What To Expect: Community Newspapers
Posted on 31. Mar, 2010 by Creatwood in Communication Tips & Trends, Industry, Media, What to Expect from PR
We’ve all seen them. Sometimes they’re laid out nicely in a doctors office, stuffed in the book bags of your child, sitting in racks at your local diner, or crumpled up on the driveway having sat there for weeks.
But no matter what you think about Community Newspapers, they are a useful way to get your message and story out to a hyper-local audience. Don’t scoff at me. I know some of you are. But believe me when I say there is a good audience reading these publications, and that’s apparent because there are so many of them around. People read these publications because it’s full of relatable content. They want to know what’s going on in their neighborhood and they want to see their peers, friends and neighbors in the pages.
I’ve actually seen clients put the kibosh on the mention of sending press releases to community papers, or local trade pubs. I can understand why they would say this, because they consider these pubs to be bathroom readers, or casualties of the driveway after no one picks it up for a week. But what they fail to realize is even though they might not read these pubs themselves, there are plenty of others that do.
Not everyone leaves them out to dry...
So instead of considering an advertisement in these pages, send them press releases and bylined articles. These are the places where you are more likely to get a story printed, and the people reading them are usually your neighbors in the area. It’s an easy way to drive more traffic to your business. And that’s the whole reason we do public relations. Start thinking about what community pubs you want to appear in, and talk to your PR consultant about it.
And if your PR consultant scoffs at it, you know they are the ones who leave those things sitting in the driveway for weeks.
Dave Strupp
Creatwood Communications
