The business world is based on models. Their structure enables appropriate strategy, operations, and metrics. When a founding executive team pitches investors for funding, they eagerly explain their business model. Sales has a model for selling and enablement. Finance has one for growth, EBITDA, and cash. But what about PR teams? Should PR operate on a set model designed to maximize efficiency and results? Is there such a thing?
Yes. However, it’s a question you don’t hear often. Perhaps this post is the first time you’ve heard such a concept. A PR model? Why?
Let’s start with a sanity check
Many PR teams are viewed tactically by executives, Marketing, Sales, Product Management, and others. To them, there’s no thought of a strategic operating model. PR strategy, sure. PR plan, yes. But PR model, which guides strategy and planning? Huh? As one PR manager once said to me, “PR is a glorified admin job” consisting of meeting scheduling and press release factories. As a PR practitioner for years, I saw how some constituents viewed the profession as glorified admins. They weren’t being rude. It wasn’t personal. It is what they believed based on MBA programs or experience. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. It wasn’t their fault. For many of them, they desired guidance.
Unfortunately, I saw my share of PR agencies and inhouse practitioners propagate the misperceptions. They missed the opportunity to reset expectations and advise media-savvy PR methodology. They executed misguided requests as a result. It was like a Nike commercial applied to PR execution – “Just Do It.”
“Just do a press release for that MQ placement or market share report.”
“Just do a press release about my ‘top exec’ award.”
“Just do a press release for my product because I need to sell more.”
“Just do a press release on why we’re better than competitor ‘X’.”
“Just do it because our CEO asked.”
“Just do it because the Marketing team needs leads.”
“Just get me in the Wall Street Journal – I want a dot mugshot on A1.”
“Just get me on CNBC.”
“Just make sure they remove our competitors from the story.”
“Just make sure I get to edit the story before they print.”
Despite this naivete, I crossed paths with great partners who respected the strategic power of PR. I am not alone. Other PR practitioners are fortunate to have collegial business partners who welcome a consultative approach and are willing to follow PR’s lead. They expect PR to know the right strategy, solution, or tactic. They expect PR teams to be media-savvy. Instead of “Just Do It,” they expect us to “Just Do It Right.”
With that class of partner, PR can establish a sophisticated program that outclasses competitive communications teams who are stuck executing the juvenile requests above. Those unlucky PR teams shortchange their brand image, demand generation, and business. It’s a wide gap between PR as a glorified admin and PR as a consultative partner leading the way.
For the good of the PR profession, it’s time that cycle ends. The difference between PR teams controlling their destiny and those who lose control over their charter is glaring. PR must be accountable for protecting and promoting its charter, or others will dictate it for them. That’s why the function needs an operating model to rationalize its actions and KPIs. PR must educate the business on its operational philosophy and have conviction to see it through. Just like Sales, Finance, and CEOs.
A PR team’s destiny hinges on a critical choice between two models that enable two divergent paths. One is beneficial, the other harmful. Welcome to the decision of all decisions PR must make – the conscientious choice between adopting a “top-tier” or “any-tier” operating model.
Academically, it’s easy to choose which PR model is better for your business – the former. Yet so many PR teams operate on an any-tier basis despite the implications. Let’s describe both and explore their benefits and shortcomings.
The Merits of Top-tier PR
The top-tier PR model is based on a select group of key media who matter most to your business. It’s not a quantity game. It’s a quality game aimed at the most crucial influencers covering your space. Everything revolves around the alphas who lead pack journalism within an industry.
The model’s fundamental deliverable is a top-tier list of those key media. The list drives all PR operations and metrics. It is a short list. It may have 10 to 20 contacts from 10-15 business, financial, and trade media. Maybe 40 to 50 for F500s and public multinational corporations.
The top-tier list includes more than reporters you know. It includes high-priority journalists with whom you do not have current relations. Build rapport, effectively influence them, and the rest will follow. Spend time and budget on top-tier influencers, and avoid additional PR costs aimed at lower-tier press. The top-tier model leverages economies of scale tops-down, providing logical justification for PR activity.
