The following steps may help clients better understand your efforts even when your hard work does not land media coverage.
- Document in detail your contacts with media outlets and share this information with clients. Provide this information as you make the contacts. Providing this information after the fact may simply seem like damage control.
- Even if reporters say they want to cover your story, remind clients others such as editors and producers are part of the decision-making process and could nix the whole idea.
- Even if media outlets schedule a shoot or interview, discuss the details and ask you to rearrange your schedule, remind clients how quickly things change (for example, breaking news) and little is guaranteed.
- Even if media outlets actually shoot a story or conduct an interview, remind clients this is still no guarantee the outlet will air or print the story. Clients may wonder why media outlets would waste such resources. Say, “Yep, that’s the business.”
- If clients click on websites or turn on the news and see no one shared their story, they may notice the media outlet went with some other “garbage” instead. Don’t try to make sense of the media’s decisions. Explain people aren’t necessarily smart or don’t always hold strong news judgement just because they’re in the media.
- A story a client expected to see on air may end up only on a station’s website. Stations sometimes call these stories “web exclusives,” but we conside that term mostly spin. When stations feel strongly about stories, they don’t save them only for websites. Yes, more and more people are getting their news from websites than from traditional newscasts, but try explaining that to a small business which sees spikes in phone calls when they’re on TV. Don’t B.S. clients. Sympathize with their disappointment and try to explain the benefits without exaggerating.
- In the end, explain you too are disappointed in the result. Don’t apologize unless you did something wrong or didn’t try hard. Hopefully, clients, like most others, will just blame the media.