Is your PR activity focusing on the wrong media?
One of the questions we always ask a new client is ‘What media is most important to your business?’ The answer they give tells us a lot about how they see themselves and where they believe their target audience hangs out.
Of their top 10 media of choice, the FT and The Guardian are usually right up there, with the BBC and The Times/Sunday Times also making an appearance. This is true of clients regardless of their sector.
The media landscape has seen a magnificent change in the last few years, with an ever-increasing number of outlets available to businesses to reach and engage their ideal audiences. When once there would be a handful of publications serving a specific sector, there are now often upwards of a dozen or more doing so – each one offering a route to different niches.
Getting in front of your target audiences, therefore, has become both harder and more time consuming. Against this backdrop, it is easy to see why so much of a business’s PR focus is on those top tier media outlets who have the potential to expose their brand to larger audiences in a fraction of the time.
But is this really the best use of their PR resources and time? The answer to this question is both yes and no.
Yes
We have secured interviews, profiles, and quotes for several clients on BBC TV, CNN, Times Radio and ITV, within The Times, FT, and Forbes and more over the years. This does wonders for increasing their brand awareness and boosting the public profiles of their key people on a large-scale.
“Getting in front of your chosen audiences is getting a lot harder”
So, for those reasons, striving for national media coverage is a good thing to do. But if want your PR to support your existing lead generation activities, a different approach must be taken.
No
Greater impact comes when our clients’ PR has a strong focus on targeting prominent outlets that are specific to the sectors within which our clients operate. The chances of getting their stories published in these niche media are both a lot higher and the audiences consuming them are more relevant. This in turn generates a much healthier return on their public relations investment.
A recent report published by Propel found that of 500,000 media pitches they analysed, 120,000 were sent to:
- BBC
- ITV
- Wall Street Journal
- New York Times
- NBC Universal
- Bloomberg
- The Guardian
- Forbes
- Business Insider
- The Sunday Times
That’s 1 in 4 of all pitches were sent to 10 of the biggest media outlets in the world in terms of audience size. I wonder how truly relevant these outlets actually were to the pitches being sent to them?
Wanting to be published by a ‘known’ name is all the very well, but if you want to generate an ROI from your PR you need to ensure that you are getting your business in front of the right people in the media that they consume, not the outlets that you fancy the look of.
