Once Simply Isn't Enough: Frequency In Public Relations

When the average person thinks about the process of creating advertising, they think of the glamour of commercial shoots, copywriting, and possibly the huge amounts of money that it takes to place an ad on that one big football game played in January.

But there's an additional aspect to advertising that most people don't see called "media placement".

Media placement is the process of selecting where your advertising will run, negotiating contracts, then actually getting payment and the creative (the film, recording or print layout) into the hands of those who actually run the advertisement for you.

While the process of writing the creative and producing the commercial is a fun and fascinating process, the process of media placement is just plain work. Fascinating work, but it's still work. (That's why I always outsource this function!)

As marketers buy media we use two measurements to determine the potential effectiveness of the media that we are buying. These are called reach and frequency.

It all starts with your budget and your target market (women 18-25, etc.)

Reach measures what percentage of that target market that will actually see or hear your advertisement.

Frequency measures how many times your target market will be exposed to it.

So you may target 80% reach, with an average frequency of 4.3 times. Of course, there are tradeoffs - assuming you have a fixed budget you can try to reach a higher reach percentage or to have a higher frequency, but usually not both.

This is all based on a set of research which shows that the more often the audience sees your advertisement, the more likely they are to buy. The actual number of exposures we target varies based on the latest research, but most models show that somewhere between 3 and 5 exposures is the magic number which balances consumers commitment to purchase with the cost to achieve a higher frequency of expose consumers.

To get untechnical here -

Most people need to see your message 3+ times before they're going to respond. I've also seen lots of data that says that number should be 7 or more.

Think about this the next time that you decide to run just one advertisement in the convention issue of your trade magazine.

It takes an investment to create a customer.

Let's bridge now into the world of Public Relations.

Is it possible that the reach / frequency model applies to public relations? I believe that the answer is absolutely "yes."

Reach is easy to imagine - you certainly want each of your pitches to reach the highest percentage of potential media partners as possible. Frequency is more interesting...

Here are three ways that you can build frequency into your public relations plan:

1. Send out a series of press releases to promote any given piece of news, rather than just one.

This is one of my favorite ways to get attention in the media. I like to send out a series of press releases / story pitches, once a week, for a long period - ideally 14-18 weeks.

Here's a possible series:

Week 1: Standard new product announcement
Week 2: Hook-based announcement designed to peak the reporter's interest and get them to call
Week 3: Article based on the key issues that users in that marketplace encounter. Your product is shown as one of the solutions.
Week 4: Announcement of new website addressing key issues (that promotes your product)
Week 5: A tip sheet on how to resolve key issues (9 Proven Techniques to...)
Week 6: An interview with your company president or product developer
Week 7: Announcement of special seminar / teleseminar / road show / trade show
Week 8: A survey of your target market and how they deal with key issues
Week 9: New feature announcement
Week 10: Cross promotion announcement (now being sold by, represented by, stocked in...)
Week 11: Article showing alternative uses of the product
Week 12: Milestone announcement - sold 10,000 copies
Week 13: Another article based on key issues that your target market encounters
And so forth...

Get the picture? Of course, you'll personalize this series to your product or service, but the key is that you send multiple messages about the same topic.

Notice that we never send out the same release twice. We are simply flooding the marketplace with news on this particular product. You're not doing it obnoxiously, though, each release has to have news value (or information value when it's an article, tip sheet or quiz) and each should stand on its own.

This works incredibly well for books, when you can pull elements of the content out and issue them as separate but related stories.

This communicates to the editor / reporter that there's truly something here that they should be paying attention to. Plus it communicates to the consumer that there truly is something interesting about your product for it to hit the media that often.

You may want to reread this section - there's gold in what I just told you!

2. Get your name all over the web

Reporters now turn to the search engines as their primary source of information on who is the expert in any given subject area.

If you're only there once, they've only got one chance to see you.

But if your name comes up repeatedly in their search results, they're likely to say "hey, I keep running into this John Doe guy's name. He must be the expert in this category."

So you're the one who gets the phone call, not your competitor!

How do you do that? Multiple sites, lots of articles freely distributed throughout the web, participating in conferences, contributing to online forums in your area of expertise, having a blog or five, etc. The goal is to have your name show up repeatedly in the results for any search in your area of expertise. It won't happen overnight, but can be very valuable once it does happen. You eventually get to the point where you couldn't turn off the faucet if you wanted to...

3. Send frequent, unsolicited leads to your key media contacts.

One great way to generate frequency is to constantly (once every 2 weeks at minimum) send a story idea off to your key media contacts, MOST of which have nothing to do with you and your company. In this strategy you are seeking to be seen as someone who's got their pulse on your industry, who is incredibly willing to help them create great stories, who is connected to all the key players (give the reporter contacts as you send them the lead...) and who is a bona fide expert in your field. Then the call comes to you when the story is ready to run.

By the way - this is a great way to build relationships during times when your company doesn't have any news, so that the relationship will be in place when you're ready to pitch your next big story!

And don't worry about pitching stories about your competition. If they're newsworthy, those stories will get run anyway. But the fact that you were the source to alert the media to the story means that you get the brownie points!

What other ideas do you have to build frequency in your publicity efforts?

Need more information on how to build relationships with the meda? Check out our powerful ebook Media Relations Power. It contains 21 separate special reports that help you develop powerful relationships with media contacts.

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Tags: Reach Frequency Model