Design and Deliver a PR Campaign

Why bother doing a PR Campaign

Editorial coverage is free - advertising costs thousands of pounds

The rate for a colour ad on the first full page in the news section of the Sunday Times is around £93,000. A full page ad in the Bristol Evening post will set you back about £4,000.

Editorial coverage gives you credibility and helps build your brand

Despite the bad publicity that the media has had (ironically, reported by the media itself!) surveys show that people still trust magazines, newspapers, broadcast media and increasingly the internet to help them take the right decisions about what to buy and what choices to make. Positive media coverage is far more powerful than most advertisements in getting people to pay attention to your message. How many of us open a magazine and straight away tip the advertising inserts into the recycling?

Media coverage is also really good for your wider brand. It gives employees a boost to see positive coverage of your organisation and it makes customers feel good to be associated with someone who's had a positive mention in the press. It can do wonders for your supply chain too - everyone likes basking in reflected glory

If you are in the public eye anyway, it's better to act than to react

You can't control the way you are covered in the media. Ultimately even the friendliest journalist has to hand their story over to a news editor to edit it, to a sub-editor to come up with a headline, to a picture researcher to come up with a suitable image to go with it, and ultimately to an editor who may decide to kill it or demand that it be turned on its head. But that doesn't mean you are powerless. If you are helpful and honest, journalists won't generally turn on you. If you have built a relationship with them, they will usually try to do the right thing for you. But if you refuse to comment on a story, try to stonewall them or - even worse - lie, they'll have no qualms about dragging your name through the dirt. In huge screaming capital letters.

The media is vast - don't just think about national newspapers, TV and radio

2,600 magazine are sold every minute of every day in the UK.
People in the UK spend around 2.6 billion pounds on magazines every year.
There are currently more than 3,300 consumer magazines in the UK.
It would take just 30 minutes to sell the number of magazines needed to cover a football pitch.

There are 354 radio stations currently operating

There are hundreds of local newspapers and thousands of websites.

All of them are hungry for content and many of them will be read by your customers and by potential employees

Think about the different sections of a magazine or newspaper - news, comment, letters, features, columns, competitions

The first thing most people think about when they consider coverage in the media is the news section. Be creative, people! News is great, but it's only one small part of the whole and it may not be the part that most readers go to first. My wife's an ex-journalist, but when the Saturday Guardian arrives she reads the Weekend magazine first, and only then turns to the news pages. I read Sport, then Travel, then Work before attempting the news.

You might stand a better chance of getting your name in the paper if you begin by writing a letter. If it's good, and sufficiently provocative, they might ask you to write a longer comment piece. Heck, if it's Metro you can probably call them up and offer a comment piece and they'll say yes straight off. Free papers have huge readerships but not much money to pay for quality content, so they are a great place to start.

Get to know your target media, find out what runs regularly - there may be a column that only happens once a week or once a month in your local newspaper that's right up your street.

How to start your PR campaign strategy

Think about your audience - what do you have to say that they will care about?

You've got two audiences to think about - the person who's going to write the copy, and the person who's going to read it. So you don't just want to rush in with an announcement that you've launched a new product, or opened a new store or hired a new member of staff. You might find that absolutely fascinating, but a journalist might not. Instead think about finding an angle.

Surveys can be a very good way of getting coverage in the media. As a rule of thumb, the BBC generally won't touch one with fewer than 1,000 respondents. Same goes for the quality national newspapers. More sensational surveys with smaller sample sizes can make it into the tabloids and larger circulation magazines though.

You have to convince the writer that you are giving them a story that's exclusive to them - or at least exclusive enough that they won't look like they've copied it from their rivals.

What is news?

Sex  change bishop on mercy dash to palace

New, relevant, interesting.

Don't tell fibs, you'll get caught

Journalists hate being over-sold a story. Once they work it out, you'll have a hell of a job rebuilding their trust. It might never happen. So don't claim that what you've done is the biggest, the best or the first if you aren't 100 per cent certain of your facts

Get to know the press

What does a journalist's day look like?

