Why PR?
The process of developing positive and frequent media coverage for a community is often hard to grasp, even for clients who have received PR coverage for years.
To put it simply, getting that coverage is a lot like the sales process. The role of your PR team is to sell editors and reporters and columnists on using the stories we have about you in their newspapers and magazines, on their radio shows and news broadcasts, and on their web sites.
And our sales effort is all about supporting your sales effort. We know that PR has the power to generate leads by creating awareness of your offering, as well to support retention by validating the buying decision of potential clients and their circles of friends. And you know that the most powerful marketing tool is word-of-mouth, personal recommendation, which is what media coverage delivers -- believable, third-party endorsement of the project -- which can be repurposed to use as sales materials as well as content for your web site.
To describe how we approach media relations, our goal with our communities is to generate a minimum of one media distribution a week so that there is a constant stream of information to our media contacts and so that we keep the pipeline of publicity opportunities loaded. To accomplish this on your behalf, your Forte team will be very involved with you and your team, as well as any agencies you work with, to be sure that everything happening with your business is turned into a publicity opportunity. We call that "story-mining", and it's an ongoing process that we discuss every week.
We take the information and ideas from meetings and conference calls to produce the PR Matrix, then we develop those ideas into press releases and media advisories and photo distributions. Time goes into the research and interviews and photo sourcing, then time goes into the actual writing of the materials that will be sent out to the media. After the editing and revisions and approvals are done, the media contacting begins. We invest significant time into identifying every local and regional media outlet that would possibly be interested in you, and into discovering which person(s) at each media outlet would be the perfect targets to pitch. Then we send the media materials with personal notes by email and continue the follow up by email and phone for the purpose of nurturing good relationships with newspaper, magazine, radio and TV people in the area who we want to persuade to use our information to help their readers, listeners and viewers learn about the project and who is behind it.
It's intense -- as intense as developing prospects into leads into sales. In many respects, media outlets are our prospects; we convert individual reporters into our leads; and their news coverage is the result of our sales.
In order to capture and report these efforts, we use a time tracking system that logs our activities on specific projects in :15 minute increments, which is a useful tool in reporting to clients how their fees are being used.
We would expect to participate in weekly calls with you and your agencies that we're all always in the loop. You'll receive an updated PR Matrix each week. And we pride ourselves on reporting results, so you'll receive a binder with monthly clippings.
