What have been your PR efforts up to this point?
If you haven’t been giving time to PR you are likely leaving revenue on the table.
In a new study, 43% of business executives said they plan to increase investment in PR in 2015. Of those executives saying they will increase PR budgets, 94% said the reason for the increase is because they are seeing value in PR.
What Is Public Relations?
PR is public relations and it’s taken on a broad definition lately.
Basically, it’s getting coverage in some kind of media in a way that influences your brand’s reputation with the public.
If you watch the national news you probably see industry “experts” being interviewed about certain trending topics. Sometimes these people are from brands or maybe they’re building their own brand for a website or blog.
It happens all the time on a local level too. Just the other day I was watching the local morning news and they had a local accountant discussing tax season. The same TV station also has a segment every morning where someone from the local Humane Society brings in a pet to the station to show off and provide exposure for the organization.
And it’s not just TV. It’s radio or even online publications. All that coverage (that is not paid) is part of PR. If it’s paid, it’s a form of advertising. The public has a trust with publications that ads are paid and other content is not. Sometimes the lines are blurred but those in the gray area are almost always found out.
That would be bad PR.
Step 1. Set Aside Time for PR Each Week
When you’re running your own business you have a hundred things on your wish list. But the things that seem to rise to the top each day are more likely the short-term, day-to-day tasks and they’re usually directly dealing with customers.
There’s nothing wrong with making your customers happy, but if you want your business to grow you have to set aside time for bigger picture and long-term efforts. That includes PR, which can fall into your marketing strategy.
Realize the importance of these efforts and set aside regular time on your weekly schedule for it. At a minimum set aside 2-4 hours. That’s really not that many in a week.
Step 2. Identify Your Chain Of PR Relationships
PR is all about establishing relationships. Some will form faster than others, but they’ll just about all be important and most will take time to form.
That’s where the concept of a chain of PR relationships comes in.
Start doing some research to list the publications where you would love coverage: TV shows, radio segments, magazines, blogs, etc.
Create a list of your dream 50 publications.
Now, you might be able to go directly to these dream 50 right away. They might turn you down 49 times, but maybe they’ll say yes on the 50th try. That would be a win!
A quick story, I read the autobiography of Jerry Weintraub. He’s a film and music producer and more. Back in the ‘70s he wanted manage an Elvis tour. Elvis hadn’t been on tour for a while. Jerry called Elvis’s manager and was turned down.
Jerry called every day for 365 days!
Most days he would just say hi. Others he would mention the tour. Finally, after a year of calls Elvis’s manager told Jerry that if he had $1 million in cash in a few days they would do it.
Jerry scrambled to get all the rich people he knew to invest in the tour and he made it happen.
The lesson? Don’t give up. This tour was hugely profitable for all parties. Jerry didn’t care that he got turned down for a year. He only needed one yes to become a success.
But you don’t even have to struggle that much. You can work your way up the chain.
This strategy comes from Ryan Holiday. You start by identifying the big publications. Then you build a chain of how you can get coverage until the big publication has proof that they should feature you and your story.
Let’s say you want to be on the Today Show. Why not? A simple chain could be getting coverage on a local blog, then a regional blog, then a national blog, then your local NBC station and from there maybe a feature on national NBC news and then on the big show.
Obviously you might not do that in a month or even a year. But don’t underestimate what you can accomplish in a couple years.
Build your dream list. Then build the chains to get there.
Step 3. Work On Your Story
None of this will work unless you work on your story. I’m not talking about what you offer as far as products and services. That’s selling and that’s not what PR is about on the surface.
If you want exposure and coverage you have to buy into the You Get What You Give or the Pay It Forward concept.
You have to offer valuable tips, insight and step-by-step, how-to information that your target audience can use and that they want. And you have to do it for free.
Think about all the interesting blogs posts you read, TV segments you see and all the other features on the media. They’re all people giving away information that people want. The publications all provide this information and they’ll look just about anywhere for really good information.
To get publications interested you have to work on the story you can tell and the information you can offer their audience.
To do that, look at all the past stories and segments publications have done. Look for the most popular features. Look at the topics those features covered. You’ll start to see trends.
Then think about what you could do in the same topic, but way better than anything that’s been done.
The people at publications know the content that has performed the best. If you come up with something that has worked before but with even better information the publication won’t be able to turn you down.
Step 4. Create Habits Based On Tasks You Can Perform
Earlier I talked about setting aside time on your schedule. That’s really just the first step in creasing your schedule for PR.
Now you have to add in the tasks, but the trick here is to focus on what you can control.
For example, part of my goal this year was to become a guest on podcasts in my industry. This has provided good exposure in the past. It was a good PR effort.
But I didn’t label the task, “Get On A Business Podcast”. I don’t have entire control over that task. The podcast owners have to accept me. That’s kind of, but not really in my control.
Instead, I came up with two tasks, “Identify New Podcasts” and “Reach Out To Podcasts”. So every month for 2 hours I would identify new podcasts. And a week later I would reach out to a handful of new podcasts with my pitch for a couple hours.
I didn’t get on all of them, but I got on a few and the return has been well worth it.
Step 5. Track Bumps In Business And Learn
That leads us perfectly into the last step: tracking.
I’ve tried a few different efforts in the past like guest posting and podcasts among a few others. Podcasting seemed to offer the most return so I’ve been putting more effort there than into others. I still experiment with new ideas, but podcasting is the main one.
As you see what works you can tweak what you spend time on. But always leave room for experimenting with new things. You never know what could become the winner in the future.
Sometimes the tracking is easy. I had new inquiries that would tell me they heard me on a podcast episode. That’s pretty obvious that those efforts were working.
You can usually track your PR efforts pretty easy because they’ll result in bumps in traffic, leads and other business metrics. Track these over time. Pay attention the type and quality of customer the efforts bring. You want to focus on the most leads and the best customers.
Conclusion
Big brands invest in PR all the time. But so do smart small businesses. Even single-person businesses can succeed with PR. And PR is great because it only takes effort and not money, which is unlike advertising.
If you don’t have a big advertising budget, but can make time for a few hours each month you can start working on building a great PR strategy that will get you loads of new business. It usually wont’ happen overnight, but give it a year or more and you’ll be rolling.
Travel business can do it. Boutiques can do it. Just about any business can do it.
You just have to start.
