Why should you hire a publicist?
Every brand, business, or organization in operation today should allocate a portion of their hard-earned revenue to hire a publicist. It is vital to retain a relevant and competitive advantage in today’s business world, regardless of whether the majority of the service a publicist provides is mostly digital rather than physical—and today, I am here to tell you why.
Even if you cannot directly feel or touch the evidence of having a publicist, you can witness firsthand the impact of hiring one across a wide array of crucial corporate and private initiatives. Though the realm of public relations (PR) can pose a difficult nut to crack, having a publicist familiar with the intricate nuances of PR can prevent you from feeling deterred regarding your PR goals.
Most businesses and organizational leaders tend to neglect PR, believing that the cost of recruiting a publicist can run high. But even if you cannot initially recognize the significance of it, PR is among the most powerful and vital services you or your company can get involved in due to its ability to provide you and your business with a higher return on investment (ROI) in the long run.
Whether you plan to recruit a publicist and use PR for personal or business purposes, the benefits you stand to gain from it are as varied as they are numerous. Here are just a few ways that recruiting a publicist can add value to you, your brand, or your business.
Are Public Relations And Marketing The Same?
What does a publicist do for their client?
PR can be simply defined as creating and maintaining relationships with the general public. Thus, the person or firm with the professional expertise to promote an individual or company throughout media, news, and platforms used by the general public is the publicist or PR agency themselves.
With the right attitude and actions, you or your company can continuously build and foster a positive relationship with the general public and others outside of your organization. Everybody likes to be treated well by others they interact with — be they a teacher, student, doctor, parent, or entrepreneur — and we all tend to react positively when others look to create and continue building positive relationships with us.
From childhood, we are taught that, in one way or the other, by developing positive and mutually beneficial relationships with the right people, we have much to gain. As children, we are taught that establishing good rapport with others can hold great influence over our social and educational lives. As we continue to age and learn and grow, we begin to see where those benefits can encompass other aspects of our lives, including economic and even romantic aspects of them.
Hence, as time goes on, we regularly come tol earn and appreciate that the better we are at pressing peoples’ “right” buttons, the smoother things work out all around for everyone involved. Remember those times when playing your cards right landed you that job role you were banking on, or got you that deal on a new car at a cheaper rate? The effects of establishing and fostering good and positive relationships permeate every part of our personal lives, and those effects only become more obvious as we grow.
Consequently, in our professional careers (and in the realm of business), we perpetually strive to create and maintain good relationships with others—with our employees, our team members, our leaders, investors, partners, and others. In doing so, the optimal ROI is growth through an increase in revenue, social standing, and organizational successes. But the degree of that ROI depends how good are you at coordinating the various aspects of both your personal and organizational PR.
As a PR expert of many years, I have learned from experience that, for most clients, there is the knowledge they possess, the ideas they need to grow, and the ability to integrate both into a seamless PR strategy. However, understanding what the prerequisite skills needed in order to achieve the greatest success or ROI possible are often far less clear.
How do I hire a publicist
Recruiting a publicist or public relations firm can help you break the translucent barriers of communication and set your PR strategy on a path to give you the results you wish to achieve. Each of us possess unique strengths, expertise, and niche specializations. As such, allowing experts to handle your PR can help you to break those barriers so that you can focus on your own strengths that add value to other areas of your brand or business so that you both can work to achieving all around maximum benefit and ROI.
In addition, it allows you to save on the costs of resources in the long run, especially if you desire to hire a PR firm on a contract basis rather than employing a single freelance or in-house publicist. Many art-based organizations have been outsourcing their PR services, along with other areas like marketing, for years with huge benefits, too.
Therefore, outsourcing for a publicist to reach your PR goals is an assured way to guarantee to get professional skills from experts at affordable rates.
Where to find a publicist
To find the perfect publicist for you, there are several places you can turn, including;
Upwork: You can hire freelancers that may or may not do a good job. Be sure to always check their reviews and get a guarantee from them up-front prior to any work being done. Remember that anyone who cannot give you a guarantee is not a confident publicist.
Fiverr: You can hire PR professionals and freelance publicists for single projects such as writing and/or distributing a digital a press release. However, most top freelance publicists do not work on Fiverr.
With an agency: Most top publicists are trained and work for the top 100 PR firms in the country, such as Otter PR. This also gives you the support and benefits of connecting your PR goals to an entire organization.
Duties of a PR firm
What exactly can a publicist do for you? In the modern world, there are numerous ways a publicist can assist you — the individual — or your organization to help achieve your goals.
The era of more “traditional” PR is gone. PR has transformed to take into consideration the challenges and emerging trends of today’s ever-evolving hyper-digital world. Some PR clients may still believe that once they are able to land placements into mainstream media avenues like television and newspaper, they are on top of the game, but this is simply no longer the case, especially for certain specialized areas of business.
