My clients have been featured in publications like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, and I’ve previously written for publications like The Washington Post so I’m often asked the following: how long does PR take to get results? In my experience, getting results for publication relations (PR) efforts is dependent on quite a few factors. It may take 11 days, but it could be 6 months or even years.
Your time may vary depending on the season, what your goals are, if your audience is local vs national, what your budget is, if your company is unique, and quite a few other factors. Because I can’t know your unique situation, I’ll do my best.
Why PR take a long time
Many founders or CMOs are under the illusion PR people like me have a list of contacts that will simply run stories I tell them to. Wrong! In fact, if a PR person guarantees placement in particular publications, run. They’re either paying off journalists or running advertorial content, which doesn’t carry the same value for your brand, doesn’t get organic ranking, and doesn’t help by giving you backlink value.
PR takes a long time because there are three major phases your company has to work through. You may need to work on your customer ID, messaging, vision, and mission to start. Even large companies skip this process, leading to confusion—great PR people will correct this first. That takes time. Second, you may need to work on basic SEO and web strategies ensuring when you do get a press hit, customers can find you. Third, you need to develop stories of value, and if you get interest you need to build those stories with the journalist.
Even when you “hook” a journalist on a truly fantastic story angle, even then it may take 6 months to finally run. The journalist has to vet sources, do research, interview you, and in some cases do site visits. It takes a long time. Obviously, your PR person should be helping you find new stories during that time.
How long does PR take?
To get results, PR takes a minimum of 6 months. To become a legitimate customer acquisition channel, PR takes years. Sadly, most founders or companies only alot 6 months of runway and often discontinue their PR efforts right when journalists start showing interest, or when they get one or two major publications to run their story. Those same companies will gladly continue to drop tens of thousands of dollars on ads that have a far less ROI. This is truly a mistake.
PR isn’t a switch to flip on and off. PR should be a part of your marcom strategy. How long does PR take? Years or even decades.
How long does regional or local PR take?
PR for regional publications, depending on market size, can be a lot faster of a turnaround— possibly a few days or a few months. Believe it or not, locally-focused journalists struggle to find great stories. That’s not a knock on local journalists, they just have a much smaller pool of story ideas to pull from.
If you’re the one with a truly inspiring or fascinating story and you pitch it, there’s a fairly good chance you’ll have success. But just because they’re pulling from a smaller story pool doesn’t mean they’ll take your story. You still need to pitch them a story that’s valuable to their audience.
My PR company isn’t getting results
Just like any other industry, PR has its winners and losers. Because I’ve written for The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and others, I’ve seen tens of thousands of pitches from PR people. Most are awful. I’m NOT suggesting you stick with a PR company or PR lead for years with no results. That’s stupid. You should have a clear conversation about realistic goals and stick with 6-month plans to see what the results are. Then you should make adjustments or draw up new goals.
Notice I said realistic goals. Every single CEO and CMO on earth wants the big wins like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune and New York Times. I’ve delivered those wins for clients but it takes time and the competition is vast. A more realistic goal would be to find a higher concentration of your market, in a smaller publication.
Practically, if you sell rocks and 100,000 people read Rock Watchers Weekly, (made that up) it would be a better target than the New York Times, which only has 1,000 people that care about rocks. And I can guarantee getting an article in Rock Watchers Weekly will be easier. There’s far less competition.
When you fail at your PR Goals
When you do fail to reach your PR goals (and you absolutely will), you don’t get to stop. Even if you decide not to continue with your PR agency, you must continue those efforts. You must continually follow up on current irons in the fire, and you have to continue setting goals.
The best way to do this is to ensure you have a shared project management system with your PR agency. Obviously, you don’t want to enter a PR relationship with the end in mind, but proper communication and coordination require weekly reports or some kind of shared software. If your PR firm refuses, chances are they’re hiding something.
