Maximizing Your PR Efforts – What Are You Leaving on the Table?
To start things with an understatement, 2020 has been unprecedented. However, it’s December, or as some of my favorite memes about this year have stated, we’ve started the “12th level of Jumanji”. Putting the pandemic aside, across all businesses, December means end-of-year (EOY), contract renewals, and time set aside to review the efforts of the past year to determine if objectives were met, exceeded, or if you fell short as plans for the next year begin to solidify.
In the world of PR, this time of year consists of reviewing the previous SOW to make assessments and pulling together documentation and reports that do their best to capture all the work that went into the previous contract period. One of the most common, and perhaps most powerful, of these reports is the EOY Clip Report. While the format from agency to agency may vary, the objective remains the same, report on either the total number or the top generated stories from the previous year.
As the Caster team begins to set aside time towards the month of December to run these for clients, it is the individual pieces of these types of reports – the clip, the generated stories – that prompted today’s blog post. While it’s wonderful to have a report showcasing all the top-level press wins, one of the secrets of effective PR lies within what your team does with each and every single one of those press wins.
If you don’t have a PR team helping you with this, the assessment you need to make as a business is whether or not you’re maximizing these press wins to their full potential or, are you leaving opportunities on the table. Here are some of the ways to maximize your coverage:
- Leverage it on social media – If you’re relying strictly on organic search in the hopes that your customer or targets will find and read that stellar feature or story on your business, you’re missing out. Not only should you share these press wins on social media, but you should also be sharing them uniquely on all of the channels at your disposal that make sense. Two pit falls we often see from businesses even when they do share their major PR on social media are that they either 1) do it just once, or 2) they share the same post on every single channel they have access to. A single piece of news coverage can be leveraged in a multitude of ways across various channels multiple times. Don’t just “one and done” it.
- Leverage it in your newsletter – If you publish an external (or internal) newsletter, that is a golden location to highlight a press story. If you manage a list serv of customers or potential customers who have expressed interest in you and what you do, draw their attention to external validation of why you’re in business. If you manage a newsletter distributed to employees only, that can be just as powerful because of our next point…
- Leverage your employees/existing network – By and large, folks like taking pride in their work and given the opportunity, take to sharing on their own personal networks when they can. By ensuring the broader spectrum of employees see and read press wins, and encouraging they share that news on their own network, which can be accomplished by providing a sample post they can just copy and paste, businesses can turn their own internal workforce into one of their largest avenues of advocacy.
If 2021 has you looking for help from the professionals on how to not only increase the cadence in which you’re mentioned in the news and ensure you’re leveraging those efforts to the fullest, give Caster Communications a shout. We’d be happy to connect with you on your needs and discuss where we might be able to help.
You can find us on Twitter @CasterComm or me personally @CasterPete.
