Don’t do things just because you can. You can contact the media at any time, but should you? Think first about why you’re doing it, what about, and how you will go about it. This is one of the lessons we’ve been sharing while coaching business owners in the last few days. We’re sure author Simon Sinek would approve. Simon wrote the highly respected book ‘Start With Why‘ which advocates knowing why you’re in business before you go on to work out what you want to achieve and how you think you’ll get there.
We have been coaching business owners in the London borough of Bromley on public relations (PR) as part of the fully-funded (and free to the recipient) business services available via the local library service under the name Start Up Bromley. There is a lot more than this to Start Up Bromley. Indeed we recorded our first Bromley Buzz podcast from their business lounge in Bromley Library (see picture of Darren Weale of In Tune PR with co-presenter mental health and wellbeing coach Zeenat Noorani), and they have a variety of events coming up.
One Start Up Bromley client gave us this brief for the coaching sessions, “I would very much like our session to focus on: Business marketing, PR, and contact with journalists (how to get journalists to write about my products/services).”
We can talk about business marketing, as it is related to PR, but it isn’t our ‘thing’. In talking about PR, however, in preparing for the sessions, we have been assessing where businesses are in relation to PR. Some are clearly not ready for the media or social media, and we tell them so. They haven’t fully sorted out their basics, their why, how, or what. Firstly, asking the media to cover something half-baked won’t interest them, and if it did, bringing an audience to a product or service that isn’t robust would mean losing people’s interest, probably permanently.
However, what we do when this comes up is to help Start Up Bromley clients produce a ‘roadmap to the media’. We work with them to set out a brief list of things they need to fix to be ready for the attention publicity could bring. Once fixed, we look at the need to have the words, the list of contacts, the hi-res images and ideas for later follow up that means that their DIY PR efforts can succeed. The result is a skeleton plan that can take them into the media, if their pitch, their hook, is good enough.
If you’re not in Bromley, or if you are and Start Up Bromley’s funding doesn’t cover our PR coaching, you can contact us to book a telephone or Zoom (or in person, if you’re local) ‘power hour’ to work towards your PR roadmap, charged at £45 per hour till the end of March 2022. After that, the price rises as we will have additional handouts for our power hour clients that are being worked up now.
Just to add, we had feedback from the client who gave us the brief quoted above at the end of their session. “You get five plus from me. I’m very, very happy,. I’m over the moon.” That’s why we’re carrying on coaching.
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