8 Ways To Use PR to Reach Your Target Audience

Excellent PR is more cost effective than other marketing activities. Keep these tips in mind to help weather the downturn when each minute and nickel count. PR can be key to increasing your mindshare - until good economic times return.

1. Align PR tactics with business strategies - Understand your organization’s strategic business objectives. Focus on those PR initiatives that will directly support the business and marketing strategies your company has adopted.

2. Focus on revenue-building opportunities - Develop lead-generation PR tactics and campaigns that directly support the sales team and help them keep existing customers happy, identify and qualify prospects, and close new sales.

3. Know what story you plan to tell - Think like an editor and make sure the story you are telling is as good as or better than the ones they are already working on. Keep pitches simple - A good headline and sound bite will either get a positive response or not – without wasting your time or the editor’s.

4. Look for high-percentage opportunities - Pick your shots carefully. Some stories are easier to tell than others. Go for the ones you are most confident will deliver near-term results.

5. Recruit, train and promote PR evangelists from within - Every organization has a tremendous pool of intellectual capital. Cultivate PR evangelists who know that a little media exposure can go a long way toward their own job security during an economic downturn.

6. Cut expensive events and promotions. Costly and time-consuming PR events are great “want-to-have” but not “must-have” investments in a recession. Personal contact with your target editors can result in almost as much exposure as a far more expensive press conference or press tour. Also, it is increasingly possible to create much more cost-effective, virtual events utilizing webinars, podcasts and video.

7. Confront bad news head on - An immediate response to bad news is a lot less time-consuming than days spent dodging or deflecting questions. Be open about the market and economic challenges. The media will cut you a lot of slack in a downturn, especially if you are forthright about the problems you face and forthcoming about the solutions you have planned.

8. Be ruthless about your PR priorities - Before undertaking any task, carefully consider whether it is essential to your success or whether it may prove to be a diversion. Time wasted is money lost, which is a quick road to disaster in a downturn, whereas time well spent may be the key to an early recovery.

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