If you’re wondering why your coworkers have been pinching you all morning, here’s a hint: It’s St. Patrick’s Day. Did you forget to wear green? Since luck is top-of-mind today, I think it’s the perfect opportunity to talk about the importance of planning. I cannot stress this enough: Do not leave your PR strategy to chance. Rolling the dice and hoping for the best is not a strategy.
Let’s pretend you’re a medical device maker with a new product set to launch next week. You’re planning to issue a press release. However, that press release should be the tip of your planning iceberg. (If you just read that line and thought “uh oh…,” give me a call asap.) Here are some other basic things to consider:
- Press kit. What will you do if a reporter asks for more details about your new product? You’ll want to be prepared with a press kit you can send. At a minimum, the press kit should contain a product fact sheet, a company fact sheet and a product FAQ, plus high resolution product images and your company’s logo. Based on your unique needs, it might make sense to include other elements, particularly if your technology is complicated.
- Spokesperson. What will you do if the reporter wants to speak with someone at your company? Before any press release leaves your office, identify who will serve as spokesperson. Sometimes it makes sense to identify a couple of people who can respond to different aspects of the story. It could be a company researcher or clinical trial investigator to handle the science-based questions, and a C-level exec to handle questions about corporate strategy. You’ll want to identify these folks in advance, make sure they’re amenable to the spokesperson role and find out their schedules the week of the announcement. There’s nothing worse than finding out at the last minute that your star spokesperson is incommunicado when you need her.
- Spokesperson prep. What will it take to ensure your spokesperson is prepared? I recommend using your key messages (you did refine your key messages after reading last week’s blog post, right?) as a starting point for creating talking points for the interview. You might also think about conducting a mock interview. We’ll get into media training in detail in a future post.
That’s my bare-bones, at-a-minimum, the least you can do planning recommendation. I highly recommend doing a comprehensive assessment of your overall PR strategy to uncover potential issues and make a plan. The team at Kovak-Likly can help with that, whether you need a basic strategy or a full, comprehensive marketing communications plan. Oh, and if I still haven’t convinced you of the need to plan to succeed, take a look at Business Insider’s summary of the 15 biggest PR disasters of the decade. Shoot me an email when you figure out what all 15 fails had in common.
– BML
