Give your PR content a spring clean

Coverage volume in target media is only one box ticked in our list of what makes a good PR programme, communicating the client’s message is also very important to us at Spark and we spend a lot of effort educating ourselves on our clients’ business and developing stories that do just that.  We are proud of the fact that when we speak to the press we can provide answers to their questions rather than constantly having to check back with the client and “circle back” to them (shudder).

Promoting the same core messages to our clients’ audience is an important part of our job but the story needs to stay interesting so now and then we should find new ways to keep our content fresh. Considering spring is officially here, why not give your PR content a spring clean?

Inject a bit of life

I was reading an older blog post by Jessica Twentyman the other day that said (very rightly) that it’s not up to her as a journalist to inject enthusiasm into a story and define to a PR what it is that makes it interesting. Kindly enough she does so anyway: “I’m looking for (genuinely) controversial opinions, real-life experiences, anecdotes and gossip, a bit of back story, a bit of emotion. Tell me something I don’t know already so that I can tell readers something they don’t know already”. Adding a bit of emotion and thinking of the human angle can go a long way to putting the story in context and drawing out the issues.

Read the news!

There’s nothing like a good news hook to make a bit of content current and interesting. Recent examples can help bring messages firmly into the present. This is true whether we are news hijacking the latest IT failure by a major bank, referring to some new analyst research at the top of an opinion piece or name dropping some recent news stories in a feature comment. Tying into some big industry news or a topic important to wider consumers can really spark reader interest (no pun intended).

Say it another way

While it’s good to include key marketing messages and certain keywords into stories for SEO purposes, using the same words over and over again can become repetitive. This is especially true if your competitors are leaping on the bandwagon and starting to use the same terminology. Words like “innovation”, “synergy” and “revolutionary” are all powerful words, but they are overused, and the English language is flexible - you can often get the same point across in different ways. We use plain English words on the phone and emotive language to highlight why we think our client’s story is interesting, and then we include all the relevant terminology and technical information in the final copy we send the journalist.

Being a good client means trusting your agency’s experience in packaging and delivering your message.  We can advise when to mix things up a bit to make it interesting to the press. It’s not only the journalists that we deal with that will be more enthused- you and your company will be pleased with the results of taking a fresh approach.