When I directed the public relations campaign strategy for a wealth management firm, we focused primarily on small media to get our message out. Sure, we hit the big ones like The Wall Street Journal, but we found more return on our investment from trade magazines, even internal organs of large conglomerates.
To focus primarily on big media is a error when you’re developing a public relations campaign strategy for professional service providers, especially in business-to-business communications.
As media continues to fragment and more quality niche media rise up to serve small, highly targeted segments of people and industry, this type of campaign strategy will become even more important.
There are four important reasons why you should include small media in your mix:
- Your business or group has a particular interest in reaching a narrow audience.
- It’s easier to get more extensive coverage with small media, which leads to greater thought leadership.
- Because media is fragmenting, you may need to build relations with smaller media to reach everyone you need to.
- Credibility with small media tends to be higher than with larger media. The closer an individual medium is to the audience it serves, the more believable it is to that audience.
At the wealth management firm, we saw more success in our public relations campaign strategy by targeting small media. We could publish whole byline articles by the CEO, written by yours truly, of course. We never missed a beat, never got a news release turned down, and always provided the small guys with usable and highly valuble content. This meant our strategy returned more, and our campaign strengthened the company brand.
