How To Get Press Coverage Without Hiring Outside PR

The news media are the original influencers. Everybody knows the value of press coverage. It’s a great way to drive demand because it’s a neutral, third-party endorsement. And if the news media is reporting about your brand, it must be worth checking out.

But if you don’t know how to write a press release, a media pitch, or how to start conversations with journalists, the prospect of doing your own public relations outreach is daunting.

At the same time mom and pop’s, small and medium-sized companies often struggle when it comes to retaining a public relations firm to get them press coverage for several reasons I’ll lay out in this post. 

“We have 5000 customers, either marketers or content markets,” says digital pr consultant Dmitry Dragilev, which provides clients with the resources and guidance to do their own media relations. 

The idea is that rather than pay a PR agency to get to know you so they can pitch you to journalists, why not just pitch journalists yourself? The concept is particularly enticing to companies looking at adding a public relations component to their marketing mix for the first time.

One of the sore spots for small clients when they hire a PR firm is the realization that it will take one to two months for the public relations team staffing the account to come up to speed.

That means that while they hired the public relations firm to get them press, that firm will bill them for 30 to 60 days to learn how to communicate their business to the media.

Even if you go to a strategic communications firm specializing in your industry, they’ll still need to figure out your go-to media strategy to differentiate you from your competitors and get you to stand out from the others. But Dmitry includes guidance and tactics for how to do that on your own.

 In addition to providing contact information for journalists and the ability to email them directly over his service, he also includes PR training, resources, and guidance to help clients get press without relying on a public relations representative.

It’s no secret that client-agency relationships are fraught with conflict. Clients are specialists, while public relations practitioners are generalists, so relying on them to connect you with other experts is inefficient.

Clients have a single focus on their business, but public relations agencies represent a portfolio of clients so their focus is split.

Clients are focused on growing their business,  but if you grow too fast too quickly, you won’t need your agency anymore so they want to keep you from outgrowing them.

These conflicts are more pronounced with startups, change-ups (pivot mode), and scale-ups than they are with grown-ups so at the lower end of the market, where most of the clients are, these challenges have persisted as long as public relations has been around.

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash