BETTER BUSINESS
How to Analyse the media Getting Ahead In The PR Race By Phil Turtle, Managing Director, Turtle Consulting
Phil Turtle gets inside Editors’ heads to unlock their publicity potential.
Here’s a specific reason to find some time to read your industry media; you need to be in there alongside or preferably more often that your competition. As I’ve mentioned in earlier articles, there’s heaps of free publicity to be had if you follow some relatively simple PR rules. But most of the magazines depend
on advertising for their income, so if you don’t do some of that too, there won’t be any media left to give you this amazingly valuable exposure. There are a number of types of
PR you can get into both printed and on-line media. Press releases can be sent out to hundreds of media and will get you short news items across the board. Most magazines and online media also like Technical Features, Tutorial Features, Opinion (preferably a little controversial) features and Case Studies. Often these will get you two or three pages in a specific magazine! That space would cost you £5-6k, plus editorial is reckoned to be worth three
times as much as advertising because it is so much more credible. To start getting into the race to
provide the Editors of your key magazines you need to understand ‘how their minds work’. Bear in mind that Editorial or PR
coverage is not like advertising, whether or not you get any depends on the quality of your feature ideas and the quality of the writing. In fact you need to ‘woo’ them.
Leave the Office Grab yourself three copies of each of the top half dozen magazines in your market sector. I take myself off to the local coffee shop and I’d suggest you do the same. You also need a supply of yellow stickies and a pad and pen. What we’re going to do is to ‘reverse
engineer’ each Editor’s magazine. Read through one copy of the
magazine doing two things. 1) note down the different sections in a list on your pad and 2) for every story or article where you think ‘We could write something along those lines’ stick on a yellow stickie. You need your lateral thinking turned
up to maximum for that second bit. So if for example you’ve seen a piece on best practice for installing square widgets, maybe you could do one on how to install specialist left-handed round widgets? Maybe you see an ‘opinion feature’
on why the market should go in a particular direction or develop a specific new technology and you disagree strongly. Well that Editor is going to be delighted to feature an opposing view. Or maybe you have a ‘bee in your bonnet’ about a specific issue in your market place. That’s probably going to make an excellent opinion feature. Write down all of the ideas you
generate for your own features and news items as you go. At the end of this exercise I promise you’ll have the best part of a years’ PR ideas listed! Go through your second and third
copy of each magazine – you may discover some further sections as some Editors have sections they run on alternate months. This time make yourself some notes on what sort of
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things the Editor is looking for within them. From this in future you’ll be able to offer him or her ideas that are appropriate to each section.
Ahead of the Pack Believe it or not, after this simple exercise (rarely undertaken even by most PR agencies), you’re 80 percent of the way to understanding each of your key Editors’ wants and needs. Next go to the magazine’s website and find the ‘media pack’. In this you will find ‘forward features’ which states what the upcoming feature topics are going to be. What this allows you to do is to be
able to pitch ideas for specific upcoming issues of the magazine/website which fit in with that month’s ‘flavour’.
Time to Pitch When you’ve got your ideas into a semblance of order, write a sixty word outline or ‘synopsis’ that encapsulates (from the Editor’s perspective not your company’s) what it’s about and why her readers will benefit from reading it. Now you’re ready to pick up the phone to one of the key Editors. Always ask if it is a good time to
speak (because they have some serious workload and deadline issues and you need to treat them like Gods because they have total control over whether you do or you don’t get free publicity!). Say you have some feature and news ideas and could you please discuss a few? Most will gladly spare you ten minutes, either then or at a more convenient time. You’ll soon find you have a commission for your first of many feature articles or case studies!
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