Identifying Your Top 10

Story posted on 21 04, 2007

PR professionals constantly say that media outreach is about building relationships. For PR practitioners it is also about building trust. Ideally, you are letting a journalist know that the news you bring to them will always be fresh, exciting and something that their readers will care about. But we can't be all things to all newspapers and the reality is that your customers really only read a focused few pubs. So we recommend identifying your 10 most important publications and journalists. To do this you need to ask yourself a few questions:

What do my customers read?
What do my shareholders read?
What does the channel read?
Who influences my partners purchasing decisions?
Who monitors the industry?
Who understands the product?
Who can easily measure the value?
How often does a publication publish?
How many times a year can we realistically expect to be covered in this publication?
What publication do we have to be in?
Who might not cover today but is really paying attention to our business for future coverage?
Where do we need to have coverage in the next 6 months?
Who writes a lot and "gets it"?

By answering these questions you begin to create your "always" list. These are the people that you consistently send communications, newsletters, products and press releases to. They cover all your business bases from customers to partner to shareholders. And they are the first on your list to pre-brief when the big news comes up.