Operating a top-tier PR program requires engaging the media list with two core skills:
- Media relationships
- Pitch prowess
A top-tier PR operating model requires constant cultivation of press relationships. The top-tier list includes more than reporters you know. It includes high-priority journalists with whom you do not have current relations.
As PR teams learn their top-tier contacts, they customize actual story ideas for each journalist on a consistent tempo without neglecting or overwhelming them. For instance, a Bloomberg or Reuters reporter may be engaged less than a trade reporter. A features reporter may be engaged every few months compared to a news writer touched biweekly. The strength of media relationships relies on the creative ideation of pitching. The better the pitching skill, the more media view PR managers as worth their time, increasing trust and interaction. What’s key is conceiving a newsworthy, objective story idea tailored to the journalist’s beat, interest, and personal brand.
As part of pitch development, PR must understand the media’s operating model, which is based on the sacred principle of objectivity. Without objectivity, the free press loses all credibility. It’s why U.S. journalism schools call American media the “Fourth Estate.” The media are expected to uphold their integrity at the same standard as the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government.
So how does a PR team pitch for a company yet bridge the gap between subjectivity and objectivity? Marketing, Sales, and product teams are subjective. They promote their wares and undercut competitors. But media never break their code of objectivity. PR must broker this gap to support both sides.
The top-tier model’s foundational pillars of relationship-building and pitch prowess enable natural dialogue between PR and media. They can discuss the newsworthiness of a company or product mapped to a broader trend or academic topic. This dialogue strengthens relationships and increases the probability that media will act.
Build relations over time, and pitch the right story idea to the right editor or reporter who matters most to your industry, company, and customer. Shape stories collaboratively with media. Be surgical in driving quality coverage over quantity. This is media-savvy top-tier PR. It’s an organic, ongoing line of high-touch communication with top-tier media that enables PR to impact brands and go-to-market motions.
For example, sophisticated marketing teams execute integrated marketing campaigns (IMCs) planned quarters ahead. Sophisticated PR teams develop media relationships and plan touch points months in advance. Together, PR and Marketing can time media engagement with a fiscal year’s slate of product launches, events, and content marketing. This makes PR a seamless part of an integrated marketing plan with its own media engagement roadmap driving awareness and demand for go-to-market teams.
With a top-tier model, PR only needs to track results with four KPIs. These KPIs have nothing to do with the number of press releases issued or stories earned. What matters is pitch success, share of voice, comparative tone, and the percentage of total coverage that results from top-tier media. (Learn more about the 4 PR KPIs that matter and how to measure them.) With all effort centered on media who matter most to the business, PR uses these KPIs to optimize budget and justify its cost structure.
Focus wins. In the press and on the balance sheet.
The Pitfalls of “Any-tier” PR
Contrary to the top-tier PR approach, too many agencies and inhouse teams consider volume as validation of performance and success. The prevailing belief is that more media targets from any tier, combined with more briefings, press releases, and coverage, produce a better PR program. But there are pitfalls to any-tier PR efforts, the most severe being brand damage to PR practitioners, agencies, and the businesses or products they promote.
In any-tier PR programs, media lists are extensive. They are master lists of contacts from media big and small, important and peripheral. Top-tier media are listed alongside journalists from less influential, amateur, or suspect media organizations. There are no productive efforts to discern and develop relationships with top-tier media. No effort is made to plan an engagement tempo and customize pitches for each contact. PR budget is spent engaging all media, regardless of influence.
Whether it’s said or not, all that matters are vanity metrics tied to the quantity of coverage that will make executives, marketing, sales, and product teams happy. PR teams blast media with various story pitches as well as press releases, blog posts, social posts, alerts, and invites to events and webinars. They fail to customize pitches for specific reporters.
Several years ago, a collegial friend leading a F500 comms team told me his PR managers were ordered by a marketing executive to conduct a rolling thunder campaign consisting of 50 press releases distributed across the wire and emailed to media in 50 days – including weekends and holidays. He challenged the marketing VP, saying the company lacked 50 news items to announce. He raised concerns about saturating or angering the press corps. He explained academically why the idea was fraught with peril and offered alternative ideas.
