Proactive vs Reactive PR

Wow. What an amazing interview I have for you today. So this is a little free part. I recently did a direct booking master class all around PR with the fantastic Megan from Rural Roots. So what I've done is I've taken apart the one hour video that we did and I've got three little videos and podcasts to share with you and today is going to be one of those videos. This was real action taking podcast and I would love everybody to pay special attention to what we're going to be talking about. If you want to find out more, head to booster.co.uk podcast. You can go to the YouTube channel, you can go to Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcast you can go and check out video, audio, blogs, etc. Everything's@boostly.co.uk podcast. Massive. Thank you to Megan for doing this and I will be back tomorrow with another episode. As always. But again, for now, please keep attention, pay attention, make notes, but most importantly, take action as we talk about PR marketing and how it can help you generate direct bookings and not to spend any money doing so. Let's go down the route of that. We want to get involved in pr. Now from what I've learned and my knowledge is very slim on this, there's two types. There's probably proactive and there's reactive. Now can you please just very quickly cover the two types of PR that is out there and we'll start with proactive and work on reactive. If there's any more actives, throw them in as well.

Yeah, sure. Proactive is obviously pre planned. So pre, pre planned PR activity. So if you have an event coming up or a new launch or something along those lines, you planned in that PR activity for you will know weeks in advance what you need. You do lots of planning on who to contact. You'll do your research on what journalists to contact or you know, what social media posts you're going to put out, what blogs you might write, what newsletters. All of these fall under the PR category as well. And there's a huge crossover. So that's proactive. Reactive is where something happens obviously in, in the press, in the national arena, international arena, or even just locally that you can react to that, you can jump on the bandwagon of or what we call in the industry as newsjacking. So you will newsjack that story. So for example, I mean basically in the last year all we've done is reactive because we've not known from day to day what we can do, what we can plan in there's no point in promoting something in advance, especially events, when events haven't been able to take place. So we've been just newsjacking everything and making sure that we can react as and when we need to.

So let's talk about the newsjacking because I think when it. Because we'll very quickly go back to proactive in a little bit. But I think this newsjacking, this reactive PR is really important because this is where your business can get in the eyes of so many people in such a quick amount of time. From, from when I've worked alongside this, it can be one of them where it is literally so quick paced because when it is reactive, a journalist will want to speak to you and it's gotta be there and then, and then it's literally out that evening, potentially because it is just nowadays. So how can a business owner set themselves up the best to be able to take advantage of reactive or newsjacking priority? What can they be doing, whether it's on Twitter or relationship building or how they structure their website or their social media profiles or just anything like what are some like those quick fire tips that you usually like to give out to somebody when you're doing something like this and explaining to a host or a business owner?

You've just listed most of them, to be honest. I mean, building a relationship with the press is really, really vital and Twitter is absolutely the tool for that. So using hashtags like journorequest on Twitter is a really great way of keeping on top of what journalists are looking for in articles. So if a journalist is writing an article on a particular subject, they will look for sources of information and they will go on Twitter and use journal request. They also use platforms like Trav Media ResponsSource, but they all cost money, whereas Twitter is a free resource. So you can keep on top of what they're looking for. And if you can just reply to them or ping an answer back to them, a lot of the time they will put their email addresses in as well and send them some information that's relevant to that request that you can jump on top of and you can use Jack, then that's a great way of sort of a building relationships because if you start reacting to them, they might not use you straight away, but three or four occasions down the line they'll get to know you. They'll get to, you know, recognize your face or your Twitter handle or whatever, and they'll know to look out for you. Or if they're writing an article and they know that you've responded to them before, they might just come straight to you, which has happened to a lot of our clients a lot of the time. Sometimes journalists just pass us by completely as an agency and go straight to the client now because they know they can give that information.

That's. That's interesting. So apart from Twitter, is there any other ways that they could help build these relationships? Because obviously we're not talking about national. A lot of the times. A lot of the times it could be in the local or the county level. So would you recommend even maybe doing a bit of research and is finding out who the local journalists are in their area through like LinkedIn and things like this, or is it literally the best way without being super stocky is just Twitter?

No, I mean, research is the base of any PR campaign. So researching a who your audience is and be, you know, what magazines or newspapers or media that they are using is really vital. So the best thing you can do is pick up a copy of that magazine or that newspaper and as you say, research who. Who the journalists are, ping them an email, just introduce yourselves. I think journalists actually quite like just hi kind of emails. They're so used to people just wanting stuff from them all the time. Sometimes it's nice to just build up relationships that way. Normally I'd say, you know, you could always pick up the phone, but at the moment you can't because everyone's working remotely. So knowing who to call and where is impossible. Or sending them something like snail mail is so underrated. So, you know, sending them something in the post. But yeah, doing your research is really, really vital for that. So making sure you're building those relationships that way and just reacting to things as well, reacting to them on Twitter or Facebook or just again, getting your name out there.