Get Maximum Impact from News Coverage

The whole point of PR Rainmaking is to use the news media to attract new clients and customers. So doesn’t it make sense to get the most out of the publicity that you generate?

Here are seven ways to do just that:

1. Focus on the print media: Yes, it’s great to get your face on TV or your voice on radio. But the medium that provides you with the most opportunity is print. Why? Because it’s much easier to pass along a newspaper article or a magazine feature than it is to get a prospect to listen to a cassette or to watch a video. Cheaper, too.

2. Supply prospects and influentials with a steady supply of clips: Make plenty of high-quality copies, then mail them to the folks who can help you the most.

3. Package your articles into a media kit: Organize your clips, have them professionally copied and package them. Reporters love the security of knowing that others have previously written about your company.

4. Buy reprints for your best hits: Most publications offer quality reprints of their articles. For the very best of your clips, pay the extra bucks and get the official reprints.

5. Extract quotes for marketing materials: Always look for sentences in your clips that you can include as third-party endorsements in your brochures, ads and sales literature.

6. Link your Web site to your best clips: Make it easy for a browser to find your clips. Create a “press room” that will connect directly to the online versions of articles about your company.

7. Go for both quality and quantity: Both count when it comes to clips. One story in the Wall Street Journal is impressive. But so are a hundred clips from well-regarded trade publications. So when you organize your clips, be sure to highlight your most impressive hits, but go for heft as well.

Remember: The odds of any one prospect reading any particular story about you or your company are very low. Hedge your bets by putting copies of your best clips right in front of your prospects.

Copyright 2003 by W.O. Cawley Jr.