Business mentor: Understanding PR tools the key to promoting your business

Public relations on a shoestring - what small things go a long way?

Richard Blundell, PR consultant, replies:

The perception of what public relations (PR) can achieve is often at odds with what it can actually deliver.

An understanding of the basic PR tools can enable you to match your aspirations for what PR can achieve for your business with the most realistic outcomes.

PR embraces many tools from simple company profiles through to elaborate special events. In this short reply let us concentrate on the highest profile of these tools: the ability to get your business mentioned favourably in the media.

A dictionary definition of PR - the practice of creating and maintaining goodwill among the public towards a business - contains three key words: creating, maintaining and public.

Any PR programme targeting media exposure will incorporate all three.

The key to creating is the news value of your message. Newspapers by their very name require news. The electronic media (radio, TV, internet) base their editorial on the same promise.

PR is the dissemination of your news, it is not free advertising; news that is genuine in the eye of your chosen media and to the readers or viewers of that media.

You may be excited about a new colour scheme on the widget that you market but that is not news. A whole new widget concept may be news.

Maintaining the goodwill created by your news requires an ongoing PR programme.

Be prepared to follow up your initial news release with a series of news stories to keep your name in the media.

This can often require you to comment on events relevant to your business that are newsworthy in their own right.

The most important part of your PR programme is to define your public. Is it your staff, your distributors, your end customers, your competitors, your potential investors or the public at large?

Defining your public enables you to target your PR, which is increasingly important given the choices in today's media world.

A PR programme for a small charitable organisation that I recently assisted illustrates that if you focus on all three key words small PR tools can go a long way.

The manager decided they had some genuine news (71 per cent growth in the past two years) and who their public would be (business sector).

The relevant media were then rung to develop an e-mail address list for the initial press release. Targeting was very important in this example, as there are specialist business publications and specialist business sectors in all major media.

I spent two to three hours assisting the manager in writing the initial release and planning future releases.

A simple but in this case highly effective start to a PR programme.

* Richard Blundell can be contacted on 09 520-4885.

* Send your Mentor questions to: Ellen_Read@nzherald.co.nz. Answers will be provided by Business in the Community's Business Mentor Programme.