ist magazine October 2021

Use Targeted PR to Sow Success By Russell Trahan Business is BLOOMING

Feature

R egardless of what date the calendar shows, business is blooming – and the season for sowing success is officially here. The ways businesses can promote them selves are blooming, too – blogs, podcasts, social media, television, magazines! When it comes to public ity, how can business owners, subject matter experts, and thought-leaders weed out what will land on the rocks and what will bear fruit? You see, a targeted publicity campaign is much like gardening. It requires an innate understanding of the medium where your expertise best fits, properly nurturing the attention that you generate, and reaping the rewards of increased awareness of your unique space in the business market. So, where to start? The soil, of course. The Soil – Your Market A successful publicity campaign starts with deep knowledge of where your knowledge works. Whether you excel at providing

management solutions or the art of making the most of the clock, you don’t simply want to blast out your content like a defective garden hose. Just like different substrates, different avenues exist for your expertise – and you need to choose the one that’s best for your expressed goals. Whether that means pitching your content out to a specific geographic region or DMA (Designated Marketing Area) that pertains to a coming event, or providing comment on a national news story, you have to possess a keen awareness of where your knowledge best fits and the out come you’re hoping to elicit. Sowing – Targeted Pitching Just like you shouldn’t take a scattershot approach to planting seeds you hope will eventually produce fruit, you shouldn’t assume you can just cover each and every aspect of the media with a publicity campaign. It’s about targeted pitch ing of content to editors, writers and producers. t

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October 2021 istmagazine.com