Join these PR groups to advance your career

A career in public relations (PR) is tough. A career in PR by yourself is even tougher. Nobody to bounce ideas off of, or get that second set of eyes. There’s nobody to ask about billing questions, or simply get a gut check on if a pitch is good or not. On top of all of this, you have to make sure you’re filling the pipeline and sourcing jobs as client contracts end.

The good news is that there are support and resources everywhere if you know where to look. Where do the top PR and Communications professionals go when they need support? Or, when they need contract work?

The top PR resources

You might be surprised to learn how many social media platforms cater to journalists and PR groups. Popular platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn may seem like obvious picks, but did you know that Reddit also has media relations communities?

Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are a great place for professionals to connect, share their...

Whether it’s just you or a small agency; it’s crucial to establish yourself as a go-to PR resource for brands. Word of mouth, advertising, and former client referrals help. To get massive authority and credibility as a PR executive, you need to get published and share your knowledge. 

Getting published can have a significant effect on your brand, encourage new levels of innovation and make you stand out in the market. One way to do this is to write guest posts for important and authoritative websites. Often known as bylined articles or contributed articles, guest posts are written by you and are intended to provide a vendor-neutral viewpoint. 

Here are the benefits of guest posting, to help you build your PR business and get you more contract jobs:

1. Build Credibility + Awareness. Remember you are speaking to the reader by talking about things that interest them or that they have questions about. After seeing your byline, readers can look for more on you...

You have probably heard that Public Relations (PR) can help your business grow and make you money. Who doesn’t want that? However, you're not quite sure how it works, what it should cost or who is good at it.

You ask to be put in touch with a “PR professional,” this mythical creature who has relationships with the press and can supposedly get you published in all the top newspapers and magazines. It sounds awesome, and you’d love to be able to say you’ve been published.

However, where do you start? Do you know what you need PR for? Do you understand what it can do for your business? How do you know if the PR professional is good at what they do?

You don’t know what you don’t know, so here are some tips on how to have an effective conversation with a PR consultant or agency, to make sure you are getting what you need to help you reach your goals.

What can PR do for me and my business?

PR is not one size fits all. Like any business objective,...

A lot of people think that the only time you need a Public Relations team is when things are going south. While this is not true (at all), a crisis still has the potential to happen. Sometimes it is preventable, and sometimes it’s not. The good news is that there are things you can do as a business owner to prevent certain crises from happening.

This blog post shares basic tips for dealing with crisis, but also preventable PR mistakes that have the potential to lead to crisis. 

Preventable Things You Can Do To Avoid Getting Into a Crisis:

1. Understand Your Competitive Landscape. You are always better prepared if you know what's going on around you. By being in-tune with your competition and what’s happening in the newscycle and world, you have the opportunity to create messaging and a narrative that best serves you in a positive light. Your messaging and narrative is the backbone of every piece of communication for your company, internally and...

We are in uncertain times and unchartered territories. Everyone is feeling it personally, financially and business-wise. With a looming recession, the natural reaction as business owners is to retract into our shells, tighten up our budgets and let everything and everyone go that isn’t essential to operations. As the business owner, you may think “Well, there are no press releases to be written right now since we are not producing any news.” Or “Everyone is talking about the Pandemic and other scary worldly issues, and we are not doing anything related to that, so there’s nothing for PR to do right now.” It seems like an obvious cut, so you make the decision to let your PR team go for capital preservation.

However, consider this: your Public Relations team has a skill set that can help your business in many capacities. A PR professional has organizational skills, speaking skills, writing skills, problem-solving skills,...

Many people don’t hire in Public Relations because they don’t understand what it is, what it can do for their business, or most importantly...what it is capable of. PR is one of the most cost-effective strategies to raise brand awareness, authority and credibility for your business, which indirectly increases sales. Cha-ching! PR complements direct marketing and advertising efforts, and helps increase your website's rank in Google so people can more readily find your business (read: great SEO)

In case you didn’t catch it earlier, here is a blog post explaining what PR is, and how it is different than marketing. 

PR is a top of the funnel activity that helps you grow your business. PR creates vast awareness that brings potential leads in. Leads = customers, customers = revenue and revenue = growth.

PR, like marketing, has channels. Depending on your PR objective, you implement different channels. A few examples are:

Media relations

Content creation (thought...

Use PR to grow your business

With the advent of social media and digital marketing, organizations have access to fresh, new ways to increase their media coverage and improve media relations. While a marketing team used to be limited to traditional advertising methods such as TV, billboards, and the like, brands can now run social media campaigns and leverage relationships with influencers to meet their public relations (PR) goals.

It's true that there are new, effective ways to boost your PR activity positively, but the recipe for success remains the same; come up with a good PR strategy! Brands have far more options now to build brand awareness and expand their customer base, but it's still vital to discover exactly which strategies can help your brand grow. 

In this article, we're going to take a look at some of the best PR strategies that you should consider.

Why is PR important?

PR is more than simply putting out a press release for your new product, service, or company. PR...

There is a *right time* to hire PR for your business and it may not be when you think it is. Here’s a common example of a conversation that I have a lot with companies who think they are ready for public relations:

Business: “We’re ready for PR, we want to be famous - actually, we want to be in TechCrunch”

Andrea:  “Why do you want to be in TechCrunch”

Business: It’s a rite of passage!

Andrea: Are your customers reading TechCrunch?

Business: Oh um, well maybe? 

Andrea: Then why do you want to be in there?

Business: It’s TechCrunch!

Andrea: Totally, but let’s talk about why you really want this right now. 

This example is powerful because like any other marketing strategy, there has to be an objective. The whole entire point is to use PR as a top of the funnel activity to bring in leads, which will ultimately convert to sales -- so why target the wrong people off the bat?

It’s not as simple as...