Create a PR strategy that will perfectly align with your brand. PR is a powerful marketing tool. It can involve many things from social media, public events, online and offline media publications to get in front of your audience. Via @MarinaBarayeva #prstrategy #business #smallbusiness #smallbiz #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #businesstips #marketing #creativeentrepreneur #creativebusiness #mompreneur #womaninbiz #ladyboss

PR is a powerful marketing tool. It can involve many things from social media, public events, online and offline media publications. That would be great to be everywhere. But it also too much work. And actually, you no need to be on every single media, you need to be in front of your audience.

In this episode, Kathryn Dishman-Baird shares how to create a perfect PR strategy.

Kathryn is award-winning PR professional, content creator and social media expert.

After nearly 12 years of working in the corporate world in marketing communications, she made the leap to become an entrepreneur and set up PR, Content Marketing and Social Media agency, KD Communications.

Through KD Communications, Kathryn has a very clear mission – to give businesses like yours the skills you need to create and deliver a PR strategy that has a genuine impact on your bottom line.

In this episode, we will cover:

  • [00:22] About the episode and Kathryn Dishman-Baird
  • [02:09] Kathryn talks about her passion to tell the stories of different businesses to the audience in the way they need to
  • [02:43] Listening is the foundation of the good PR strategy
  • [03:42] How and where to listen to people to know what they want
  • [04:47] Setting the goals are the most important part of the PR strategy. Once you know them, you can look backward and write down how to get there
  • [06:19] How to measure the process and results of your PR strategy
  • [08:46] What to start with when you want to create a PR strategy
  • [09:42] Five steps of creating a perfect PR strategy
  • [11:22] What to promote a personal brand or business brand
  • [13:30] Kathryn shares an example of PR strategy for the client from the fashion industry
  • [17:21] The key aspects of the message you want to share about your business through media
  • [20:03] Four sites where you can easily find journalists and pitch them your story: Gorkana, Source Bottle, Response Source and Help a Reporter
  • [20:38] Use a hashtag #JournoRequest on Twitter to find more journalists who are looking for the stories
  • [23:42] How to choose what to focus on when you create a PR strategy
  • [25:08] How to implement PR strategy to your social media
  • [27:02] Before Kathryn and her client start pitching the press they put together a press pack
  • [28:56] What to include in your press kit
  • [30:58] Think like a journalist when you send a press kit
  • [31:41] Adjust your press kit to media you send it to
  • [33:29] What to avoid when you work on your PR strategy
  • [36:06] Where to find Kathryn online and learn more about her upcoming book
  • [36:58] For the show notes go to marinabarayeva.com and subscribe to the Marketing for Creatives show

4 Things to Remember When You Create Your PR Strategy

  • Be yourself online as well as offline, so when you talk to media they will get the similar expression that they got by checking you online
  • Avoid doing too many things at one time when you work on your PR strategy
  • Don’t over commit and then underachieve what you do
  • Keep your promises and consistency
'Goals are the most important aspect of any PR strategy' ~ Kathryn DishmanClick To Tweet
'We all have more than one target audience. Make sure that you talk to them all in the way they want to be talked to' ~ Kathryn DishmanClick To Tweet
'If you have a varied audience, then you need to have more of a varied approach in terms of press' ~ Kathryn Dishman Click To Tweet

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5 Steps to Create a Perfect PR Strategy – Interview Transcription

Create a PR strategy that will perfectly align with your brand. PR is a powerful marketing tool. It can involve many things from social media, public events, online and offline media publications to get in front of your audience. Via @MarinaBarayeva #prstrategy #business #smallbusiness #smallbiz #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #businesstips #marketing #creativeentrepreneur #creativebusiness #mompreneur #womaninbiz #ladyboss

Marina Barayeva:

Kathryn, please tell us your story.

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

I’m a specialist in public relations content marketing and social media. My business is KD communications. I’m based in Northumberland in the UK. And what I do essentially is I help businesses share their story to their audiences in the way that they need to.

