Maximizing Your PR Investment – Three Common Mistakes to Avoid

June 9, 2023 | Cynthia Guiang

Written by Cynthia Guiang, CMO

Over the years I have watched companies who have recognized the value of PR, invested in it, and then
put so many constraints on their campaigns that they did not get nearly the value they could have. It has
left me scratching my head at times.


The difficult part of PR is that as a publicist I cannot guarantee anything. If you do X, you will get Y is not
anything I can say with any certainty. Publicists are at the whim of the editors, news cycles, and so many
other elements outside of our control. This can make it difficult to convince clients to lift their
constraints and biases which I believe can limit the ultimate ROI they receive from their investment in
PR.


I always use a single example to demonstrate the three common mistakes I see – because this happened
in real life, I was the publicist, none of the mistakes were made, and the outcome was ideal. Every time I
see a client make one of the three mistakes; I cringe knowing I will never know what ultimate outcome
we might be missing.


Mistake #1 – Limiting Who You Are Willing to Engage With


Everyone comes to a PR campaign with a dream to be in the Wall Street Journal or the Today Show or
Cosmopolitan Magazine…and at Orca, we do make those happen. We make it very clear though, there
are no guarantees – I will refer to it as the “whim clause.” As stated above, there are so many factors we
cannot control. Some clients are so focused on being featured in these top-tier outlets, they are not
interested in anything else or engaging with anyone that is outside of that circle. So, they limit who we
can send samples to and some even get annoyed by requests we send from bloggers and influencers –
they are clearly not on the masthead of the larger outlets they covet so why are we wasting their time?!


And that is mistake #1. Those top-tier “hits” as we like to call them can take time. I’m pulling out my
whim clause here. The problem is, you could go for a while without seeing anything appear in the top-tier media. If you limit yourself to those outlets, you will see zero exposure instead of at least thousands/tens of thousands of impressions or more that smaller outlets can secure. It may not be the millions of eyeballs or cachet you seek, but the buzz and momentum are at least building. We always say PR is a marathon, not a sprint. The smaller hits help bridge the gap until the larger hits have a chance to germinate. Clients who have chosen this selective, top-tier-only path often pull the plug on PR because they don’t have the patience to wait for the big hit – and so they stop PR before it ever has a chance to bloom.


My Example: My client had a travel tech solution and the tricky part is in order to properly test out the
service, you had to be traveling internationally. Finding media who were about to embark on a trip
outside of the U.S. made the lead time even more stretched out than normal. I found plenty of media
who were interested, but travel was months away. My client was not going to pay me to sit around for
months waiting for someone to get on an airplane before they got any coverage (even though that is
exactly what needed to happen!). As luck would have it, a writer at Engadget was embarking on a trip
within a month and he literally saved me/the campaign. Engadget was a dream outlet and when his
very positive review was posted, web traffic spiked, orders came in, and proof of the value of PR was
established. It bought me more time. However, I still had the problem of waiting for people to travel.

I convinced the client to let me engage with smaller travel bloggers. Yes, their audience is much smaller, but it is focused on travel and these writers are gearing up for trips on a regular basis. As a result, we got
some wonderful reviews from several travel bloggers. And while they didn’t cause a spike on the website like Engadget, they ended up doing much more for us…see mistake #2…

Mistake #2 – Judging a Book by Its Cover

Or in this case, a blogger or influencer by the size of its audience. There is quite a bit of content created
for many of the top-tier outlets outside of those listed on the masthead. This becomes truer each day as
the media cut staff and turn to contributors to build out content. As publicists, this can really make our
jobs difficult. We can pitch all the right people at an outlet, and the perfect article for our client to be
featured in could end up being written by an outside freelancer (or sometimes someone at the outlet
listed under a totally different beat) and we miss inclusion because…who knew…


Bloggers and influencers are sometimes tapped to provide content as freelance writers and
contributors. They are subject matter experts in their smaller circles that are often missing on staff,
especially on the much smaller, reduced staff, at top-tier outlets. In some cases, they may have even
worked at those outlets in the past.


And that is mistake #2. Don’t try to pick and choose which ones might have the potential. Your publicist
is equipped to screen out most of the bad ones for you (we call these sample seekers). However, you
may still have to kiss a few frogs to ensure you don’t miss out on a prince of an opportunity. I
understand that the cost of a sample including shipping can add up, but how much are we talking about
in the scheme of potential? I recommend that you come to a PR campaign prepared to invest in the
sampling to maximize your results. Even if you agree to send these smaller outlets product to review, do
not assume you know the relative value of this connection. Don’t treat them like they’re just bridging
the gap, treat them as you would any valued contact – get them the information they need in a timely
manner and show gratitude for their interest.


