15 Tactics for Managing Effective PR Teams
Something ironic about the public relations industry as a whole is its reputation problem. Too many CEOs and marketing professionals have been burned by PR teams that they feel have failed to deliver on their promises.
Of course, those of us who have experienced successful PR engagements with teams understand it takes two to tango. However, some PR teams often rest on their early achievements before working hard again to renew a contract, wait around for the client to tell them what to do, or blame the company when coverage results fail to meet expectations.
Obviously, every company and PR team is different because these groups are not collections of identical robots; they are not ones and zeros. They are groups of people – all with different skills, preferences, personalities, experiences, connections and creativity levels.
However, there are ways to standardize and apply best practices to public relations to help companies achieve their business goals. Whether handled in-house or outsourced externally to a single contractor or agency, fostering an effective partnership with your PR resources is essential for achieving your organizational goals and maximizing your budget.
As part of our 15th-anniversary celebration, Technica shares its 15 top tactics for getting superior results and value from your PR team.
1) Define Clear Objectives and Communicate Them
PR is one of the most cost-effective tools for gaining brand awareness, but only when those tools are applied toward achieving the same goals. Start by sharing your overall business goals with your PR team (internal or external) so that they can establish clear PR-related initiatives that can support achieving those goals. To ensure success, it’s important to ensure that your goals follow the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) framework.
For example, many executives and startup founders see being in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal (WSJ) as a key goal of their PR strategy. While inclusion in those publications is a big achievement, it might not actually further a company’s business goals. Sometimes, these publications can provide a large amount of brand awareness to a general audience, not an audience of your key customers. Often, trade publications are a better fit for the power of PR to drive sales. Additionally, while some WSJ coverage certainly meets the “S” or Specific criteria, the PR team may have to lean on the “A” Achievable or “R” Realistic components of goal setting and devise a more feasible goal.
Next, make sure decision-makers at the company, marketing, sales, C-suite, advisors, and investors clearly understand the goals the PR team will be focused on, making adjustments for any feedback. You want to avoid setting a PR team on a path only to be forced to change their direction or let them go because the outcomes do not align with other decision-makers’ expectations. Once goals are created and agreed upon, everyone can work towards the same outcomes.
How to Diagnose this Problem: If your company’s employees are frustrated with the results of your PR program or are looking for something different, the company’s goals and PR initiatives may not be in alignment.
2) Be in Communication
Effective communication is the linchpin in avoiding the frustration experienced by PR teams. Whether they are waiting for content approvals, looking for updates from the company for future news, or simply seeking to learn more from the company’s leadership on its vision for the industry, you’d be surprised how often PR teams are kept in the dark until the very last minute.
Prolonged periods of uncertainty slow progress on projects and can leave teams feeling stranded, especially when last-minute opportunities arise with reporters on tight deadlines. In the dynamic media landscape, where quick responses to current events can make or break your relevance, delays in communication can kill an opportunity—and the ability to establish a relationship with a reporter.
By prioritizing open and consistent communication, companies can create an environment where PR teams can act quickly to seize opportunities and maintain a competitive edge in their industry.
How to Diagnose this Problem: If your PR team always seems to rush at the last minute or wait until the deadline to receive updates on a campaign, consider how your communication with them could be improved to help them be more proactive.
3) Get Your PR Team into Your Visionary’s Head
Much like the open office concept, which sought to facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas between disparate employees, regular connections and communications with company leaders can help your PR team understand your spokespeople on a more connected level.
It’s essential to always ensure that your PR team has open access to the leaders behind the company or business unity. They should have regular coffees (in-person or virtual) to talk shop about the company, the industry, and everything in between. The spokespeople should send the PR team notes on articles and news items they find and offer insights or counterpoints to what was covered.
This deeper understanding and connection help your PR team identify more opportunities to pursue and generate more creative ideas.
How to Diagnose this Problem: Companies in which the PR team is siloed under marketing and does not regularly have access to the C-suite may suffer from communication challenges that are hindering the team’s success.
4) Be Open with Numbers
At Technica, our storytelling strategy extends beyond awareness to establish credibility, viability, deliverability and trustworthiness. These factors are best established with statistics, numbers, and hard facts. At best, reporters often view companies unwilling to be open about the facts of their business as not being prepared or serious. At worst, a reporter might think the company has something to hide and start digging to uncover something they don’t want the media to know.
Sometimes, executives feel nervous about revealing sensitive information about their solution or market traction. In such cases, numbers can be hedged in percentages or “up to” statements that give the company a hard number to show without putting itself at risk.
How to Diagnose this Problem: Does your company routinely remove hard facts or numbers from your announcements? If so, watch for these instances in the future and fight to keep the information in the content.
5) Plan Collaboratively
Most C-suite executives fail to consider how their strategic or business decisions might impact their internal or external communication programs. Too frequently, PR teams are only involved in executive-level decisions during a crisis.