I’m very passionate about the fact that every business has a different story to share and every audience wants to hear the story in a different way. I help businesses do that through a mixture of online content press and social media so they can say what they need to say and attract the right customers to grow their business.

Marina Barayeva:

Fantastic. The whole strategy.

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Yes, the whole strategy from start to finish.

Marina Barayeva:

Can you tell us please, what is the foundation of the good PR strategy?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

A good PR strategy actually is based on listening. I think that is so important. There are so many brands out there right now who have a brilliant PR strategy in place, and they think it’s perfect, but actually, if they’re not listening to their audience and they’re not hearing what their audience wants and needs from them than they could be delivering all the wrong messages.

The foundation of a good PR strategy is making sure you listen to, your audience and create a strategy around that. That’s going to attract your ideal customers. Always have your ideal customer in mind when you actually create your PR. It is the very basics of marketing, but it’s so, so important. I can’t stress that enough because if you don’t have that foundation in place, your whole PR strategy is not going to work well for you and deliver what it needs.

Marina Barayeva:

And when you talk about listening to people, how would you listen to them? Where would you go to check out what they want, what they say?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

They still go back to the traditional market research. I actually include competitors in this. If you have a few competitors, have a look and see what they’re doing online, see what tactics they’re using to talk to their ideal customer.

It may not be the same as yours, and it may be the same. You never know. But using online, we live in a world now where everybody puts everything online through Twitter, through Facebook, through Instagram, and it’s so easy to do our market research.

But also go back to the beginning and actually survey your existing audience. Send them a few questions. Get them to shape your strategy for you and the more they do that and the more information they give you, you will be able to create a brilliant PR strategy specifically with those ideal clients and customers in mind.

And that will increase your income and your revenue because you’ll be talking to them on a regular basis and they’ll get to know you for you. So you’re not going to be out there as your competitor. You’re out there purely as you and your brand. And I think that is very important as well

Marina Barayeva:

When we create a PR strategy, when we create any strategy, we need to set the goals. What goals can we set here and how would you recommend to measure and track them?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Goals are the most important aspect of any PR strategy because if you don’t know what you want to achieve, then it’s very unlikely that you’ll achieve it. We have to start with goals by looking at the end product. What is it that you want to achieve in six months, in 12 months? Whatever your PR strategy is.

I know a lot of PR people have actually a five-year PR plan and that’s absolutely fine. Whatever your end goal is, we need to look at that.

It could be that you want to increase your income by 20%. What we could do is look at that goal, so you want to increase your income by 20%, work backward.

  • How do we help you through your PR to achieve that goal?
  • And what tactics do we need to use?
  • Is this press online or offline?

Once we know that and get a better understanding of what your goals actually are through your wider business goals as well, don’t just relate this purely to PR, we need to think wider in terms of what you want to achieve through your business, because it’s so important that your PR strategy actually supports that.

What I would suggest doing is think about what you want to achieve, and then we can put measurements in place to achieve them.

We’re very spoiled in the world that we live in at the moment because we have online conversions, online analytics that we actually use to see:

  • Who’s interacting with us?
  • Who’s liking our posts? Who’s retweeting us?
  • Who’s sharing our content?

That’s great for online.

We can also say from a press perspective:

  • How many people have viewed an article that we’ve been involved in?
  • How many people have shared it?
  • How many people have been driven to it and from what different sites?

We can do anything we want online in terms of analytics. And that’s great. We’re very spoiled.

But offline is a different case. It’s much harder to measure. What I would recommend you do is if you do any purely offline press where it’s very traditional and imprint, then you take into account the circulation.

  • How many people receive that exact publication?
  • How many people have purchased that one?

But also think about how many different businesses that spun into so it could have gone into a business and being a receptionist, an office somewhere that’s potentially hundreds of people that could have seen your article that you don’t even know about.

I think it’s really important to keep that in mind. You can’t when you’re offline. It’s very hard to be specific as you can be online, but you can estimate and estimating is how you’re going to necessarily find out how you can achieve your goals that way.

