You may have read my post about press releases, below. These are great when you are launching or have interesting news relating to your business, but what of the times when you are just ticking along, doing what you do, serving customers? The local paper, with all due respect, isn’t going to be too interested in that.

So to keep media momentum (mediamentum?) going and generate that valuable PR coverage, you need to think of ways to create some news. First of all, consider little things within your business – new appointments, one millionth or thousandth customer (ask them to pose for a photo), new offerings. You may get some success locally out of these kind of stories.

But if you don’t, or there really is nothing to write home (to press) about, then all is not lost.

Surveys are a good way to generate news where there is none. You see them in the newspapers all the time – X per cent of Brits prefer a chippy dinner to fine dining. That sort of thing. Fling open the Mail or the Express and you’ll find a few survey stories, which have almost always been placed by a diligent PR officer.

First you need to decide on the best survey topic for your business. This should be something relevant, but not mundane. The aim is to extract from answerers the funniest/best/worst/most shocking trends which will then make an appealing news story. So, if you sell lawn mowers, don’t ask questions like ‘How often do you mow your lawn?’, but try something like ‘Which of these is the best motivation for getting round to mowing the lawn: a) neat garden b) get in the missus’ good books c) get to ride around on a piece of manly machinery d) other’. You can be a bit funny, a bit quirky, and this will result in better story.

You’ll need about five questions, including age and location. 

Surveys can cost anything from £0 to many thousands of pounds. If you have a vast budget then get in touch with a company such as 72 Point and they’ll help you to put your questions into a top notch survey, complete with analysis of the results and specially tailored wording. But I’m assuming that most people who read this are trying to do PR on a budget, and so for those, there are other ways to go about this which will cause less damage to the wallet.

If you have a customer database, send out a survey to them. Consider offering a prize, as we all know what a pain it is when these things land in your inbox, but a little incentivisation might help things along. If you have a website which gets a good number of hits, put your survey there. Or, if you have a shop, ask customers to fill in a questionnaire when they come in.

Another way to get a survey done is through a local paper. Ring up and ask to speak to promotions, tell them about your business and your survey to see if they like the idea. You will, most probably have to offer a decent prize (ask what the minimum prize value is), but it still costs you considerably less than going through a survey company, and you can negotiate to guarantee coverage of the results further down the line. If possible, aim to get them to put the survey online and in the paper.

Once the survey appears get all your friends, family and colleagues to complete it. Advertise it online, in your email signature, in your shop. Websites like Money Saving Expert and others have forums where competitions can be posted, so if you are offering a prize then post a link on some of these. Get as many people to enter as possible – the more the better in terms of the quality of the results.

Once you get the results back, you need to formulate the raw data into a press release. First of all, you need to pick out the interesting bits to focus on. This will probably be just one piece of data which is shocking or funny in some way, and maybe much more/less than would have been expected. This will be the main topic for your press release, but you need to include the other data in the details (see press releases post). If you cover more than one geographical area, use the results of location to formulate more than one release and get multiple pieces of local coverage. For instance, if you cover Leeds, Harrogate and Wakefield, look at the results of people from each of those – “76 per cent of people in Leeds have visited a sex shop in the last year”, “53 per cent of people in Wakefield…”, and so on (I’m sure these figures are nowhere near the truth, but I just pulled them off the top my head, before I start getting lambasted by angry Yorkshire folk).

Tie the results back into you and your business. So, for example, with the lawnmower seller, you might find out that most people are motivated to mow the lawn by the prospect of being in their wife or girlfriend’s good books. Then they might like to try X lawmower, which gets the job done as quickly as possible, leaving them to reap the, errrr, rewards.

Or, if they like to ride a piece of manly machinery, it would be your biggest, noisiest number. 

Draft all the information into a press release and pitch it into the media (see press releases and media relations posts, below). Should get you some nice coverage if done right.

Please contact me for help with surveys or any other topics at missmirataylor@yahoo.com