My Example Continued: Two travel bloggers found themselves on a committee of subject matter experts
for USA Today tasked with choosing the Best in Travel Tech. Guess what they immediately found they
had in common…they had both trialed and loved my client’s service. And so, they reached out to me to
let me know they were nominating my client as one of the Best in Travel Tech. Had they been tapped by
USA Today in the past to do this? No, this was their first year. Did I have any way of knowing they would
be the ones making this important decision when I had reached out to them months earlier and set
them up with trials on their trips? No, I don’t believe they even knew it at that point. Those two product
trials which resulted in coverage on two small, but focused travel blogs landed the coveted top-tier
outlet coverage I was seeking. By the way, I was quite predictably pitching the USA Today travel writer
persistently this entire time. I never heard from him, and he wasn’t on the committee for choosing Best
in Travel Tech.


Mistake # 3 – Expecting PR to Do All the Heavy Lifting Alone

PR is a powerful tool in the marketing mix, but it should not be left to carry all the weight of your
promotional efforts. One of the biggest mistakes is counting on just one channel to do all the work. You
lose the advantages of each when you do this. I’m not going to go into all of the pros and cons of each
channel, but I will say that you can’t time PR, you have no control over when and where it is placed, nor do you have control over the message. You can certainly work hard to try to impact these factors to your
desired result but insert the whim clause once again here.

For this reason, you can’t rely on PR to drive immediate sales. The best-placed ads are put in front of the right audience, at just the right time, with a message that moves them to buy immediately. This is not the purpose of PR coverage (e-commerce opportunities are an exception). To put it very simplistically, paid advertising is targeted, more expensive, but designed to drive measurable sales. PR is broader in reach, much less expensive (cost per impression) and builds your brand and brand credibility over time in a way that no other channel can.


So here is mistake #3. You get the hit – large or small – and expect it to drive sales. We’ve even seen
some of our biggest hits have a relatively small impact on immediate web traffic and sales. You need to
keep in mind that PR is for brand building. The benefit is it works for you long after your campaign is
concluded, long after the hit appears. When you search for a product to see if it’s worth buying, to see
what others have to say – every single one of those hits will build the story of your brand and give it
credibility. How often those hits help drive a sale cannot be tracked or measured. This is a constant
thorn in PR’s side. Large firms with the money to fund research can measure brand awareness and
sentiment and to a certain extent tie this back to PR… that’s why they continue to invest in PR and
make it a priority even when it cannot be easily and directly tied to sales.


My Example’s Happy Ending: The USA Today article came out and I stood by with my Greatest Publicist
Award speech in hand, ready to give at a moment’s notice. That moment didn’t come. We saw a small
spike in web traffic, but nothing like the Engadget article. However, we shared the USA Today hit on
social and the engagement was through the roof! People liked this post (vs our other promotional posts)
way more than anything else we ever posted. The client turned it into an ad…Named by USA Today Best
in Travel Tech and it was the best-performing
ad they ever ran. They used it in their email campaigns,
they plastered it on their website. It gave them the credibility that their otherwise unrecognizable brand
did not have.


This all became apparent months after the actual article ran, so I never got to give my speech…LOL…but
the client got great ROI out of their PR. However, had they stuck with top tier only I believe they would
have pulled the plug on PR before it even had the chance to take off. Had they waived off the two small
travel bloggers I chose to engage with, they would not have been chosen for the USA Today Best in
Travel Tech. And had they not leveraged the USA Today placement in other areas of marketing to
actually drive sales, they would not have seen the results and ROI that they ultimately achieved.


When I hear a client say they invested in PR and saw nothing come out of it, I wonder if they gave it a
chance or did they knock the wind out of the sails of the campaign before it even started? Maybe they
engaged with a subpar publicist or PR firm. But aside from that, the most common factor I’ve witnessed
in my long career in PR is they’ve made one or more of these three mistakes. When you choose to invest
in PR, I recommend avoiding these three mistakes to maximize your investment. I know it can be a
difficult decision to spend the money to begin with but don’t hold back your campaign by restricting
your outreach or by failing to leverage all of your PR coverage.

The “hit” is just the start of the PR payoff (and not the end goal) if you nurture it properly. And that’s where the true potential ROI will really be seen.