It’s not always easy for companies to generate any sort of media coverage with their public relations campaigns because of the sheer number of stories that journalists need to cover and tend to come across on a daily basis. To have an easier time generating media coverage there are a few things that companies can do.
Story
To maximize the amount of media coverage a company receives from its public relations campaign the first thing it needs to do is make sure that the promotional message is in combination with a newsworthy story. Most journalists don’t really care about companies and their public relations campaigns. What they truly care about is whether companies present them with news stories that are going to be of interest to the readers. That means to create a newsworthy story, companies need to figure out a way to create a message that’s going to grab the attention of the public. For example, any news stories about innovations, changes in consumer behavior, or achievements from a company can affect a lot of people and are therefore bound to grab attention. Fortunately, every company has a newsworthy story that it can share, as long as it knows where to look for it and how to best present that story.
Guidelines
Companies need to plan and prepare for their public relations campaigns beforehand for many reasons, however, the biggest one is that if a company wants to receive any sort of media coverage from the press, it needs to work to the deadlines of the outlets that it wants to target. Every media outlet has its own editorial deadlines, which means if a company wants to maximize its media coverage it needs to plan to coordinate each campaign with the deadlines of each media outlet that it is going to target. When a company’s planning public relations campaigns, it’s also important to understand the difference between a feature story and a news story, as each one has different deadlines, which means companies also need to take those deadlines into consideration when planning their media outreach. However, the most important thing the companies need to remember is the deadline and work according to the deadlines of the media outlets they want to target, which means sending out the company stories when the time is right. In general, for magazines, companies need to send their stories between three and six months in advance, and for social media influencers, it’s between one to two months in advance. On the other hand newspapers, podcasts, and radio tend to work on shorter deadlines, with newspapers requesting everything be sent in between a day and up to three weeks in advance, podcasts between two and six weeks in advance, and radios up to two days in advance.