It’s not an exact science, but it’s the best science available to us in this day and age for offline marketing purely.  But we need to take into account networking. How many people see you at networking events? Because that’s PR.

How you answer your phone when people call your business – that’s PR. How your website looks – that’s PR.

It’s really important that you have everything in line in reflective with your brand. That will make it easier to measure. That will help you build on the foundation of your PR strategy as well. So hopefully that makes sense.

Marina Barayeva:

It does. Let’s make it a little more simple anyway. If for example, I or any of your listeners would come to you and say, I need a PR strategy for my creative business. How would we get from there? What would we start with to create that perfect PR strategy?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

What I would do is I will sit down with you and talk about your business as it currently stands and even before we get to the goals, I’ll talk to you about your previous activity:

  • What is it you’ve done with PR in the past?
  • What’s worked for you?
  • What hasn’t worked for you?

Because I wouldn’t want to suggest and put things in place for you that have already tried and tested in the didn’t work.

I talk to you about if say if you talk to certain types of press and you got nothing out of that, I would figure out how to integrate that into your new strategy. But also, as I talk to you about where you want to go.

We’ve talked about your past, what you can improve on, maybe what you don’t want to do moving forward, but then we need to talk about your present.

  • What is it you’re doing now with your business that’s amazing?
  • What can we do to help you share your story?
  • Who’s your ideal customer?
  • How can we talk to them?

And then I would suggest moving forward, which would be basically putting a PR strategy in place which I take you through five different steps in order to do that. The five steps would be:

Goal setting. We’ll take all your goals and objectives.

Following on from that, we’d create key messages all along with keeping your ideal client in mind. So key messages:

  • What are you trying to say?
  • What is it that you want to be relayed through all of your PR?

Step number three would be looking at your tactics:

  • What is it that you actually want to do?
  • What do you want to achieve?
  • What social media platform should we use to share your messages?

That you’ve got them in place.

But we also know that we’ve got your ideal audience to think about, so we need to think about them as well.

  • What is it that need?
  • What are the pain points?
  • How can we encourage them to buy from you?

That’s what we need to talk about as well.

Then your final one would be the metrics:

  • How do we measure what your PR activity is going to be and how do we take that forwards?

Through those five steps, you’ll find that you are listening and you are sharing, and that is how you in your brand as a business for creative business specifically, we need to make sure that you’re personable, that we reflect you in your personal brand as well as your business brand.

We need to make sure that we take that forward in a way that suits you, that you’re comfortable with and attracts a larger following and create an audience that will actually become eventually customers. Once you build that trust.

Marina Barayeva:

How would you align to get a personal brand and business brand? Because we have solopreneurs, freelancers, small business owners, and it’s usually either only you will or just a few people in the team.

Should the business brand and personal brand be different? Or it should be a just about business, just about a person? What do you think?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

I think in terms of a personal brand, so say for me, I’m a solopreneur. My brand is me. I understand that my brand has to be me. But I’ve also worked in the house and corporate organizations where the brand couldn’t be me had to be the wider organization. So, if you’ve got five or six people in place in your business, then it’s really important that you create a sustainable business brand that reflects them.

But if it is your business, you should all be on the same page because what we’ve got to think about is there are internal messages and external messages. If I was working with you on a PR strategy, and you had a team of three, four, five, six, whatever it was, I would talk to you about your employees as well and figure out what it is that they want to achieve so that we can create a brand that they buy into.

It’s so important that your employees and your team members buy into you as a brand. As the business brand that would be slightly separate but still reflective of you as a person because it is your business.

We have to think about:

  • Who’s going to be the person at the front of the brand?
  • Who is going to be spearheading it?
  • Is it going to be you who puts press comments in?
  • Do you have a PR manager who would do that?
  • We’ll need to think about who is selecting, who would put forward for you in the public place.

I would recommend that that would be you as a business owner rather than members of your team, but it depends on how your business is structured. So that would be something that we would discuss in further detail.

