When to Get PR

Not every company needs PR and not every company is ready for PR. Ethical public relations professionals won’t work with your company if you’re not ready for the deep effort—and, frankly, great expense—that garnering attention requires. It generally requires you have a marketing team; ideally, it requires a CMO and more than one PowerPoint (obvious because CMOs + PPTs = <3).
Being ready for PR means being ready to meet with your PR team on a biweekly basis, being ready to respond to your PR team on a daily basis, and being willing to do what your PR team actually advises you to do—perhaps the most difficult task of them all. It also means that you and your team must know what you’re trying to accomplish. PR can help you with a number of goals.

Why to Get PR

Key among PR goals is the elevation of a person, brand, or product. Following your smart marketing strategy, PR can help amplify the story your brand wants to tell by ensuring that the media who report on your industry are able to try out your product or service and assess it. Sometimes that results in reviews; sometimes that results in profiles or feature stories; sometimes it frustratingly results in nothing at all. You can’t control the review and you can’t control the stories but you can control what inputs are given to the reviews and stories. PR does that, too, and it tries again (and again) if your work is ignored.
Engaging PR is strongly advised for business owners who already have their exit strategy in mind. Press releases, which feature a city of origin and a date as do news stories and which ostensibly tell the truth as do news stories, are a way to mark a company’s progress and success in a legal and neutral manner. Think of them as posts that mark the history of your firm as it advances. Potential buyers will certainly see it that way.
PR is also a key tool when raising capital and again, press releases make your trajectory public and traceable, helping potential money see the value in what you do clearly. (As an aside, press releases themselves are ridiculously expensive — typically costing between $1,110-$1,400 — and so should be used with wisdom, discretion, and extra heaping helpings of SEO to make them worthwhile. A good PR pro will talk you out of unnecessary releases and craft highly useful ones when the time is right.)

Crisis Comms

PR is essential if yours is a highly regulated industry like cannabis, where crisis is a norm. As a cannabis PR professional, I once advised a client who burned down the neighborhood while I had a group of journalists staying on the very property that was on fire. Stuff happens and the advice in that instance was very human: Don’t do like Diddy. Keep your head up and your mouth open by acknowledging the error, apologizing for the error, and paying for the error.
Ideally, your PR team creates your crisis communication plan before things catch on fire so that you and your company are always ready to react in the smartest way possible. In emerging and highly volatile industries like cannabis, PR may sometimes be caught flat-footed by events. The advent of Labor Peace Agreements (LPAs) are a great example of regulations moving faster than even a PR pro can leap. Intended to honor the great example of decades past, cannabis LPAs are legally required compacts between cannabis companies and labor unions that at their most basic level allow employees to organize should they so choose. Unfortunately, fake labor unions amazingly exist, and signing an LPA with one, which happens with surprising frequency in this industry, means that a cannabis company is out of compliance and may face censure and fines even though they thought they had done the right thing. That can be a big PR problem and unsurprisingly, telling the truth once again is your best fix.

Dark Arts

Public relations are poorly understood perhaps because they require a private sense of panic on the part of the publicist. I was mentored by an executive who always maintained a subscription to the professional version of the IMDB, which lists star-serving agents and managers and attorneys as well as info about the stars themselves. If she struck out trying to reach celebrities through ordinary channels, she’d reach out to their attorneys instead, knowing that their offices would relay her messages because that’s a billable moment for them. And danged if that tactic didn’t result in her planning Kim Kardashian’s CBD baby shower for our client HelloMD, which was in the CBD business at the time. That’s some dark arts shit right there.
But mostly, PR pros are indefatigable. If we can’t find a way to support you and your brand one way, we’ll try another. We are immune to the embarrassment of DMing strangers. We dive into journalist’s back catalogues as though they’re cool mountain streams on warm July afternoons. And we’ll wrack our brains to find a creative solution to even the most mundane of problems.
As an example, that same mentor who hosted the Kardashians was once stuck on an angle for a press release. It was a standard affair announcing a new cannabis dispensary outlet, which is often usually met with snores. Searching for an in that would interest media, she Googled the address of the building. That’s when she discovered it had once been a Sears store. All of a sudden, she had a trend story about the demise of legacy retail and the rise of a scrappy new kind of retail, one that sells items that were illegal the last time anyone visited a Sears in that town. Dark arts.

Ask Yourself. . .

Is your company truly ready for PR? Could be time to put yourself and your team radically forward to the next step in your evolution. But it could be too soon and your money (and, more importantly: your time) could be wasted. Ask the smart questions and really consider your positioning before engaging a PR team. Because when you are ready and the time is right, this may be the smartest business move you make — and we’ll be sure to send out a press release about it. . . .