Optimizing your PR-effort is about choosing the right media, and choosing the right media is about deciding:
- Who should read your story?
- Who will print your story?
Choosing readers
If you want your potential customers to read your story, you should obviously find the media, that your audience read or watch. They will read probably read national as well as local media, and they will probably read general as well as more specialized media. Once you have a list of relevant media, you should look at the stories you can tell and consider, which media will be suited for which stories. I will come back to that in a minute…
However you also might want other people to read your story. Entrepreneurs I know have told me, how articles in the danish business newspaper Børsen have attracted investors or potential mentors or board members. Other entrepreneurs have had more applications for vacant jobs after local press coverage.
And I even know an team of entrepreneur, who broke the news about their invention in an early stage to tell potential competitors, that they were in the lead.
So you shouldn’t just se PR as a way of speaking to customers, but also as a way of speaking to potential partners or employees etc.
Choosing media
Choosing media is about looking at the story as well as the target group. In the printed media you can basically get PR in four different types of media:
Local media – the local or regional newspaper.
Industry media (or specialized magazines) – newspapers or magazines focusing on a specific industry or a very specific topic. There has been an explosion in magazines in recent years.
Business media – more general media focusing on business in general.
National media - nationwide media with a more general audience and with many different topics.
The media in general are in constant need of new stories, so if your story is relevant to the readers, you have a good chance of getting publicity. But remember, that the news in the national media will have to be relevant to a lot of people all over the country, whereas the local media can choose anything, that has just local interest. Again general business media will have to pick stories of very general interest to business people, where the more specialized industry media can pick stories, that are mainly relevant for their industry.
It is the most difficult to get access to national media, but don’t give up. Sometimes a way to get access to national media is via local media og industry media. Media read media. Journalists are just as lazy as the rest of us, so if they can spot a story by reading fx a local paper or an industry magazine in stead of finding it the hard way, they will do it.
