Lolo Siderman, Founder and CEO of Gypsywing Media (http://www.gypsywing.com/) gets serious about PR. These insider tips will help you grow your public exposure and attract customer attention.
- Institute a detailed plan of attack
- Compelling hooks are essential to successful PR
- Reach out to appropriate reporters
- Respond quickly & professionally
PR can be a very powerful tool for a business. So here are four secrets to getting PR for your business. One is to create a plan. You could spend 8 hours a day, 10 hours a day all week long working on getting PR. So creating that plan of exactly how you’re going to go about it. Are you going to try to get into typical newspapers? Are you going to try to establish relationships with journalists? Are you going to reach out to blogs? Whatever it may be, setting up your plan, setting a time limit on how much time you’re going to put into it is really important in just creating the framework for how you’re going to go about getting PR.
The next thing is practice creating hooks. You know, read the news. It’s not—the articles aren’t, “There is a business that sells bricks.”
The article would be, “Brick business in Santa Monica is helping local schools create new buildings and opportunities for children.”
So whatever it may be, taking -- whatever your business is and making it applicable and newsworthy and interesting for a journalists’ readers because when it comes down to us they could care less about whether you’re in the news. What they care about is creating something that their readers are interested in -- valuable content.
Third is just go ahead and reach out to reporters. The information of how to get a hold of people, it’s available online. So if you think about who would be relevant to whatever your industry is, and then send an e-mail, make a phone call, go ahead and start reaching out. They are not going to contact you. They are not going to come knocking on your door inviting you to be in their article. So you need to be the one making that contact. And don’t assume that just because they didn’t respond on the first one that they didn’t read it, didn’t think about it, or you might not have been interesting to them. It could be that they read it and it wasn’t the right time. So reaching out again and again while not being annoying maybe you know, once a month or whatever it may be. Whenever you have something to say, go ahead and reach out.
And finally if you do reach out and someone actually answers you, be prompt with your response. Because sometimes, they are working on a piece and they have a deadline it might be this afternoon. And when they reach out to you it’s the morning they need to hear from immediately basically to get this piece done and get it in to the news. So after doing all these work, there is nothing worse than actually making that contact. Having them, you know, want to have you in their article, and then having it not come through because you didn’t answer quickly. So remember that journalists are working on a different time frame than most other businesses, and you really need to be prompt with responding to them.
So those are four ways or four secrets that you can use when you are trying to get some PR for your business.