Marina Barayeva:

When you shared with us those five steps to create a perfect PR strategy, can you give us some examples how it actually works?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Yeah. I have a client who is in the fashion industry. She is a solopreneur. She is setting up a marketplace. What I did is I spent the entire day with her, and we created her PR strategy.

We looked at every single step that I mentioned before in detail, but we definitely identify two audiences. We also identified in terms of the tactics we identified how she wanted to grow his following. That’s great.

But we also identified how she wanted to grow her audience in a different way: through the press, through guest appearances on podcasts, video blogs, any kind of publication that she would be attracted to.

But also wanted her main ways of earning an income and insourcing new audiences is actually trade shows. Her PR strategy was very events oriented. She did trade shows in Paris, London. She did some up in Newcastle. She also did one in Brussels as well.

So really we fixed her entire PR strategy around her tray chores and press. They will hit two main items as well as Instagram for social media. And as a consequence of that, in six months she’s grown her following significantly online.

She’s also growing her income, and she’s growing her credibility and brand reputation. Because it seems that every time I open a magazine or look something, she’s involved in it somehow. She’s just really, really made an effort to get her brand out there.

As a result of that, she’s growing her business. So that’s quite a success story, and that’s in a very short space of time. It’s just coming up to six months since we did that.

And she is reaping the benefits. She’s opened a shop front where she can sell items, so she’s not online as well as offline, and her growth strategy is actually growing a lot faster than she anticipated, which is brilliant and that she puts that down to her PR strategy as well.

But everyone’s PR strategy is different. I know that you’ve had very good friends Andrew and Pete on the show before. As creatives, their PR strategy has been very much based upon influences. It’s upon speaking, it’s on video, and it’s on influences. That’s their PR strategy. And that influenced a strategy.

They’ve spent the past three years really getting to know who are the key influences in the world across the marketing and creative industry and they’ve really leveraged that in a way that has taken that brand onto the next level, then the next level, and the next level again. And they’ve really, really grown their business and their online membership through that.

Marina Barayeva:

Wow. That’s very interesting. When you say six months, for some people it can be a short period, but some people can’t get the publicity you or to grow their business for years. That’s impressive.

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

It is. I think that PR strategies are different. It could be that someone aims to have to be in the press four times in 12 months and it could be aiming to be enough four times in four years. The way your business will grow will depend on what your strategy is because everybody is so different.

Marina Barayeva:

And how would you start your PR strategy? How would you start reaching media? You said that you need to craft your vision, your message and then next you set your goals, and then you start doing your PR. So, when you craft this mission, what are the key aspect of that?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

The key foundation of the message is what it is that you want your audiences to feel through seeing you through PR. Is it that you want to them to feel like, “Oh my goodness,” of course we all want them to feel like “I’ll just need to go and follow them and buy from them.”

Or is it that you want them to feel “That’s abroad, but I think I could trust. That is a brand that I think I could follow for a while and then potentially considered buying from eventually.”

It could be that it’s a longer-term relationship, but what you need to do is establish that relationship through your key message with your target audience, but also with the press.

Because when I say your target audiences, that every business has more than one because it could be that the press is your target audience, that Instagram is your target audience, but also it could be that actually you have people who you want to collaborate with who you’ll call your audiences as well.

We all have more than one target audience, and it’s about making sure that we talk to them all in the way they want to be talked to and your message will be specifically crafted around them.

For example, I’m working with the business at the moment who are specialists in mental well-being, but they are targeting schools. They’re also targeting employees, and they are very, very different audiences with different needs.

We’re working on creating key messages that will attract both of the audiences and the way that we want them to so that they will buy from them and by the services.

That’s quite difficult to do when you’ve got such varying audiences. But if we discover that pain points and craft your message around the pain points, then you’ll find that the audiences will be attracted naturally, come flowing to you because you’re conveying the right message and that needs to be across everything you do in PR.

From a press release to a Tweet, to a Facebook post, to everything that appears on Google as a result of searches so and through your online content and your website as well. That’s very important.

