PR Outreach – How to Do It Right

You might find your PR strategies effective to create healthy relationships with your existing customers. But, that isn’t enough if you are expecting dramatic business growth. You need to reach out to new customers to grow your network and the best way to do that is through PR outreach.

What is PR Outreach?

PR outreach is a strategy to increase your brand’s reach by engaging relevant influencers, journalists, and media outlets. With this marketing campaign, you can increase brand exposure, increase awareness about products, and build relationships.

Although PR outreach is not a new technique to attract potential customers, it has changed a lot in the past especially because of technological advancement. Today, we have advanced tools and channels to reach desired outcomes. Some essential techniques to reach new customers through media outreach are online magazines, back links, and social media platforms.

PR outreaching process isn’t simple despite the availability of automation tools to engage new prospects. Therefore, many businesses conduct market research, create PR outreach plans, and utilize online press release. You can also hire a professional marketing agency and streamline the process.

Steps to Conduct PR Outreach

Want to collaborate with journalists and influencers to promote your brand? Well, here is what you need to do:

1.      Create a PR Outreach Plan

Sharing your brand stories with the audience isn’t enough. A plethora of businesses create PR pitches to engage a targeted audience. Design your pitches creatively and include unique elements to stand out from competitors. But first, you must build a relationship with your current audience. If your current audience feels satisfied with the brand, they could become your brand’s ambassadors. Therefore, PR outreach is a long-term process to boost brand awareness and visibility.

Choose a theme or story that you want to share with your target audience. Share the story with influencers and journalists so they can promote your news. Divide journalists and influencers into different categories based on audience. A proper plan will help you with accountability and keep you on the right track.

2.      Test Different Content and Channels

Businesses use different channels to interact with influencers and journalists with email being the common channel. However, some reports suggest that email pitches are not valuable. For instance, Fractl conducted a survey that stated that just 20% of writers consider email as an important business element. Therefore, you should not limit your PR outreach with emails. Although it is a primary channel, there are other platforms as well, which include networking events, phone calls, and social networks. Experiment with different channels and find the finest options. You should provide content that offers benefits like:

• A compelling story
• Press release
• Visuals
• Report or research
• Reference work

Tool selection won’t be a problem if you have clear PR outreach goals. Some of these goals are new product announcements, research promotion, or the launch of a new outlet. Therefore, the first step to creating compelling stories is setting up the goals you want to accomplish.

Keep in mind influencers and journalists often take time to respond. Therefore, you need to share engaging content that stands out in their inbox. But never reveal all the answers in your first interaction. Instead, give them a reason to call you for more information.

3.      Choose a Personalized Approach

Many businesses ready-made templates from the internet and send them to media outreach. This strategy saves plenty of time, but it doesn’t help your business stand out. Since your goal is to build relationships with the influencers, it would be best to maintain a personal approach. Do not use the same template repeatedly as it can get boring. Even if the journalist or influencer finds the content interesting at first, they will easily get bored. Create an emotional touch with the content or start with something interesting that the influencer or journalist won’t know.

4.      Conduct Research

Market research keeps you on the right track. When you understand targeted PR outreach, you can offer audiences what they want. A survey suggests that 80% of publishers decline irrelevant pitches. That’s why your pitch should be specific and informative. The best way to understand targeted journalists is through evaluation of previous work.  Go through their social media account and find what they have been posting lately. This technique will help you create a strong bond with the media PR.

5.      Follow Trends

Keep your media pitch updated. This is an important element to interact with PR media. When you send outdated information to media personalities, they will think you are not serious about your campaign. When you focus on the latest trends, journalists and influencers will appreciate your professionalism.

6.      Plan a Pitch Strategically

Professional journalists evaluate pitches very closely. They can easily pinpoint unprofessional structures and outdated trends from your pitch. So, you must strategically plan the structure of the pitch. When a PR media representative won’t find relevance in your content after reading the pitch from their busy schedule, they might not respond. Some journalists skim through the important part of the pitch. You can steer clear from this issue by creating headlines and highlight important elements to add relevance and context.

7.      Be Patient

It takes time to build relationships with journalists as most of them do not respond right away. If a publisher does not respond for a long period, move on to another one. Always make sure that you share a complete overview of the story.

Conclusion

Creating a perfect PR outreach strategy requires practice and time. Initially, you may not find perfect content or catchy titles to engage journalists. However, once you focus on consistency and keep on sending pitches to different influencers and journalists, you will eventually learn how to get the right response.