How long does good PR take?

fashion-person-woman-hand

After sitting through hundreds if not thousands of public relations new business meetings, I’ve come to (at least) one universal conclusion:

Potential clients wait until the absolute last minute to decide that they need to work with a PR firm.

I really don’t know why this is the case. It doesn’t happen (as much) to our advertising brothers and sisters who are usually given months to do research, generate creative treatments, present final ideas, place media and then track results.

Perhaps it’s because folks still don’t know what front-end work goes into public relations. We too require time to research, create messaging and talking points, target the right media, pitch, etc.

I can’t tell you how many times a client has come to us and said, “Oh, and we’d like to get this in the paper next week.”

It just doesn’t work that way.

This is changing even more as we expand into the world of content marketing and content management.

Clients should expect and anticipate at least a two-month ramp up time before the first article is placed or before the first piece of content is published on a blog, Facebook page, etc.

I repeat for effect: Clients should expect and anticipate at least a two-month ramp up time.

So what happens during those two months? Perhaps the most important work we will do in our engagement.

  • Research: Media research, competitive research, social research. We need to get a handle of what is going on with the client, their competition and how we can use that information to our advantage.
  • Messaging: Making sure we craft a compelling story for the client.
  • Messaging training: Making sure the client can deliver that messaging to the media.
  • Story development: More than messaging, making sure the story fits into the media landscape.
  • Content audit: If we are doing content marketing and management there is a series of steps that need to happen in sequential order.
    • Persona research and creation: Usually in a series of 6-10 interviews of key stakeholders. These generate the targets for your content. Yes we give them actual names and profiles.
    • Content bins: Identifying the right content and the right platforms to reach those personas.
    • Content plan and calendar: This is the outline for the first 6-12 months of your content approach. Depending on the assignment it even includes the first month or two of actual posts.

We understand that once you decide you want to “market” your company or organization you want to get it done yesterday. By seeing this process, our hope is that you understand the upfront work that needs to be done to “move the chains” correctly.

Some clients are very comfortable including these first few months in an ongoing retainer. Others are more inclined to separate this upfront work into a communications audit of sorts and then seeing what we find before going into that second “work” phase.

We can—and do—work either way.

We’ve seen the faces of disappointment when we tell folks it’ll take a few months to get it right before the actual marketing happens.

We’ve also seen the faces of happiness when they see the positive results this upfront work brings to a successful PR and content marketing effort.

Please share your thoughts on this upfront process, how long it should take and how much it should cost.

Free download: 5 reasons your media relations strategy is failing

Jon Newman

In 2002 Jon cofounded The Hodges Partnership and has helped to grow it into one of the country’s largest public relations firms (based on O’Dwyer’s annual rankings). Jon has taught communications as an adjunct professor at VCU, speaks regularly at conferences and meetings and blogs and tweets about public relations and marketing issues.

Read more by Jon

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sign up to receive our blog posts by email