Just another day at Neo – building brands and creating media opportunities
Recently I was asked to give a presentation to our growing team about media relations and creating media opportunities. We have a few people on the team who are starting out in their PR journey, and so we ran an interactive session to focus on this topic.
There are fundamentally a few important factors that brands need to get right from the offset in order to be successful from a tech/b2b PR campaign perspective – all of which needs to be coupled with strong campaign management, work ethic, tenacity, drive, following campaign tasks and process, and so on.
Key focuses
In particular, we looked at the core differences between “public relations” and “media relations” to better understand what media relations is and where it fits in our clients marketing mix. It is vital for our fresh graduates to understand the differences and how to apply this knowledge to our variety of clients. Additionally, we discussed the PESO model (paid, earned, shared, owned media) and showcased how we’re working alongside the media to drive powerful brand awareness across key audiences for our clients. This includes launching brands, products, and creating messaging and positioning for our clients in key markets as opinion leaders on topics that matter to them. For many, this work has not only created and built the media profile they’re after, but it has also led to quantifiable sales leads.
Next, we looked at journalists and the importance of creating those relationships. Focusing on how we might adjust our pitching approaches to the needs of different journalists and how they like to work; the importance of storytelling; and the different kinds of story packages that generally appeal to media, as well as looking at media pitching tips for us all to consider.
What we learnt
During the session, we discussed openly about our achievements that we secured for our clients, either through coverage, or through live opportunities in key target publications. Our team has done some really amazing work together over the last year. We’ve got our clients into the nationals and the publications that really matter to them, helping them drive the awareness of their clients’ businesses forward within their key sectors. We each took a turn to share coverage from a campaign that we’re proud of, and we dissected what we thought the common denominators were that helped us to achieve the results that we did.
At the heart of our success, we all agreed that a strong story is key, as well as focusing on key target publications that will result in the successful coverage we need – further cementing journalist relationships, or enabling us to create new ones. This idea isn’t necessarily new to many people within the industry. But, for some, it was important to help develop an appreciation internally and celebrate the successes of our team.
To close our session, we brainstormed how we, individually and collectively, felt that we could further support our clients. This gave us the opportunity to try and think a little bit more laterally about what we are trying to achieve, with us all walking away with a set of new ideas to try.
Conclusion
The team has executed new and exciting ideas for our clients since the session and we continue to achieve excellent results. It’s also really great to see how people are thriving, growing and applying themselves at Neo PR. Our clients are happy, and we continue to deliver.
Just another day at Neo PR….