She questioned his can-do attitude and told him to make up 50. He quit rather than commit reputational suicide with the press. How do I know? I was interviewing with the team. Upon hearing his resignation over the preposterous idea, I withdrew my candidacy.
In his absence, the 50-day barrage took place with miserable results. It was a classic example of a marketing VP with no PR or journalism acumen winning a “marketing PR” Darwin award instead of trusting the comms pros to conduct media-savvy PR. My friend and I both avoided reputational suicide with media we knew and those we would know later in our careers.
The flurry of email, lack of personalization, and poor media savvy frustrate higher-tier press. They receive hundreds of emails, tweets, and texts a day – more than CEOs of major companies. They have no choice but to ignore, or worse, blackball PR practitioners who send “junk mail.” Any-tier practitioners who are blind to this fact panic about low response rates from media, which fuels the addiction. They continue blasting large media lists, hoping enough will engage to prevent complaints from the business. PR spam-a-thons become media delete-a-thons. This pointless cycle results in PR denigrating into yes men and CYA artists instead of media-savvy business leaders.
As a client, I remember calling out agency AEs for producing a poor media list for a product announcement. There were 108 contacts on the list. They lacked close relations with most of them. Seven were from the Wall Street Journal. Five from Reuters. Four or five were from Bloomberg. If custom pitches were created – which they weren’t – only one contact from each of those business media was relevant.
The list also included one reporter from the Associated Press, who never wrote about vendor products. A few each from Forbes and Fortune, who also would never cover products. One of them wasn’t even at Forbes anymore – the agency’s list was outdated. FastCompany. Inc. Wired. All inappropriate targets for the news at hand.
The email pitch was the same for all 108 targets. It was drafted by the agency without product or industry acumen. My inhouse team rewrote it. The number of meetings, emails, and days it took the agency and inhouse team to prepare was ridiculous. We had to pay hourly billing rates to the agency regardless of execution time and results – from $100 an hour to as high as $350-$450 an hour depending on the titles involved, resulting in thousands of dollars for one announcement.
This experience shaped my perspective. PR was losing control. I realized that the profession needed a focused, top-tier model to base strategy, planning, and execution. The agency model of tactical any-tier PR to achieve customer satisfaction wasn’t working. Money was at stake. It is extremely difficult proving ROI in an any-tier model. If a generic pitch to 108 contacts generates 5 to 8 briefings, 6 earned stories, yet only 2 or 3 are from top-tier press, are the headcount cost, agency spend, and execution time worth it? Of course not.
THE NOTION OF ICPs AND RELEVANCE TO PR
The truth is, PR’s value is unrealized when operating an any-tier program. A random, nonsensical approach degrades PR’s brand image. However, a top-tier model leads PR teams to optimize share of voice among the most influential media covering a space. Such optimization makes it easier to prove ROI and spotlight adjustments to finetune further return on PR agency spend, headcount hours, and integrated marketing support. The difference between the two models is significant.
Consider this perspective on how other enterprise functional groups target for success. High-performing Sales and Marketing teams have ideal customer profiles (ICP). All demand gen spend and sales execution is spent attracting and closing ICPs as long-term customers. HR has ICPs too – ideal candidate profiles. These ICPs are prototypical candidates with hard skills that map perfectly to job reqs and soft skills that fit corporate culture.
PR has media lists, but are they comprised of top-tier “ICP” media targets? Not in an any-tier model. But in a top-tier model, they are, making metrics more pertinent to the business. A top-tier PR model is a competitive advantage. It elevates PR’s strategic value, impact, and brand image within companies. Those who realize the difference and capitalize on it stand out in a crowded marketplace, with PR leading the way.
Summary of Top-tier PR
- Rationalize, document a top-tier media list
- Cultivate genuine relationships with top-tier contacts
- Plan engagement tempo for each top-tier contact
- Customize story and pitch ideas for each top-tier contact
- Measure through four key KPIs
