As an entrepreneur or business owner, you may have considered hiring a freelance PR professional to help you build your brand and increase your visibility. In such a competitive industry, finding a PR Freelancer that best suits your needs can be difficult. How do you know who to choose? How much should you pay them? How do you know what is considered "good?" There are so many questions! 

In this blog, let’s focus on how to determine the costs of such services, once you have found a good match. Freelancers may charge anywhere from $50 to $250 per hour but the truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all answer as the cost depends on a variety of factors, including their experience, location, and the scope of the project. Additionally, it is not solely up to you to determine this rate – the professional will come in with their expected compensation. This is simply a benchmark for you to understand their fees.

Experience

According to a survey conducted by the Freelancers...

Clients across the board may be eager to start working with you – but do you want to work with them? As we PR professionals know, there are a handful of things that need to be in order with a client’s business before the business is actually ready for PR. To be sure you are setting yourself (and the client) up for success, here are the top 5 qualifying intake questions you’ll want to ask your client.  

1. What are your goals for using PR? Like any marketing strategy, it is important for clients to identify their company goals. Otherwise, how will you know where to start? If your client is unsure about their expectations, start by probing for their ‘pain points.’ By getting your client thinking about the issues they’ve already run into with their business, you can properly assess their needs (and not make the same mistakes again!). Every company requires a different approach, so be sure to consider whether your skill set meets their goals...

Public Relations holds a unique power - it’s one business unit that truly supports every other business function within an organization. From sales to engineering, PR serves as a necessary link connecting a company’s work with the right audience for their product or service. It can be important to pinpoint exactly how PR is supporting each business function to maximally extract the benefits. Here are the different ways that Public Relations can support your business development, sales, marketing, and engineering plans.

Business Development

• Generating Brand Awareness - leads to easier sales: As you know by now, effective PR increases brand awareness. Whether you are trying to drum up more customers or build partnerships, having an already aware audience is a great starting point. Consumers are more likely to trust and invest in familiar brands and likewise, partners, investors, customers, and influencers almost always prefer companies who have already established a...

The majority of PR professionals will tell you: public relations can be difficult to explain to the c-suite, or other business executives. It’s often nuanced, layered with soft skills, and doesn’t always have the most linear measurement to track progress. The frustrating part is that it does have the capacity to create massive business impact. 

So oftentimes, PR professionals are tasked with not only having to first sell executives on the value of PR, but then follow that up with tangible results. Not surprising, it’s also difficult to build rapport with the C-Suite themselves as a new hire. They are busy people and too commonly, executive management's primary point of contact with the PR team is during crisis management. Consider the ways that you could build a more consistent relationship with management, whether that be regular meetings or monthly reports. You’ll need to prove your PR approach is worth the C-Suite’s investment both financially...

Working from home has a lot of benefits, like maintaining a flexible schedule or relaxed dress code. But when work teams have only met through a Zoom meeting or email chain, it can be difficult to build a tight-knit, collaborative, and supportive dynamic. When a company builds a strong, trustworthy team, productivity can skyrocket.  

Here are a few ways you can cultivate those relationships, near or far. 

Check-Ins

Encourage your coworkers to get to know each other past the bare minimum required for work. Check in with each other! Sharing a high and low of your day, what keurig coffee cup you’re sipping, or vacation plans for the weekend instill a sense of community and camaraderie. We work best with those we know– not strangers! 

This can be done in a few different ways. One idea is to set up a “good news” channel on whatever messaging platform your company uses. This can serve as a space for employees to share personal, family, or work...

“I want to be quoted as an expert in [insert outlet here].” 

As remote PR professionals, we certainly hear that a lot. While it’s easy to retort, “well, ARE YOU an expert?” it’s important to remember that anyone that wants to be quoted does think they indeed are an expert and have valuable things to say to the audience(s) of their target publications. Oftentimes, however, they want to be quoted simply for the sake of talking about their company and selling more stuff. And that’s the wrong way to approach the problem.

Reporters and editors aren’t fools. They know a simple mention or a quote from a popular blog or publication can help companies get a lot of attention from customers and other media. That’s why they’re discerning about what types of articles they write and the sources they choose. They need to make sure that the topic is of interest to their audience because that means more page views, and of course, more...

Gaining traction with the “media that matters” in the B2B market is not just about pitching and press releases. For companies to meet their marketing and business goals, they need to work with their PR partners to develop a comprehensive strategy that’s built on: 

• Targeted research and relationship building
• Compelling pitches and strategic outreach
• Targeted analysis post-campaign

 We asked three PR professionals with clients in the B2B sector – Dana Sullivan Kilroy, principal at The Ferraro Group, Laura Borgstede, founder and CEO of Calysto Communications, and Shirley Johnson, founder and owner of Stage 1 Public Relations – for their tips and strategies for getting meaningful coverage for their B2B clients.

Remote PR Jobs: What is the best piece of advice you can give a new PR professional when they enter the B2B space? 

Borgstede: Do the research. Learn your industry inside and out. Take the time to read the top industry...

The past 18 months have been challenging for businesses, but none more so than small and midsize businesses (SMBs). They’ve had to scramble and pivot to stay relevant in a COVID world. Despite the challenges, many have not only survived, but thrived, and are ready to grow. For some, that means launching a PR strategy to help bolster their brand and differentiate themselves from their competitors.

We asked four PR professionals that work with SMBs— Patricia Baronowski-Schneider, president and CEO of Pristine Advisers; Ronai Rivera, owner at Anomaly the Agency; Colin Bennett, founder and owner of C.L. Bennett PR, and Luiza Leal, marketing specialist and professional writer—for tips and strategies for approaching these companies as they prepare to move forward post-COVID.

Listening is Key

Remote PR Jobs: What is the best piece of advice you can give a new PR professional when they are targeting the SMB space?

 Baronowski-Schneider: I believe the best piece of...

Mental Health is one of the most important topics of discussion in recent times and rightfully so. As anyone working at home over the past 18 months can tell you, staring at the same four walls every day is not always good for the soul—or the mind. Those that were already working from home, such as remote PR professionals, were especially hard hit when the quarantine locked everything down; not only were they staying at home for work, but now they also couldn’t leave it for pleasure. That negatively impacted mental health for many.

Although restrictions are lifting, mental health should still be top of mind for remote PR professionals. Yes, that means taking better care of YOU and understanding how your actions can encourage others to protect your mental health as well. 

Bring on the Fuzzy Slippers

Let’s face it, working remotely has some definite perks. For example, no one takes the last cup of coffee and leaves the pot on the burner, and no one’s...

As a PR professional, you’re well-versed in writing guest posts/contributed content (same thing) on behalf of your executives, spokespeople, or even yourself. You’ve determined the outlets your audience is reading or watching, you’ve created a refined media target list, and you have a great topic in mind for your client or subject matter expert (SME).

More often than not however, the first step to getting your content published is pitching the reporter an abstract of what it is about. An abstract is an effective description of what you are proposing to write and a lot of reporters will ask for this FIRST to be sure the final content you deliver is aligned with their media outlet’s own objectives. There are some exceptions where an editor won’t want or need an abstract, but it’s always important to ask and tailor your process to what best fits theirs. 

You May Also Like: Pro Tips to Creating a Media List

What is an abstract?

Think of your...