Really this blog could be a couple of lines long. PR is the art of relating a business, individual, cause, message or product to its public. It isn’t sales and it isn’t an SEO tool for generating backlinks. Can good PR help with sales and help with SEO? Yes, of course. But that shouldn’t be the core ambition of a good PR strategy.

In my view, PR is also more than just ‘getting things into the press’ – it is about understanding public sentiment, tapping into it, respecting it and ensuring your business or organisation (or that of your clients), is fit for purpose. 

At the heart of a good PR strategy is the story you’re trying to tell. A good story garners the interest of the media you’re targeting, the public you’re trying to reach and ultimately, any stakeholder you want to influence. And make no mistake, PR is about influence – and the story you create needs to influence the reader.

A good PR consultant doesn’t just churn out content and relentlessly throw it at the wall, ‘spray and pray’ doesn’t work. A good PR consultant takes the time to understand their client’s long-term business objectives and creates a strategy that helps them on that journey. One outcome of that strategy may be coverage in media, it may be content developed for sales teams, it may be a founder/ c-suite specific strategy of speaking engagements, and, of course, it may be all of that and more. 

There has been a growing trend for clients  to request ‘link backs’ for coverage achieved too. And while this is a logical ambition – it isn’t what a good PR strategy is set up to do. Requests for a MOZ-rating of XYZ or something similar is not the right approach. There are publications that may not rank well, but their morning email blast reaches hundreds or thousands of exactly the right people, so being featured in them is absolutely worthwhile. A good PR person will help their client understand this and will clearly outline how it adds value from the outset.

Coverage remains the ambition for PR people but the economics of publishing have dramatically swung in favour of paid opportunities as budgets are squeezed at publications and readership fragments across an ever-expanding sea of titles. Earned coverage has never been more aptly named and achieving it is becoming more and more difficult by the week. So PR must not stop at achieving it. A good PR team now understands what to do when the coverage is achieved, how it can be shared on social, used to update clients, or utilised in sales collateral.  

Great PR can be invaluable to any business. Not just for spreading news about the stories that matter to you, but also as an adviser on broader growth strategy. 

 PR isn’t a way to convert sales, a way to achieve bank-links or a way to generate leads. It can help but that isn’t the purpose. If that’s what you had in mind when you started looking for PR advice – you’re already heading for disappointment.