What I recommend people do is create a press wish list before they actually approach, any media outlets. Because you’ll have your key messages and focus on the press that will actually help you create a wish list that will actually help you convey your message in the way you want them to. And that’s how you’re gonna succeed.

Marina Barayeva:

Can you recommend any resources where we can find those media?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Yeah. There are quite a few media resources out there, but there are four in particular, which are incredibly popular, there are paid for versions and free versions.

So there are Gorkana, Source Bottle, Response Source and Help a Reporter.

If you are at a point in your business, were you thinking, you know that a media database is a lot to actually invest in at the moment financially. It can be for quite if you’re solopreneurs. What I would do is I would leverage Twitter.

So, if you leveraged Twitter, journalists are very active on Twitter. You’ll be able to find specific journalists themselves, different publications, but also there’s a hashtag to follow. And the Hashtag is #JournoRequest. That’s #JournoRequest.

What journalists do is they go on Twitter and when they need help or have an opportunity either they need to write a story so they could go on and say “I need to create a business to help me with X,” or “I need a PR firm and to talk to me about X for an article I’m writing.” That literally has thousands of tweets from across the world every day using that hashtag.

And you can often find that there are PR opportunities and news opportunities there for you with journalists to sit in they are waiting for you to approach them. Do anything you can to keep an eye on that hashtag. Save it in Twitter search and go on to that every day and check what’s available and what potentially your business can get involved with.

You’ll find the opportunities do come and find you via Twitter, which is brilliant. It’s such a good outlet.

Marina Barayeva:

Is it about any topics or anything specific?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Anything and everything. There’re journalists from all over the world. Lots of different sectors are asking for help with stories ranging from anything and everything. But there are quite a few creative ones on that.

They’re the ones from all over the world as well, so it varies in terms of topics, so you might have to sift through before you find a really good one for you, but it’s updated all the time with Twitter. So it is a really valuable tool, and it’s free to use.

Marina Barayeva:

It’s very interesting because a lot of people now do not consider Twitter as social media. I mean creatives. Because they usually use Instagram, maybe Pinterest, Facebook, but Twitter, not too many people use it now. Well, not too many creative people.

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Yeah. I understand. I have to be on it because I train other businesses on how to use it, but it probably isn’t my favorite platform. Instagram is. But still a lot of value on Twitter from a PR perspective and brand reputation perspective.

But yeah, I understand why lots of people don’t use it. But it’s not available the hashtag isn’t used on any other platform like this on Twitter. So I would recommend just going in there just to have a look.

Marina Barayeva:

OK, we’ll try it. And you know, it’s hard to do everything at one time. When you worked with your fashion designer client, you said that you came out with different tactics and maybe she could do this but not many can.

Because sometimes for solopreneurs it can be a side hustle business. Maybe they have full-time jobs and just growing their business. So how to choose what to focus on when you do your PR?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

In terms of focusing as part of your strategy what I would recommend you do is you figure out what exactly, it may take some time of experimentation may be a couple of months of testing out a few different tactics, but figure out:

  • What actually brings you a good return on investment?
  • What actually brings you, customers?

And once you understand that you can focus purely on that.

In terms of social media, I would recommend that you focus on one platform. And I always say to my clients to focus on that one platform, and you conquer it completely.

You become known as the creative business on that platform in your field who is amazing at using Facebook, are amazing at using Twitter, whatever it is, and you really, really conquer that.

You utilize it to the best of its capabilities if you do everything you can to get new customers through that platform.

And once you know what’s going to bring the good return on investment and the good custom, then stick to that. Really stick to it.

It will take some experimentation, but once you understand what it is that actually raises your profile and gets you that custom, maximize it to its fullest potential.

Marina Barayeva:

When you focus on this one social media channel, how would you implement your PR strategy to that?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

What I would do is say, for example, I have a client who Facebooks all the way. She’s on twitter, but she usually just replicates her Facebook posts on Twitter and sends it to it automatically. What she does is she maximize it.

