The Small Business Guide to PR: Plan and execute your first PR campaign in just 10 hours

By Greg Simpson

Put your lunch hour to use and learn how to create, manage and execute your own bespoke PR campaign in just ten days.
- Get to grips with what makes a good story, learn how to contact journalists and build working relationships that get stronger with each new story.
- Discover how to craft a press release, how to weave in your key messages and how to ensure that what you are doing with your PR is contributing to your overall marketing strategy.
- Unlock the secrets of the professionals by spending a day in both camps - the journalist and the PR consultant.
- Find out what it takes to give your story the edge above the hundreds of others competing for attention.
- Listen in on a PR consultant's meeting with a key client so that you can understand the processes that are put in place and the strategies that are debated between client and consultant to ensure that every opportunity is flushed out, examined and maximised.
- Hear case studies from small businesses that share the highs and lows of their own public relations campaigns so that you do not make the same mistakes.
Let the author, who has over a decade of experience in running PR campaigns for everyone from multinational PLCs to not for profit organisations and start-up businesses, guide you through the same process that he uses to create professional and hugely effective PR campaigns.
Learn how to create a PR campaign that delivers measurable, strategic results for your business and that allows you to refine and improve it every time you return to it.
Create a PR strategy that evolves with your business and fits in with the way you work. Learn how to delegate tasks to individuals within your own team and what to outsource to the professionals.
Discover how to get your story to stand out from the crowd through the use of clever photography - begin to 'think in pictures' as you learn how to become an asset to your target media.
Set measurable goals and begin to evaluate the success of your campaign right from the beginning, arming yourself with information on what works or your business and what approach works best for you as the new head of PR in your business.
Have fun! PR offers a huge variety of ways for you to communicate with your target audience.
Discover inspirational ideas that will have you raring to go with your own PR campaign and all in the space of ten hours.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harriman House
• Release date: Sep 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908003331

Greg Simpson

Greg Simpson has been a journalist, a marketing director of a £33m turnover business and worked in two large PR agencies for clients that ranged from multinational PLCs, to charities, not-for-profits and start-ups. His frustration with a lack of transparency in the PR industry led him to set up his own PR consultancy, Press For Attention PR. Since its formation in 2008, Greg has sought to blend the skills and experience he gained from working with some of the biggest brands and organisations in the UK, with a straightforward and streamlined approach to PR that allows even the smallest budgets to compete for share of voice in a noisy market.

Book preview

Publishing details

A Brightword book

www.brightwordpublishing.com

HARRIMAN HOUSE LTD

3A Penns Road

Petersfield

Hampshire

GU32 2EW

GREAT BRITAIN

Tel: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Website: www.harriman-house.com

First published in Great Britain in 2012

Copyright © 2012 Harriman House

The right of Greg Simpson to be identified as the Author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 9781908003331

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher or by the Author.

About the author

Greg Simpson has been a journalist, a marketing director of a £30m turnover business and worked in two large PR agencies for clients that have ranged from multinational PLCs, to charities, not-for-profits and start-ups.

His frustration with a lack of transparency in the PR industry and its frequent ‘smoke and mirrors’ approach led him to quit big agency life and invest his years of experience into his own PR consultancy, Press For Attention PR.

Since its launch in 2008, Greg has sought to blend the skills and experience he gained from working with some of the biggest brands and organisations in the UK, with a straightforward and streamlined approach to PR that allows even the smallest budgets to compete for share of voice in a noisy market. True to his open approach and determination to help others lacking in resource, Greg also established a regular, free PR Clinic for business and management graduates at Nottingham University.

Just four years later, in spring 2012, Greg was introducing a client (a 24-year-old entrepreneur he met at one of his PR clinics) and his guest, Sir Richard Branson, to the national business press at the UK’s biggest ever business show.

Greg introduces PR master and business legend Sir Richard Branson to the national media

PR isn’t all about big ideas and even bigger budgets, champagne launches and celebrity endorsements. Greg helps his clients to get the foundations of a solid PR campaign in place right from the start, so that their messages will be heard loud and clear when it is time to shout them from the rooftops!

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to my family and friends that have been patient with me and resisted the urge to roll their eyes when I said I was writing a book!

You have been hugely supportive, especially when the going has been rough and I have on occasion lost the ability to string a sentence together like an errr…you know, one of those people that struggles to sort of express himself a bit like.

Thank you to my clients for understanding this temporary demand on my time (although I hope you haven’t noticed) especially Simon Gray at Cherry Professional for being as enthused about the project as me.

A big shout to my Mum and Dad for both inspiring me and encouraging me to pursue my own dreams, my brother for keeping an objective but supportive distance (whilst being secretly quite impressed) and to Gemma for kicking my backside when I have slackened off a little and believing in this project with me.

Finally, a big shout to Alan Hardy at Paragon Plc for giving me my first real job in marketing after university and then again giving me my first break when I went self-employed, clearly a glutton for punishment!

Massive appreciation to you all and to everyone else involved in my career to date but sorry this isn’t Oscar night and I haven’t got time to mention you all!

Cheers,

Greg

Who this book is for

Quite simply, anyone who wants to be able to have something to show for their PR efforts.

I use the word effort here because this book has been written for those who take action. I could write ten books on PR theory and you could read them all and still not have anything to show for it afterwards – other than less room on your bookshelves.

I want you to be able to look back in ten days or even ten hours and see what you have achieved.

So, who are you?

You could be a PA at a mid-size manufacturing business, the MD of a new start-up, a marketing executive in a law firm, a business development manager for a construction business, a community liaison officer for a charity or an events manager for a not-for-profit. You may well be studying business at university or college and feel that you need a good primer on PR.

The job titles above are not random. They belong to six people that I have helped in the last six months, with me either becoming their PR director or their PR coach.

Ultimately, it simply does not matter who is reading this. The common factors I find