Getting featured in television, newspapers, podcasts, or radio now feels more akin to winning the lottery. And sometimes, if a brand, business, entrepreneur, or thought leader is able to get featured in media at all, they are limited to niche publications and more localized news outlets.
PR for various types of brands
The mass media obviously have greater things to deal with than handling coverage for every new emerging artist, musician, or non-profit organization today. For instance, think about how often you may have seen public figures like art critics review art in the mainstream media? The New York Times now gives the arts little or no space in mainstream media, and The New Yorker Magazine has no business with art from outside of New York, renowned musicians and all.
So, if you or your brand falls under an umbrella such as this, why would you still need a publicist in a scenario where the “big shots” in mass media would rather eschew your public initiatives?
Fortunately, the new era of social media and the internet has given those in the arts (and their publicists) a new lease of life. With the power of digital innovation at your disposal, such as the widespread accessibility and ease of use for search engines like Google and Bing, and advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you can still regularly promote and inform your public.
Thankfully, most PR clients know this and apply it in their own unique and creative ways. From the foregoing, we can take away these facts:
- You can reach your target audience/public effectively with or without paying for the reach or use of more “traditional” media avenues.
- You can effectively share your desired messages at all times, given that you have priorly established a larger and loyal audience/fan base.
- You can directly communicate with this fan base without relying on a proverbial middleman to do so.
How To Align Your Brand With Media Outlets
First-hand experience with a publicist
Based on my first-hand experience in working as a publicist for trusted brands and thought leaders, I have come up with three steps vital in PR.
- Identify the most effective model and strategy for organizations and individuals as clients.
- Create relevant PR content suitable to the brand’s goals using the right media, whether that be traditional media, social media, advertising, or email outreach.
- Assemble the content created and develop a practical timetable to follow in disseminating the message(s) of your PR initiatives.
As easy as these steps may sound, chances are high that you will still need an experienced publicist to make them work efficiently and to your benefit. You can establish your own in-house strategies and build communication systems through the internet and other digital resources, but there are still lots of people that still believe the traditional media is the only efficient means of achieving meaningful PR.
Don’t get me wrong; traditional media is still relevant and effective, but seeing as they offer limited coverage to certain niche specializations of industry, you should take the fate of your own brand or business — and the reputation you wish to build for it through PR — into your own hands. Employ the digital means that will allow you to achieve fostering a more direct relationship with your public audience. After all, you have the power in your hands to do so through utilizing digital platforms that allow you to control the strategies, contents, and methods of your PR initiatives.
These more “modern” methods of achieving PR grant us the ability to create and distribute engaging and relevant content in the form of text or graphics using relevant social media platforms and other primary digital avenues. You can even outsource the creation of this content to ghostwriters or digital designers if you opt to not produce them internally. Furthermore, opportunities exist in which you can more deeply integrate additional aspects of PR like brand partnerships into the mix in order to produce a single unified PR communication mechanism.
How do you choose the right PR firm?
There are certain vital factors you need to consider before you recruit a publicist, but some of the most important ones include:
- Based on what you know about the publicist and/or their firm, do you like them enough to establish and continue building a working professional relationship with them?
- Are you comfortable with what the publicist and/or their firm has to offer you in order to help you achieve your unique PR goals?
- Is the publicist or their firm affordable to you, your brand, or your business?
- Is the publicist or firm you intend to hire competent, and are they experienced working in your field directly, or with others in that field or similar ones?
The good news for you that it tends to be far easier to hire a good publicist if you know what you need and have an idea of how to get there. Most publicists, too, are quite experienced. Having worked with various high-profile brands and individuals throughout their career, they commonly possess the right contacts in the right places across their networks within media and other professional industries, and tend to be better acquainted with evolving industry trends. Yet, only a handful of publicists can actually deliver meaningful results and the specific ROI you wish to see.
Why you should choose Otter PR
With our niche approach to the media field, you can save costs and get effective PR at a pocket-friendly rate that still generates the best results and achieves your PR goals. Thanks to technological innovations, our team is able to comfortably work remotely with our established team of PR experts, meaning we are able to work for (and with) you from anywhere in the world.
In addition, since we utilize a team of seasoned PR experts with more than 300 years of combined expertise across niche areas of industry, you can be assured of our team’s professional PR services to provide you with the best services from their wealth of knowledge in both your own field as well as the realm of media.
At Otter PR, we remain committed to always deliver on our promise to clients. From our team’s combined expertise and interactions with top individuals and world-leading organizations, Otter has crafted specialized tactics that are masterfully carried out by our PR experts. In hiring us as your trusted PR professionals, you will be sure to learn how recruiting a publicist will deliver the results you want for you, your brand, or your business time and time again.
Tags: hire a publicist, importance of publicist, PR agency, Public relations, Publicist
