Archive for 'What to Expect from PR'
What To Expect: Community Newspapers
Posted on 31. Mar, 2010 by Creatwood.
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
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What To Expect: Bylined Articles
Posted on 17. Mar, 2010 by Creatwood.
Every Wednesday, I’d like to write about what clients can expect from different services a PR firm can offer. Hopefully, this insight will give you a better understanding of the different components of PR, and also to help you realize just how valuable some of them can really be for your company.
For the first installation of this running theme, I’d like to talk about what you can expect from a byline article. First, let me explain what a byline article is. Obviously, it’s an article with your byline on it that the PR firm has created on your behalf. These articles can be submitted to many different online and print publications, especially trade pubs and magazines.
It might seem like a dishonest thing to do, but that’s only if you do it dishonestly and don’t contribute much to the article and instead let the PR consultant do research and write an article on your behalf. That’s irresponsible of the client, and dangerous if the consultant isn’t familiar with the topic.
The whole point of the article is to get your name out there as an expert on a particular topic to a targeted audience. Obviously you’re going to be providing a vast majority of the information, but it’s likely that the PR consultant will be handling a great deal, if not all, of the writing. This process will take a good bit of brainstorming and collaboration, but the more preparation the client and consultant are able to do, the better the article.
Once the article is created and you have the good fortune of getting it published, there obviously needs to be a bit more promotion of the article. Of course you’ll reach that targeted readership of the publication the article appears in, but it wouldn’t hurt to promote the article as well. This is when you can toot your own horn and show people you are the expert they want to have speaking at their next engagement, or providing them consultation on their next business venture. It will also aid your reputation among media as a reliable source on a subject.
Byline articles really are one of the best ways to posture yourself as an expert. But, in saying that, it does help to be fairly knowledgeable on the subject. You’ll be hard pressed to find much good fortune coming from an article that you and a PR consultant have scrapped together and punted to an array of different publications. That is not the kind of byline article that does any one much good.
So, plan it out, collaborate with the PR consultant and be certain you know exactly who you’re hoping to reach. From their, your PR consultant will be able to create an article that will do you proud.
–DS