It’s free. It’s effective. It’s easy.
Public relations is, for most organizations, an underutilized marketing tool that straddles the advantages of social media marketing and paid advertising. If you really want to control your message and reach your target audience, of course you have to pay for that. However, effective PR can nonetheless extend your reach, sometimes considerably, and usually with your message intact, all for the same cost and effort as managing social media accounts.
If the following seems grossly oversimplified, it’s not. Writing a news release as an artform, to be sure, but submitting one is not complicated at all.
Start Locally
Local news media have fewer sources than, for example, national news media. This simply means that there is less competition. Consequently, it is far easier to be seen locally, and the challenge increases with each higher level (county, state, national, international). But, as you nurture media relationships and build a reputation within target communities, it gets easier to expand your reach. Unless you’re lucky enough to have sensational stories from the start, it’s usually a marathon, not a sprint.
A perennial event used to get no media attention at all. After just a year or two of promoting it, the following year a…
