But PR Rainmakers reject such amateurism. Instead, they adopt motto of U.S. military sniper: “One shot, one kill.”

You want to become so precise with your proposals that you inspire news stories that accomplish exactly what you and your client aim to accomplish.

There are five steps to bringing such precision to your publicity:

1. Pinpoint your objective.

This is often hardest part of process. It requires you to focus your client or your boss on exactly what it is they want from your news story. Boil your objective into a simple sentence, such as “We want our retailers to gain confidence in this new product” or “We want our vendors to complain to Congress.”

Executives often rush through this process. Don’t let them. Ask them: “If we don’t know what we are aiming at, how do we know when we hit it?”

2. Identify your audience.

Knowing your objective allows you to choose appropriate audience for your story. Generally for a business, audiences fall into seven categories: management, employees, customers, vendors, lenders, investors and regulators.

The appropriate audience is one that can help you reach your objective. All other audiences are irrelevant for purposes of this particular story.

3. Design message.

But change is also most common of these four elements, and thus weakest. You should search for other elements within story.

PR Rainmakers recognize these four basic elements of news: change, conflict, aberration and problem.

Any one of these, if significant in its scope, can spark media interest in your story. The more of these elements that are present, most likely you are to get a reporter’s attention.

But converse is also true. You must have at least one of these elements in your story proposal, or you simply do not have a news story.

We’ve looked at change. Let’s look at other three elements that can put muscle on a weak news proposal.

You find out that some industry experts think it’s insane for a company to invest in a widget plant in current economy. There’s conflict.

You learn that your company’s widget factory is nation’s first new widget factory since World War II. There’s aberration.

You discover that your company must convince customers to embrace a revolutionary new design over cheap imports of an outdated, but functional design. There’s your problem.