news as long as possible. If you do it right, the media attention will come in “waves,” so you can capitalize on the prolonged affect, rather than getting a sudden spurt of attention, followed by a major drop-off. Unless you’re publicizing a one-time event, you want to keep your brand name and achievements in the sights of your clients or audience at regular intervals, over time.
In our digital age, people often think about online marketing and PR, but they neglect to see the whole picture. Don’t forget about print and broadcast, even though you’ve got a popular blog and a regular e-letter—to make noise, you’ve got to be heard. It’s analogous to a loudspeaker array that’s in stereo or 5.1 Surround. If your prospective client or customer is in the middle of a room, you want him or her to hear your story from all vantage points.
You need to know where and when your prospective clients or customers will be looking or listening. You need to know where they hang out, where and how they live or work, what they do for fun, what they do to learn and advance in their own businesses or careers. Then, it’s imperative to match that knowledge—based on careful research and talking to your clients or customers—with knowing what they read, what radio and TV stations they listen to, what movies they see, and where they go on the internet; in other words, what media will reach them regularly. You may have more than one “audience” or market niche, in which case, you’ll need to do the same process for each niche. In the next PR Mentor post, we’ll look at timelining your PR Campaign.
***
A condensed version of this article, parts 1 and 2, is now also available at: http://webcontentawarenessday.com/articlepr2.htm
Return to the Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates Home Page
***
The Fine Print:
Copyright 2006-2011 Cathryn Hrudicka. All rights reserved worldwide. No content on this site may be copied or excerpted on another web site or in print without prior permission of the author. If a quote, blog post, article or other content is placed on another site, blog, printed periodical or other format, a credit must be given to Cathryn Hrudicka/Creative Sage™/Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates, with a link back to this blog.
Cathryn Hrudicka & Associates Logo designed by Julia Stege.