She has a Facebook group with about 8,000 people in it. She genuinely gets business from it. I think she told me the other day she’d got like £20-30,000 from it in the past 12 months. Purely from using Facebook, but she uses ads.

She uses Facebook ads and also promotes a page and put good content on her page. But alongside that, she doesn’t really focus a lot on the other channels at all. But alongside that, she focuses on press because of her primary audience, female.

She focuses on press who target females and social, not necessarily in fashion magazines, but you know, a female lifestyle magazine.

She spends a lot of time being interviewed in them, and they have two main aspects of her PR strategy and how she grows her online presence, and she is absolutely killing it in both of those and earning a lot of money out of it.

I am a fan of focusing and niching down as much as possible. Once you figure out what it is that you want to say and who it is you see it too.

If you have a varied audience, then you will need to have a little bit more of a varied approach in terms of press. But in terms of online marketing, if you get a good return on investment, on purely blogging or purely podcasting or videos, if video is your thing, move forward with that and just conquer it and focus purely on that and you will retain an audience, you’ll gain a larger audience, but you’ll also get customer from that.

Marina Barayeva:

When you talked about your, this client who is in different press and media, how did she approach them? How did she to reach them and how did she get to all of those media magazines, publications? She just came to them saying, “Oh, here I am so cool person. Please interview me?” (laughter)

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Well, I worked with her on that, and I approached them. And what I did is I pulled together a press pack. In the press pack, I had case studies of our previous work, an introduction to her different types of content she’s produced when she’s been in the press previously.

I pulled this all into one document with a video introduction from her and I pitched to end for her to the press and then started building a relationship and then I passed it over to her after that so she could manage things because she wanted to be a little bit more hands-on, on the press side.

So we both liaise on a regular basis. She focused on her press wish list, which I mentioned creating before and we discover the journalists were at these ideal magazines and newspapers and outlets that she wanted.

We really started contacting them and building a relationship with them for her. That’s when she started seeing the PR opportunities come through.

It did take a little bit of time, but it’s something that I would recommend doing and I constantly was pitching in stories for her. So different stories that I thought might be of interest to that publication based on her, I would pitch it in. And we had a few NOs before we got some YESes, but it worked out very well, and she’s regularly featured in the press now.

Marina Barayeva:

When you created a press kit for her, what was there? Is it more like about page on the website or what does it look like?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

For her it was a, I think, it was an eight-page document that I created and we got it fully designed up, so it looked really good and what it was a link to a video introduction from her, some case studies, some testimonials and case studies and the work she’s done some testimonials from her existing customers and clients. And then from then, it was a little bit of about her.

That was a little bit of a page which was probably reflective of her webpage, her about page. And then from then, it was what kind of opportunity she was looking out for in terms of PR and how she could help the journalists. So that is how we took it forward.

Marina Barayeva:

Do you have any extra recommendations for our listeners if they want to create this press kit?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Yes. What I would do is focus on you and your brand and what it is. Focus everything around your key messages, but look at what you’ve done. Look at what you’ve achieved for your customers, look at what your most popular items or services that you sell and replicate that in your press kit and tell the journalist about that.

Always have a hook on what it is. Even if it’s a case study, it needs to have your key message in it, but also a hook, something that’s really going to interest that specific publication and tailor your press pack to individual publications as well because that will help you.

If you are targeting technology, for example, if you are targeting some tech magazines, you would talk to them slightly differently than you would if you were targeting Forbes or Inc or one of the major… or Entrepreneur magazine or something like that.

But that would be different to targeting marketing magazines like Mashable or Marketing Week or anything like that. I would recommend that you tailor your press pack to the different industries that you’re targeting and make it interesting for them.

Think like a journalist. Think what would it be that they want? Because every journalist wants to publish something that inevitably interests their readers. Think as a reader of those magazines and news outlets. What would you want to see if you were a reader? And create a press pack around that.

I’m not saying creating a completely different press pack for every single industry. Just tweak it slightly. Have a variation of case studies, have a variation of hooks, but also come up with some new hooks yourself.