Having your communications team at the C-suite table when key decisions are made (or at least consulted before moves are final) can ensure that concepts like public perception, reputation risks, or internal complications can be considered. Additionally, a PR team will often have ideas on how to make a decision or initiative more successful. Having them at the table helps you have diverse opinions and guarantees brand awareness considerations are included in the strategic process.
How to Diagnose this Problem: If unilateral decisions are made at the company without gaining input from your PR team, the company is missing out on key information it could use to make more informed decisions.
6) Talk Like a Laymen
No one likes being ‘sold’ to, especially reporters. They have very high bars for transparency and are vigilantly skeptical about information coming from a company, as it is naturally self-serving and self-promotional.
A clear red flag for journalists is company documents that use industry jargon, unsubstantiated claims, or flowery language. In the biz, they call this “marketing-speak.” This type of release copy slows them down and forces them to rephrase or reimagine the messages the company is attempting to convey into “news-speak.” Too much marketing-speak in a document might cause the journalist to give up on the whole endeavor of covering the company altogether, as their job is to convey information in ways everyone can understand.
Whether explaining complex concepts in simple terms or avoiding industry-specific buzzwords, speaking plainly ensures that messages get past the journalist gate, resonate with a broader audience and build stronger relationships with customers and stakeholders.
How to Diagnose this Problem: Check to see how much marketing-speak you are allowing in your outward-facing documents. Whether it’s put in by a PR team or by someone in the company, the more that’s allowed in final documents, the higher the likelihood it could be hindering the success of your PR efforts. Additionally, if one executive at the company insists on using language in a way you think is detrimental to the success of the communication, have a one-on-one chat with them to explain the value of messaging to meet the layman where they are.
7) Support and Encourage the Creation of Compelling Storylines
Reporters are looking for things that are new, novel, unique, and groundbreaking. Your PR team is likely coming up with dozens of such storylines regularly. How many of those are you shooting down simply because it seems too risky or out of step with your established brand?
At the beginning of an engagement, PR teams are typically so excited about your offering and working with you that they develop a variety of creative ideas to propel your brand. Too often, company executives shoot these down and place guardrails around what they want to see from the firm. Forced to stay within these boundaries, the PR team’s creativity tends to fall.
How to Diagnose this Problem: Evaluate how often you (or another person at the company) shoot(s) down novel ideas from your team because you don’t immediately see how it could connect to more sales. Be on the lookout the next time an idea is offered, and rather than shooting it down, use it as fodder to build on the idea to bring it more into alignment with your expectations.
8) Innovate Your PR Program
The media landscape is constantly changing, requiring PR teams and their programs to evolve alongside them. Similar to encouraging creative storylines, you can also encourage your teams to try new media tactics and channels to expand your brand’s reach. Keep your PR program from stagnating by encouraging your team to explore new ideas, experiment with different approaches, consider new channels and embrace emerging trends in the media landscape.
Ask about how to incorporate podcasts, Substack newsletters, or TikTok videos into your strategies. Look at adjacent strategies, like influencer marketing, as avenues to attract large audiences who might not read traditional print news. Oftentimes, a podcast or newsletter might have a small subscriber base but one that is hyper-targeted to the client’s market or industry. Participating as a guest on that podcast or contributing content to that newsletter can provide a unique ability to engage with the perfect audience.
How to Diagnose this Problem: If you feel like you have been doing the same thing repeatedly, consider asking your PR team what they would do if there were no barriers and money were no object. Work those ideas until they are manageable enough to be executed.
9) Don’t Mix Your Messages
Clarity in communication increases the success of a media campaign. However, sometimes executives want to include a variety of news items or messages into a single initiative. Mixing messages in your announcements leads to confusion and dilutes the intended impact of the communication.
A simple example of this is releasing four new products in a single day and including them all in one press release. This sounds like a hypothetical, but in fact, it actually happened at Technica against our adamant advice. Because each product served a separate function in the industry ecosystem, which was covered by different types of reporters, the media coverage was sparse. The single release couldn’t provide enough messaging for each product to help convey the qualities of these products that made them unique to the market. Instead, the release could only provide generic, top-level information, which is not convincing enough for the media and the market to rise above the noise.
How to Diagnose this Problem: Make sure your outbound communications don’t attempt to say too much. Think about the single most important takeaway from a piece of given content, and focus your efforts on making sure the entire communication supports that takeaway.
10) Stop Scooping Yourself
It’s common for company executives or stakeholders to be so excited about a new development that they rush to tell everyone about it. They might post it on social media, add it to a newsletter, or send an email to suppliers. Vendors might be so happy to be working with the company that they post their own release without your permission or input. This premature release of information can significantly undercut the effectiveness of ensuing media campaigns. You would be surprised how many reporters are following your company on social media or subscribing to your newsletter until a reporter contacts you asking for comment, or a piece of news you didn’t intend to release ends up as a news story.
