10 Yetis Insight Blog - Top Tips For Securing The Maximum Amount of Coverage For Your Clients

If you are considering a career in PR and seek out advice from people who already work within the industry, there is a very strong chance that you will hear the phrases ‘ups and downs’, ‘peaks and troughs’ and ‘highs and lows’ banded around like they are going out of style.

It is, I’m afraid, undeniably true.

As a PR professional working across a range of different clients (here at 10 Yetis Digital each member of the PR team works on between 5-7 clients at any one time), you will have weeks when you can’t wait to hit send on the coverage report to your clients and show them how incredible you’ve been that week in securing a whole host of follow links on national news sites. There will also be weeks when you have to come to terms with the fact that, despite your best efforts, that press release with the great news hook or those feature pitch sell-ins that you spent so long putting a media list together for, just didn’t work in your favour.

All is not lost though, and before starting to panic that PR isn’t the right path for you, be aware that there are a number of effective ways that could just help you out the following week in salvaging back those longed-for links and client mentions.

Night Editors

Picture the scene. It took you weeks and weeks to convince a client to sign-off on a campaign idea or newsworthy angle that you’d had your heart set on for them, and you were as confident as the most confident PR there ever was that it was going to reward you with some fab coverage and follow links on all of the national sites and news publications.

Then it doesn’t get anywhere. No pick-up. No promising emails. No interest from follow-up calls to journalist. Nada.

Instead of giving up on the story before you leave the office that day, try selling in to the night editors of online sites to see if it might just be one for them. This is a tactic used very successfully here in the office recently to great effect. Yes it MIGHT mean having to respond to some out of office emails from the comfort of your sofa that evening, but it feels pretty darn good seeing the coverage appear on google the next morning when you arrive at work. Trust us.

New Feature Angles

If you have a client that is pretty niche in terms of the kind of product or service it offers to customers, but is still keen to improve its google ranking and SEO efforts, then it’s time to think outside of the box.

You might be stuck at a dead-end attempting to secure a client coverage in its trade or industry press, but try to find a newsworthy lifestyle link and sell in to the health, beauty, relationship, fitness or parenting media and you never know who might get back in touch keen to work with your client, sample their product/service, or what they are currently working on that your expert spokesperson could contribute towards.

Social Media

More and more PR’s are becoming increasingly reliant on the hashtag #journorequest, and for good reason.

Yes, it can be VERY hit and miss in terms of a lot of jokers wanting to take the p**s out of our industry, but here at 10 Yetis we have ALL managed to secure great pieces of coverage for our clients as a result of twitter engagements with journalist from the UK and other parts of the world which we otherwise would never have initially been in contact with through our media databases alone.

Recycled Stories

If you have a story for a client that didn’t manage to secure the desired level of coverage the first time you circulated it to press for one reason or another (half-term business/huge national news story/celebrity death etc.…), there is no reason why you can’t re-sell it in should a relevant story news story appear in the media that it lends itself well to.

Obviously a time sensitive story will not do well weeks after it was originally pitched to journalists, but a strong video campaign, PR stunt, interactive widget or set of concept images should hold their own long enough for journalists to still find the newsworthiness in them once they have time to appreciate them properly. Don’t give up hope!

Put In The Extra Hours

Finally, a method that I have recently found to be particularly effective in securing coverage for some of my clients.

Don’t be afraid to sell in a story or two over the weekend or during the weekday evenings. Many journalists working for the big national newspapers and news sites are NOT on a 9 ‘till 5 schedule, and are undoubtedly checking their emails well into the night and throughout the weekends. It therefore, to me, makes logical sense to email pitch them exclusive stories for my clients when I know the other thousands of PR’s won’t also be vying for their attention! Remember too, that many traditional PR’s will still sell-in ‘Sunday for Monday’ releases in a bid to get their stories seen above others.

Hopefully this has given you some encouragement and a little food for thought surrounding the multiple routes to take to ensure you know you’ve done everything possible to secure your clients the most amount of results possible.