We’re all aware that since the pandemic, companies around the world have been facing hiring challenges. Between you and me, how could it be otherwise when every business sector has had massive layoffs?
So it’s time to quit complaining and get on with it. I’m one of those bosses who has figured out that you have to be in permanent hiring mode and that recruiting young talent who have just finished their studies—if you give them a little time—can quickly prove to be more efficient than an employee who says they have three years of experience but who’s bounced from job to job without ever really digging in. That means we’ll just have to train them anyway.
I can hear you saying, what? You train employees who might very well not stay with NATA PR? And my answer is yes! Plenty of them are going to leave, often six months or a year in, whether we train them or not. Yet I have to say, since I’ve made peace with constantly training and hiring, more than 70% of our new hires have stayed with us for more than a year. And if they do leave, it’s often to go back to school, to travel since that wasn’t an option for this new generation, or sometimes to choose another profession.
I too benefit from this ongoing training by rethinking every move we make at NATA PR and how we can develop processes to make what we do here crystal-clear and easy. And you know what? My training sessions with my employees have become the basis of the NATA PR SCHOOL, where I teach you media relations, simplified.
The first thing we do with our young hires is:
- Show them a completed activity report. This is often an annual report that shows the number of interviews, articles and mentions we got for a client.
Step two:
- Teach them what we did to get those results (e.g. nine press releases + products + two virtual presentations).
Step three:
- Bring them to the front or centre stage to draft an initial email introducing a product, service or company—what we call the brief—which they’ll then send out in an email. Centre stage is sending emails and sometimes making phone calls. What are we going to say or write? What is essential?
That’s already 50% of the work. The next step—Step 3 in our model—is to identify what I call the “real” influencers. It’s just a question of finding who’s interested in the product or service you’re selling.
Yes, we have powerful tools to run media searches, but just like you, we’ll Google it. Sometimes, reaching out three times to journalists/influencers whom we’ve done research on to find out if they’ve recently written about the same type of subject is better than sending out a thousand cold emails to a list of contacts you got from a friend.
According to CISION’s annual State of the Media Report, the #1 complaint of journalists is the low volume of interesting emails (barely 25%) based on the business sectors they write about. So you’ll understand that there’s no point in sending them an email about a new clothing collection when they only write about electric cars.
But will you get more from them if the information you’re sending them is related to the topics they cover?
So now it’s your turn to include simplified PR in your marketing plan. Enrol in our programme and I’ll teach you our fast and effective method that will only take an hour or two of your time each week.
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