Being strategic about releasing company developments ensures that you can refine your message surrounding the milestone and maximize its media exposure.
How to Diagnose this Problem: Typically, this shows up as eager CEOs posting on their socials or telling stakeholders about developments immediately when they happen. It can also appear as hinting to reporters that something will happen soon, only for it to be delayed, and by then, it’s too late to take it back. Ensure you have a clear employee communications guidelines document in your employee handbook that outlines when employees are allowed to talk about certain company items.
11) Be Prompt With Approvals
Waiting too long to deliver feedback on your PR team’s outputs, whether it’s a release draft or outcomes of a pitching effort, can slow and stall progress. This directly affects the success of your PR campaigns because any delay means there’s less time to pitch reporters and even less time for journalists to craft a piece of coverage.
At Technica, our policy is not to pitch any news announcements before they are final. This is because anytime you tell a reporter that the copy you are sending is a draft, they view it as something they don’t need to handle immediately. The company comes across as unorganized and as if it’s rushing. Additionally, if you do send a draft release, it’s hard to guarantee that when you send the final version the old copy will not be used. On top of this, going back and forth with reporters with updated drafts is so tedious, time-consuming and inefficient. By offering prompt and constructive feedback, content creation and campaigns can run at steady speeds to give teams more time to be successful.
How to Diagnose this Problem: Watch how long it takes your company to provide feedback to the PR team on content edits. Anything longer than a few days slows down your whole program.
12) Share Performance Feedback, No Matter How Small
It’s frequent that a PR team will meet its deliverables, land wins, and find themselves blindsided with a notice to end a contract. While they thought they were being successful, in reality, people at the company were unhappy, and no one told them. PR programs are quite nimble entities. They can flip and pivot at a moment’s notice to take advantage of a new idea or opportunity. However, executives all too frequently fail to provide feedback to their PR teams to help improve outcomes.
Constructive feedback, big and small, can enhance the relationship between the company and the PR team. By not allowing things to fester and speaking up about them, you allow your PR team to make adjustments and improvements, ultimately improving your PR program’s success. Such conversations can also enlighten you or your C-suite on the company’s role in supporting or undercutting the success of its PR campaigns.
How to Diagnose this Problem: If you or your executives are unhappy with your PR program and have not shared it with your team, you might want to consider having a chat with your team to clear the air and strengthen your relationship.
13) Activate Your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
Often, a company founder does it all, including serving as the spokesperson for the company. However, once the PR machine is up and running, new sales, investor, and partnership opportunities will come to the company and take up much of the C-suite’s time. You don’t want to turn down a media interview or speaking opportunity because your only spokesperson is too busy working in the business.
That’s why it’s important to identify and empower other people within the company to speak on behalf of the business. These can be salespeople with deep expertise in a certain segment or technical employees who hold specialized knowledge. These people can take lower-level media interviews, draft industry-specific content, and speak at conferences deemed too small for the C-suite to attend. Leveraging SMEs allows for richer, deeper conversations with the media on complex technology or industry topics best suited for an SME.
How to Diagnose this Problem: If the company is turning down media or speaking opportunities because the key spokesperson doesn’t trust anyone else to speak on behalf of the company, is too busy, or doesn’t think the offers are worth their time, you could likely benefit from delegating additional spokespeople.
14) Celebrate Successes
Too often, being a PR representative feels like you are in the trenches of World War I. Whether you are weary from the constant media rejections, feel under pressure to make coverage happen on short timelines with low news value items, or are restricted from getting coverage in certain sectors because they are not deemed good enough by the company executives, being a PR soldier can be a thankless job.
However, recognizing and celebrating your PR team’s successes and achievements with them can go a long way to building up their emotional bank account for the next run across No Man’s Land.
How to Diagnose this Problem: Consider if you or any of your company executives have sent a thank you email or phone call to your PR team. If it’s been a long time, or never, look for the next opportunity to give them some praise.
15) Provide Access to Information
Ensure your PR team has access to accurate and up-to-date information about your company, products, services, and people. Even the tiniest bit of information, such as a new hire or the completion of an interesting customer engagement, can be valuable for the PR team to secure coverage. Even things that might happen in the future can open up new threads of creativity for the team and help them strategize early to optimize the announcement when it’s ready.
Companies think PR efforts must center around big announcements like a funding round that merits a formal press release. Even if another PR team is handling that release, your team should know as soon as you do that it’s happening so they can support your success as needed.
How to Diagnose this Problem: If your PR team consistently mentions they were unaware of something happening at the company or feel caught off guard by a revelation, consider how you can inform them of more things ahead of time.
Do any of these resonate with you? We’d love to hear how and why. Drop us a line here.
