What’s a PR coach?

NewsBusiness Director David Bateson

Who am I?

Over the years I’ve helped clients get media coverage anywhere from local papers to industry magazines right up to national coverage in major media – newspapers and magazines and on radio and breakfast television and primetime television news. We even had one client flown over to the US to be interviewed by a very well known American TV host as a result of TV coverage here in Australia. A conservative valuation of 700+ media appearances we have got for our clients is in the multimillions of dollars.

But…

I’ve also seen a lot of businesses with a great story to tell not get coverage because they didn’t know how to do it, or maybe thought that their business wasn’t ‘newsworthy’. And in other instances I’ve seen businesses get great coverage, but then not use it properly in their marketing and so to a large degree waste it.

This is one of the problems of the different ‘silos’ in business – ‘PR’ is put in one box and ‘marketing’ in another and so one doesn’t know what the other is doing and so opportunities are missed. This happens in small businesses and large ones. The most successful – in both camps – are the ones that get everything working together.

PR is dismissed by many businesses for two reasons – it’s too hard and it’s too expensive

And I agree on both points.

It IS hard and when I made the transition from a career in sales to PR I had to unlearn a lot of what I used to do in sales. Unlike many people in PR I had done the hard yards in sales and so when I almost stumbled into doing some PR ‘on the side’ as a sales exec for a company I was working for, I could not believe how powerful media coverage could be.

I suddenly became ‘famous’ (well in the industry I was working in) – according to a person I made a cold call on anyway – who’d just read about me in the industry magazine. A few doors opened and a number of high value sales happened without me really needing to do anything or meet or even speak to the new clients! This was when I realised the power of PR and how you could get it to work for you.

Getting media coverage is just the start…

So I set up a tiny PR agency for smaller and startup businesses and started to score some coverage for them. Which was great. But not all of my clients used it in their marketing – which you ABSOLUTELY MUST DO as not everyone sees your media coverage…

So yes PR is hard, but there are ways to improve your odds of getting coverage, and things YOU MUST DO to maximise the impact of any coverage.

And YES, if you take on a PR agency to get you coverage, it can be expensive, with generally no cast iron guarantee that the money you spend with them will get you any coverage at all.*

 

So here’s the thing – you CAN definitely do your own PR.

But you do have to know what you’re doing. And although I learnt on the job so to speak, I certainly made some mistakes. But sometimes you only get one shot.

The richest man in the world does his own PR. And several other well-known businesspeople do too – but that’s because they’re already famous and the media seeks them out. It wasn’t always like that for them. And lots of people also get burnt by one experience and never want to involve the media again – which is a shame …for them and their business

So that’s why I set up Your PR Coach. To help you get the media coverage you deserve, without it costing you a small fortune.**

Find out more…


*BTW we do actually offer a coverage guarantee – not a money back guarantee mind you, but a guarantee that if we don’t achieve coverage to the value of our fees within a certain time, we work for free until we do

**I am of course happy to do it all for you. But that would involve a very different level of ‘investment’…