If you want create a PR campaign that is effective and consistent, you must learn to market your story to
news media. You must learn to treat reporters as customers who will either buy or reject your product: raw news.You should apply techniques of PR Rainmaking, which is practice of using news media to attract customers and clients to your enterprise.
Any effective campaign of PR Rainmaking is grounded in three fundamental ideas:
a) The reporter is consumer.
b) The story is product that must be tailored for and sold to that consumer.
c) Reporters will buy your story for their reasons, not yours.
First, reporter is consumer
Today’s PR specialists often forget this basic principle. The bad ones – ones that reporters ridicule as mere “flacks” – never learn it.
To some of these folks, reader or viewer is their primary consumer. Others consider their client or their CEO to be consumer of their work.
Wrong.
The PR Rainmaker knows: When it comes to getting your story into media, you must look upon reporter as your consumer.
Without reporter, nothing happens. There is no story for your target audience to view or to read. There is nothing for your CEO to show his directors. There is nothing for your sales team to hand out to prospects.
Without reporter, all you have is a story idea.
The reporter is consumer. The reporter is customer. And you must act accordingly.
Second, story is product
It is not enough that you want to sell something. Countless enterprises have lost money trying to sell a product they wanted to sell and no one wanted to buy.
No matter what you produce, you must find a market that wants to purchase your product.
The same holds true when placing your story in news media. The PR Rainmaker knows that story is product. The story must be tailored for consumer, who is reporter. Then it must be sold to that reporter.
This is where PR flacks lose their direction. They look upon media relations as mass production. They want to build an assembly line. They want to crank out one press release after another, send out a blast fax, and read their story in newspapers next day.
By using these “spray and pray” techniques, a company may well generate media coverage. But that coverage is likely to be ineffective. The key messages will be distorted. The story will go to wrong audiences. The company will receive no return on its investment other than some newspaper clippings and perhaps some videotape.
