Feature Placement
With ever more companies, pushing “me too” products and services, developing a good PR story is becoming increasingly more difficult. And having a good PR story is only half the battle, the real challenge invariably lies in getting it seen and heard in the right place and then understood and acted upon by the right people. But how do you know who will be writing about what, where and when? How do you know which media outlets are most influential to your target audience? And how do you go about getting anyone to pay attention to what you have to say?
Our approach
Our approach begins the potentially awkward task of telling you whether you do or don’t have the basis of a good PR story. If you don’t, then not only are you unlikely to get any publicity at all, you also risk your credibility with a journalist/editor and weaken the chances of them being interested when you do have something positive to contribute. And, even if you do manage to gain some publicity, it won’t help you achieve your wider aims and objective and may well work against you. Even what appears to be a genuinely good PR story but one which isn’t on-message can actually turn out to be counterproductive. Should you have a genuinely good story that fits within your overall PR/Comms strategy, we’ll leverage our almost 20 years’ experience to advise where best to look to place it, when, and then work with you to present it to the relevant journalist/editor in the most effective way for it to be used.
Case Study
We have successfully created and strategically placed a diverse range of good PR material for a large variety of clients in the UK, EMEA and the US. A case in point was a software company that wanted a year-long campaign to raise its profile in both the UK and the US by regularly feature placements in its primary target media. We began by establishing the number and type of good PR stories our client was confident it could generate over this type of period, primarily customer case studies and high-level industry thought leadership comment from the company CEO. We then reviewed the feature plans for all the target publications for the year and began to identify the relevant features we were confident we contribute to. We then approached each publication at the outset of the year and highlighted the features of interest and what we intended to contribute with a view to using any feedback to fine tune our final offerings. From this we backward scheduled a content creation plan for the year, identifying which case studies and which thought leadership articles that would need to be written and by when for each feature. This included ensuring the finished articles were in the appropriate size and style preferred by each publication to minimise any barriers to acceptance.
Not only did we succeed in securing coverage in the majority of our target features which helped the client achieve its aim of raising its profile, we also helped develop and strengthen a number of strategically important relationships with key editors and journalists. This bore further fruit in the following years as we were increasingly proactively approached by journalists looking for a good PR story as they knew they could depend on us and our client to deliver.
Clients
Cello Health
Epicor
Exel Computer Systems
Infor
Microsoft
Microsoft Business Solutions
Preactor International
Seiki Systmes
Sense Business Systems
WinMan
Collaborative Partners
Helen Lawn & Associates
Inferno
