Strategic PR is an integral part of a company’s marketing activities. However, as work takes up so much of our time, most people tend to think what they do is inherently interesting. Things like features, new software, and additional functionality seem important to the people creating them and bringing them to customers. Still, it cannot be said often enough – outside highly specialized industry media, no one cares about your product.
The only way to make what you do interesting outside the internal bubble is to link what you’re doing with larger societal trends and media discussions. To contextualize the impact your company is making on the world! Here’s how you use the current media trends in PR.
Read the news!
If the world is talking about how AI will kill jobs or how new EU sustainability regulations will impact corporate reporting, you won’t know about it unless you’re tapped in. Find the bigger media trends in your industry, and build your big announcement around those. We’re not saying you should stretch it too far, though. It doesn’t make sense for an enterprise SaaS company solving office efficiency to talk about water scarcity or food security. Definitely don’t try to loosely link your product to an ongoing conflict or natural disaster far away. But the war on Excel inefficiency or AI in sales applications could work!
Reading the news in your industry, be it trade media, business, or general tech, will mean you know what’s happening when you start to plan your big announcement to take those bigger media trends into your strategic PR planning phase. That way, what you send out will feel fresh, relevant, and interesting to news consumers.
Be specific about how you fit in.
People need to get the connection between what you do and the bigger picture. When tying your PR to bigger media trends, you must show a straightforward, easy-to-understand connection between your impact and the broader trend. Take, for example, software that provides fast and easy mortgage access. There is no apparent link to corporate sustainability or AI development here, but there is one to a declining housing market or increased rent prices.
If your big new product launch is titled “Company X launches best-in-class mortgage platform,” that doesn’t create a lot of traction. But if you title it “Putting roofs over people’s heads – company X launches platform Y,” you tie the news with the problem you’re trying to solve and also create enough mystery for the reader to want to read the article. That way, your company is placed in the right box, and people get it.
Use data. Lots of data.
It’s not always easy to get, but data proves your point. By linking to external sources that clearly show the scale of the problem you’re solving, such as the number of people in rental flats or the average time to get a mortgage, you show the scale of the issue. If you then have your own data showing the efficiency of your solution in tackling the problem, that’s a powerful way to show how your solution directly addresses a larger societal challenge.
When building your strategic PR plan, having complete awareness of what data you have available and being able to pull puts you ahead of the competition. You also provide journalists with great sources of information.
So, what next?
Think about which bigger trends you can tap into, and start mapping out relevant, concrete, and understandable links between what you do and what you’re solving. Then, build your strategic PR around this. That way, you can reach out to the media with something you know they’re talking about, offering a fresh perspective and solution that affects people’s everyday lives. There is no more powerful way to do PR.