When you actually send them that press part and you talk to them. Say, actually I’ve got some stories that potentially I could work on with you. Here is my idea. Don’t be afraid to pitch your ideas to the press. They’re happy to receive it.

Marina Barayeva:

When you say that you pitch different press with the ideas, how do you come up with the ideas? Based on her story? Or did you pitch them the same ideas?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Not. What I would actually do is have a look at your press wish list, your target press and see what they’ve actually, because you don’t want to pitch something to them that published two or three weeks ago. So have a look at what they published and found a gap that you think will be of interest to their readers.

It does take a bit of time and a bit of resource, but it could be initially that you focus purely on like five publications, five key outlets that you really focus on targeting. And do have a look at the current issue, previous issues, see what it is that they’ve reported on, what stories and that’ll inspire you naturally I think.

Well, it does. When I have looked at it, I think, “Oh, I could think about it from this angle. Or we could think about it from a totally different angle.” And pitch it in based on your knowledge and your expertise because we want them to see your business. I think that it’s really important to do that.

My recommendation would be to do a little bit of research and scribbled down a few different news items that you could potentially help them with. Then either call them or email them because they’re obviously incredibly busy and when you email them per capsule tell the story idea and then the title of what your idea could be.

That will naturally get them curious and get them responding to you.

Marina Barayeva:

Kathryn, you gave us a lot of tips on what to do, but from your experience, what mistakes people should avoid when they created PR strategy?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

There were a few things to avoid. One of which is not being yourself. Your audiences will say if you’re not being you, there are so many brands that I meet online, and I think, “oh,” and I created this perception about what they are based on what they share online, and then I meet them in person, and there couldn’t be any more different.

That is something to avoid. Make sure through your PR strategy that you act and talk and you are exactly the same online is you are offline.

That is really important because people build trust with you by following you online and if they meet you in person and you’re not the same, it kind of takes the trust away a little bit, and they’re not going to be encouraged to buy from you.

Be consistent with your PR, but be you as well. Just make sure that you have a personal brand or a business brand or whatever it is you create, and you stick to it across all your platforms. Avoid making that mistake.

Also, avoid trying to do too many things at once with your PR strategy. As we’ve already mentioned resources and time is a huge issue for us on a huge challenge to overcome or running a business and focusing and really niching down on what it is you want to achieve in terms of your goals, but also niching down with your activity to make sure it matches your goals.

It is going to help you succeed, and it’s going to help you get more and generate more of an income and following and grow your following in the way you want to than anything else.

Make sure that you don’t over commit and then underachieve because of that because that will have a knock-on effect throughout your business and also make you feel a bit rubbish as well.

I always say to people because they say, “Oh, we don’t have time to do PR” or “We don’t have time to write three blogs a week or one blog a week.” And I’ll say, “Right, well what do you have time to do and let’s start shipping your PR strategy around that.”

But also, another mistake to avoid is to make false promises to your audience and then not turn up. So if you say to them that every Wednesday they’re going to receive a newsletter from you or an email or some type of email marketing, you show up every Wednesday, and you sent that to them. Otherwise, the trust is not going to be.

There I see so many brands who say, right, “every two weeks we’ll talk to you” or “every week we’ll talk to you” and then they never talk to them. And if you don’t show up consistently serve your audience after you’ve promised them something, then they’re not going to buy from you.

I think that can actually do more damage than good.

Marina Barayeva:

Thank you so much, Kathryn. I’m very grateful for all of your tips. Now please share with us how can we know more about you? How can we connect with you?

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

My website is kdcommunications.co.uk. You will find my blog on that. Everything that I’m up to at the moment, but also my links to my social media channels.

My two primary channels are Facebook and Instagram, so my Instagram handle is @kd_comms, and my handle on Facebook is @kdcommunications.

Also, I’m working on creating a new membership and writing a book at the moment. So I’m very busy. If you want to follow me, you’ll find out more about that.

Marina Barayeva:

Thank you so much for being here, Kathryn.

Kathryn Dishman-Baird:

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

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