In today’s cluttered marketing environment, it’s easy for your brand to be lost in the noise.
At the same time, with the rise of social media marketing, many businesses often undervalue public relations (PR). Despite the concentration on tweets and posts, PR should remain a central component of your marketing mix and a valuable way of putting your marketing message in front of your target audience.
That said, using public relations can present a set of challenges different to other marketing channels. For example, often an issue with your PR strategy will emerge only when you take it to the media, and you’re in the sights of an experienced journalist.
Journalists and reporters go all out for the strongest angle for a story…and this position may not meet your marketing objectives. Therefore, to help ensure a PR opportunity works well for your brand, it’s important you consider some media training before you find yourself facing up to a newspaper reporter or a journalist from Professional Planner.
- Media training keeps you on message
It would be easy if journalists asked questions that easily matched the story you were planning to tell. In reality, this scenario rarely occurs.
From a marketing perspective, media training helps you stay on message even when an experience reporter is working you into a different corner. With media training, many interviewees can bring a discussion back to the points they want to talk about, without overtly dismissing the journalist’s questions.
Politicians are notorious for having these evasive skills, as are our favourite sporting heroes. Many reporters bemoan the fact stars such as Andy Murray and Roger Federer never give away too much about themselves and, like a metronome, stick rigidly to the ‘script’. This is a badge of honour for their media trainers, who have coached them to stay on message and not deviate in a way that may embarrass them or the sport that employs them.
- Training teaches you how to handle the media ‘curveball’
Building on my first point, good media training should help you answer a question that could potentially bring you unstuck in an interview.
There are techniques that can help you answer a question to ensure you don’t slip up and say something potentially damaging to your brand. Probably one of the worst media mistakes you can make in business is to talk directly about your competitors – or worse, criticise them. I wish this rule would be applied to politicians, but as a business owner, good media training gives you the tools to deflect such a line of questioning and, instead, help you focus on the key messages you want to cover about your offering.
- Media training is often harder than reality
As tennis great Andre Agassi once said: “If you don’t practice, you don’t deserve to win”. Like many events in life, preparing for a tricky media interview is usually a stressful assignment. But it will be worth its weight in gold if you get a journalist’s microphone shoved under your nose.
Media training gives you experience in an interview scenario, including an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and hone your messages. Likewise, a capable media trainer should help point out your faults and help you correct them, so you’re match fit when the time arrives for a live interview.
I’ve witnessed, firsthand, media training where an experienced television reporter grilled a colleague of mine mercilessly. In reality, he may never face a cross-examination like this, but it made him better prepared for future media encounters, which he continues to engage in with much enthusiasm and skill.
