Have you recently started to create a business or is your company at cruising speed? And you’ll surely want to ride this wave! Like all companies, you want the most effective way to increase your business income in the long run. Stepping up your sales force or word-of-mouth are important steps, but they don’t seem to be able to reach a large, perfectly targeted audience with certainty. Therefore, the press seems to be a good solution to convey your brand image in the media. How can you work closely with your press secretary?

Press relations are based on a winning pair

Without a relationship of trust between the marketing manager and the press secretary, effective communication may suffer. This is a crucial condition to get good communication results. There are lots of marketing actions you can take, but they sometimes need to be done by different stakeholders in the company. In order to promote optimal brand communication, the marketing manager and the press secretary need to be moving in the same direction by forming a true partnership. Weekly meetings are a good way to promote communication under the right conditions: reflecting on targeted communication actions, identifying potential contributors internally depending on the approach, analyzing past publicity campaigns, etc. In order to create effective editorial content (press releases, press kits, opinion columns, etc.), the press secretary needs to have access to the company’s information. Communication can be facilitated by setting up a shared dashboard that summarizes all of the press secretary’s exhaustive questions. The marketing manager can then answer them as they come in by filling in the table.   Try this table template to track the media coverage  

Press relations | Logistics for success

Following the weekly meetings between the marketing manager and the press secretary, actions that are decided upon can be mentioned in a shared table that is accessible and editable by both parties. That way, for every action taken for a specific objective, the corresponding information can be assigned to them. For example: • type of action (contact a journalist, reach out to a blogger, etc.) • responsibility for the task (press secretary or marketing manager) • action date • date of the next reminder, etc. Moreover, the editorial content developed by the press secretary can be archived within a mini-document base and listed in order of importance. Finally, schedules can be created to anticipate press events planned for the month to come that will also mention the names of participants in the company who need to attend. Successful press relations depend mainly on a solid partnership between the press secretary and the client. Their concerted efforts will considerably increase the level of results in terms of the brand image, reputation, and notoriety. Do not neglect this aspect of communication, and get support now with the collaborative tools available from RowShare!