Foreword
Some of the best businesses I know are businesses that excel at PR. They are in the news, across the web, and on your mind when making buying decisions. You open a magazine and see their products, you hear them on the radio, read about them on blogs and talk about them amongst friends. Building a great business is absolutely tied with having a good idea that’s well executed and sold but it’s also about being well known.
In this tip-filled and helpful guide, PR Pro Greg Simpson shows how it’s done. He’s well qualified to help, having advised clients for years on how they raise profile – and having done a fine job of it for himself!
You don’t need big budgets to be a success at PR and Greg is conscious of this, offering advice that can be carried out at sensible cost.
What you will find is that success in PR brings profile, new opportunities and more sales, whilst keeping existing customers happy. It’s one of the most powerful tools in business and in reading this guide you’re a big step closer to making it work for you.
Congratulations to Greg on publication of his book and best wishes to you, the reader, in developing your venture.
Emma Jones
Founder of Enterprise Nation www.enterprisenation.com and a co-founder of StartUp Britain www.startupbritain.org.
September 2012
Introduction
This book is your opportunity to put an hour of your day to good use.
There are plenty of great books out there which introduce PR as a concept and discipline in marketing but not many that help you to actually have a tangible return on your investment – both in terms of the initial purchase and the reading time.
My goal is to show you, in plain English, how to create, manage and execute your own bespoke PR campaign in just ten hours. I will guide you through the same process that I use to create professional and hugely effective PR campaigns.
Think about that for a moment.
If today is Monday, by a week on Friday you will be looking back and reviewing what happened in the last fortnight and looking forward to seeing your company’s cause in lights.
Over the next ten chapters, or days, you will get to grips with what makes a good story, learn how to contact journalists and build working relationships that get stronger with each new story.
You will discover, step-by-step, how to craft a press release, how to devise and then weave your key messages into your campaign and ultimately how to ensure that what you are doing with your PR is contributing to your overall marketing strategy.
By Day 7, you will be unlocking the secrets of the professionals by spending a day in both camps – the journalist and the PR consultant. Find out what it takes to give your story the edge over the hundreds of others competing for attention.
Discover how to get your story to stand out from the crowd through the use of clever photography – begin to think in pictures as you learn how to become an asset to your target media, working more as a content partner than as a desperate purveyor of press releases.
This book will show you how to create a PR campaign that delivers measurable, strategic results for your business and can also be refined and improved every time you return to it. It will show you how to set measurable goals and evaluate the success of your campaign right from the start.
By the end of this ten-hour plan you will understand how to create a simple PR strategy that evolves with your business and fits in with the way you work.
Finally, remember to have fun! PR offers a huge variety of ways for you to communicate with your target audience. This book will help you to discover inspirational ideas that will have you raring to go with your own PR campaign and all in the space of ten hours.
Day 1. Congratulations
Congratulations my friend! Well done on your new promotion to PR Director.
From now on, whenever you read this book, I want you to imagine yourself in this role. I’m serious. It is time for you to put on another hat and start thinking just a little differently. If it helps, why not give yourself a new email address and job title to go with it: Head of PR, PR Director, Publicity Officer, Marketing and PR Manager – whichever feels natural to you.
If you put yourself in the right mindset then you will begin to notice opportunities all around you. You know what happens when you want a new car, don’t you? Come on, you see that model everywhere. Suddenly the world is full of Mini Coopers, Jaguars, Audis or if you are really into PR, probably Toyota Prius’s!
I want you to start thinking about PR in the same way.
Start to notice the news.
I mean really start to pay attention.
See how businesses and organisations have been getting their messages out and covered for free by the press. What have they done to secure that coverage?
What is PR?
I suppose we should start by quickly defining what it is we are up to here. So, what actually is public relations?
Let’s go straight to the top on this one and ask the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR):
“Public relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. It is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.”
Somewhat predictably for an industry body the definition is rather long-winded but it serves its purpose.
Note my highlights in bold. PR is about influencing opinion and action. It cannot on its own change behaviours. My quick definition for the purpose of this book simply boils down to this:
PR is about raising awareness.
That might be awareness of a cause, a new product, a new appointment, or an event. The list is endless but I do give an overview of what is potentially newsworthy and worth raising awareness about below.
I have also highlighted ‘planned’ and ‘sustained’. You can issue a press release with no real thought behind it but it probably won’t achieve much, especially with regards to any real marketing goals, if you haven’t taken the time to plan the overall campaign. You need to have a strategy in place first – and sustain it You cannot simply turn the PR tap on and off when it suits your needs. Sure, you can try, but you will find that PR works best when it has momentum behind it and your target media and the ‘publics’ that they disseminate information to have you on their radar more often.
How does it work?
As mentioned earlier, PR is about influence. In order to influence your target market we need to get to the people who influence them: the press. Suffice to say ‘the press’ in this book means the people that publish. (I’m not going to distinguish between online and offline as most things apply to both formats).
In essence, the press needs content. Their audience demand it. That’s why they buy the paper, read the websites or tune in to the programme. Every day, every hour, every minute, journalists are rushing around trying to find stories that their audience is interested in. They crave news as providers, just as much as we crave it as consumers.
So where does PR fit into this? Well, PR teams and consultants up and