Why You Feel You Got Burned By PR

Every company needs and deserves great PR. And when great PR happens, your brand has the opportunity to take steps forward.

What you should expect: For the moment, PR is what you pray for, advertising is what you pay for. I say for the moment, because we have all seen the clear shift from Social content to paid media within the Social Media world. With a lot of praying comes the opportunity to have your brand featured in the media.

Much like traditional sales, the relationship is a vital part of completing and securing a PR opportunity. It is the job of your agency to cultivate relationships with the media and wait for the moment to deliver your story. Great storytellers, though, need great stories.

They need you to dig deep and give them the bait to snag the media’s attention. You must be willing to be vulnerable—not just for exposing your story, but also for your lack of control of the story once it’s in the hands of a journalist. A journalist is like an artist—they don’t want to be told where to put blue and where to put red.

They want to be the prize fighter of their words—and sometimes that’s challenging for the source to comprehend. With a good PR firm, you should expect a consistency of placement built from great relationships, service and strategy.

What can you measure: In today’s digital world, measuring PR has become much easier than it was in the past. Before, you were really limited to quantity of placement, consistency of placement, and a rough value of placement. Today, we can look at spikes in traffic, conversions to leads, increases in sales, upticks in local sales, and Social interactions.

While the additional measurements are helpful, they probably will never tell the complete story. Today’s buyer (whether buying a pack of gum or buying a house) is much more sophisticated. They research on their own and come to the conclusions on their own.

This means that although you can see exact moments, you can’t measure the emotional improvement your PR moment made. For instance, I was just (literally) reading Fast Company. I bent the corner of a page for a product that interested me.

The magazine is current, but, the likeliness that I will act on that product this month is slim to none. If I act on it in two months, that PR moment (that nice shiny article their PR firm placed) will not get the credit. Inching forward with consistency of media is still a critical indicator of whether PR is working or not.

How do you define winning: When it comes to winning, it is important to establish expectations from the very start of the relationship. Try to get on the same page with your agency. Is winning gaining a feature in your industry’s top trade publication?

Is winning gaining a consistency of placement in B-to-B publications? Is winning great content pieces that get shared across the web? Define expectations from the very beginning and that will help lead to winning.

Remember, winning will not be the same for every brand. And, once you have won, the true winning comes from what you do with your press—how you leverage it, share it, distribute it and make it for your growing company.