This is hugely important, and there isn't one simple answer to the question. Daily newspapers generally start each day with a news conference in which they discuss the emerging stories that they think will be big by the time the paper goes to press that night. They then spend their day researching and writing the copy. So there's little point in contacting them at 9pm with a fantastic story hoping you'll get it into the next day's issue.

Local newspapers generally come out in the afternoon, so they are largely done and dusted the previous day and printed late morning.

Features sections on newspapers are often planned weeks in advance.

Monthly magazines very often work four to six months ahead of time - so they'll be starting to shoot their spring editions right now and will be photographing models in bikinis for next summer before Christmas is over

All of which is to say you will make friends and influence people if you plan ahead and know when's a good time to call and when's a really bad time.

How can you become their friend, rather than an irritant?

As a journalist the people I liked best always asked me if it was a good time to talk before launching into their sales spiel; contacted me about twice a year with a couple of really good ideas, rather than daily with dross; knew what my magazine would print and what it wouldn't; gave me exclusives rather than stuff they were peddling all over the place; and behaved like they enjoyed my company rather than seeing journalists as a necessary evil.

The ones I hated most sent round-robin press releases to everyone and then rang up to ask if we'd received it. In the middle of press days.

Invest time in building relationships

As a journalist, it can be nice to be taken out to lunch or invited to the theatre one in a while - although it can be embarrassing if your host whips out a list of article ideas over pudding or during the interval drinks. There's rarely any harm in taking a journalist out for a coffee or a social event just to explain who you are, what you do and to offer to help them if they are ever working on a story or feature that ties in with the work you do. You'll get a reputation for being helpful and undemanding and eventually that'll pay off.

Press release do's and don'ts

They can be useful - many go straight on the page. Many more end up in the bin

A recent book called Flat Earth News showed how under pressure most local and regional journalists are these days to produce copy with limited budgets. As a result a lot of press releases go straight into newspapers with little or no editing. That's not very good for the health of our democracy because it means too few journalists are chasing the stories that people would rather they didn't print. But it does give you an opportunity to get coverage.

On the other hand in my years in journalism I've lost count of the crappy press releases I've been sent that weren't relevant to me, didn't make sense and just annoyed me. They were worse than useless, they actually turned me off the brands in question.

Don't depend on them as your main point of contact

I'd always soften a journalist up with an email or a call to introduce myself before sending out press releases - otherwise you have no context to work from. Press releases serve a purpose, particularly if you are addressing multiple audiences, but they are a pretty blunt tool. And since 99 per cent of them arrive by email these days, you can steal a march on your competitors and stand out from the crowd by sending a copy in the post.

Who, what, when, why, how. And contacts.

There's loads of information on how to write a good press release on the Business Link website. For now I'll just say that you have to summarise your story and grab the reader's attention in the first paragraph or you won't do it at all - most journalists will give up after the first sentence. And you have to tell them who, what, why, when and how really fast. Other than that the main thing to remember is to provide all the contact details you possibly can so it's easy for them to get hold of you, and lots of notes for editors at the end .In fact the more you can do their job for them, the better. Don't sweat over the headline at the top, though - it'll probably never be seen by the person who actually writes the headline on the story if it gets used.

Be Creative

Events can be fun for journalists - or not

One of my favourite events is a summer garden party run by Henley Management College. It coincides with the Regatta, they pick you up from Reading Station, there's Pimms and strawberries on the lawn, lunch in a marquee, then a couple of hours on a riverboat watching the races, while the faculty gently tell you what they are up to - no hard sell at all. It's a great day out with great networking.

Don't ask too much of their time

A day can be an impossible amount of time for a reporter on a local paper to take out of the office, while being perfectly manageable for a features writer on a magazine. It's all relative - and depends on what they think they'll get out of time. But generally speaking time is tighter than it used to be in the days when journalists would routinely take a few hours for a liquid lunch

Remember a good pic can be worth a thousand words

Picture caption stories can be a brilliant way of getting into the media, online and off, and you don't need a terribly strong story to go with a fantastic image. Remember though that you need to make sure you have people's permission to use their image, even if only as a courtesy.