Don’t get coverage blindness

Achieving positive coverage for your business is part and parcel of a good PR campaign. The tactics for achieving this may include press releases, opinion pieces, articles and getting pertinent comment published in relevant features. Each new piece of coverage provides a thrill. You know you’re delivering results, raising the profile of the organisation and helping to position its leaders as experts in their field. All is going well and you work even harder to achieve more coverage and then more coverage and so on. After all, if you achieve 25 more pieces of coverage this year compared to last year, surely the campaign is going from strength to strength and the company is getting increasingly well known!

Yes, counting coverage is a great way of evaluating the success of a PR campaign, however it’s important not to get bogged down with metrics, as an increasing number of coverage pieces does not always equate to greater success. It’s important to focus on quality of coverage just as much as quantity. For instance, a one page article in a high profile online magazine that has a large readership and a high domain authority (DA) is worth so much more than a one-line mention in 20 lesser-known publications/onlines. Yes, the one-liners are ‘nice to have’ but the PR time and budget should be focused on achieving the meaty pieces of coverage which can really make a difference. Deciding that you want to focus more on quality of coverage rather than the quantity will mean re-evaluating your tactics, perhaps reducing the number of press releases you push out in favour of improving relations with a handful of key journalists.

So be smart about PR and what you’re trying to achieve. It’s not about paying lip-service to the organisational leaders who are insisting on more press releases and more coverage, it’s about ensuring the coverage you do achieve is read and is (hopefully) acted upon by the people who matter, be it your customers, shareholders, partners and/or employees.