Evaluate your current PR program to help you develop a plan that will reach your goals and objectives, while delivering value to the business. Learn the four keys you need to plan for strong, focused and successful PR in 2009.
Vocus White Paper
Planning for PR Success: Four Keys to
Prepare for 2009Vocus White Paper 1
Planning for PR Success: Four Keys to Prepare for 2009
IntroductionNext year is just around the corner and its time to plan your PR strategy. Planning for next year means analyzing and evaluating this year's PR program to help you develop a plan to improve and reach your PR goals and objectives.
With the current economic situation, it is more important than ever to evaluate the strength and weaknesses of your PR pro-grams to build cost-effective and productive strategies that produce results. As technology designed specifically for PR has emerged, you have the opportunity to refine your programs to maximize impact, incorporate new techniques and integrate with marketing to create a strategy to not only propel your campaigns forward but contribute to the overall bottom-line.
Four Tips to Prepare for PR Success in the Coming Year As you plan for 2009, there are four keys ways to create an effective strategy that will help you achieve PR success for your company.
1) Cut Costs and Expand Distribution
Using today's tools, you can save thousands on your public relations programs simply by leveraging the Internet.
The Internet has significantly changed the structure of communications. Comprising an audience of an estimated 178 million people or nearly four out of five US adults (2007, Harris Interactive Study) and consisting of consumers, media, investors and more, the Internet has greatly enhanced the amount and availability of information. Today's PR goes beyond the media to reach many audiences. To maximize your PR dollars, use your efforts not only as an avenue to gain publicity but to help drive attention for and guide other company initiatives forward.
An effective press release strategy relies on multiple releases, meaning your organization may be spending upwards of $50,000 or more per year on wire distribution using traditional newswires that cost anywhere from $500 to $1,500. Fortunately, techniques exist that can help organizations greatly reduce their dependency on expensive wire services while increasing the value and visibility of their press releases. You can save a substantial amount by taking advantage of online distribution services designed to send your news throughout the Internet.
Using PRWeb as an example, your news will appear in search engine results, be featured on top news sites like Yahoo! News and get distributed directly to bloggers and potential customers for between $80 to $360 per release. Many online services will also allow you to launch integrated campaigns by embedding links, images, attachments and even video into your release, all of which help increase the visibility of your news and drive traffic to your website. There are even free sites that allow organizations to post press releases. Although many of these sites have little or no distribution and are not highly ranked by search engines like Google and Yahoo!, they can provide an additional avenue to distribute your message. Online press release distribution saves you money, all while reaching the media and increasing the visibility and impact of their news online.
While wire services blast press releases to newsrooms, a PR system allows you to take a more surgical approach to reach the media. Using a media database to identify and target the right journalists, you can use PR software to email your pitch or press release directly to the journalists you have targeted. Equally important, some of the systems can connect and coordinate all the actions performed through the system to each other. For example, Vocus allows you to track which of the journalists to whom you emailed your news, opened your email, requested more information or wrote a story, giving you a qualitative success rate. Not only can organizations use this information to fine tune their pitching and save money, but they can actually track the impact of their news and build more personal relationships with journalists.
2) Improve Productivity by Automating Tasks
As a PR professional, you are tasked with juggling the multiple areas of your program and in many cases multiple vendors as well. This is your year to organize all those tasks in a complete PR system that will not only give you access to all your information at one time and in one place but allow you to automate ... [download for more]
