By Linda Forrest
Media relations is a collaborative process. The client and the PR agency should clearly define objectives for the program at the outset and a plan should be formulated to reach those goals.
It’s important to consider that one of the predominant reasons for outsourcing the PR function is to gain efficiency. We can ease your workload so that you can better spend your time attending to your other business requirements. We are here to take the content development, pitching, media monitoring and other PR activities off of your plate. We work hard to learn our clients’ full story and best pursue the media coverage that your story deserves.
If this is your first time using an agency instead of doing PR in-house, a transition is to be expected. But soon enough, as our clients can attest, the process has been streamlined and results are achieved. Hopefully, the following few words on content development will help ease the transition.
Every writer has a unique voice. This is as true for PR practitioners as it is for novelists, poets or any other wordsmith. This is also true of marketing managers, CEOs, and other decision makers in the marketing department. As such, the revision process for materials can become a cumbersome task if not approached using best practices.
Although it’s just an urban legend, the parable about the many words the Inuit have for snow is not an inappropriate metaphor in this instance (nor for today’s weather in Ottawa, but I digress.) There are multiple ways to say the same thing. When you are reviewing your materials, true, it may not be written how you would have written it, but the questions you really need to answer are a) is it technically accurate? And b) does it best represent your company in order to achieve established goals and outcomes, in this case, media coverage? The former, we trust in our clients to correct any technical errors, but with the latter, we humbly ask our clients to put faith in our expertise and experience.
As I stated in my last post, we feel strongly that it is important to develop materials that convey key messages without hyperbole. Because we are constantly preparing materials for the media and some of our team has experience working in newsrooms, we know what the media are looking for. And what they’re not looking for. The old adage about news being about the “five w’s” is very true and over time we have crafted an effective template for media materials.
Each client’s technology, story, positioning and key messages are different, to be sure, but in my experience with the focused business-to-business technologies that we exclusively represent, the presentation of these materials only slightly deviates from a template that we know gets these points across in a way that the audience can easily understand, absorb and utilize when crafting their own editorial coverage.
