How to Write a PR Plan: A 7-Step Framework

You have a powerful story to tell, but in a crowded world, even the best stories can get lost in the noise. A PR plan is the tool that ensures your message is heard clearly by the people who matter most. Think of it as the strategic framework for your entire communications effort. It helps you define what you want to say, who you need to say it to, and the most effective ways to deliver that message. Without this focused approach, your voice can be diluted. A well-designed PR plan turns your narrative into a focused campaign that builds credibility and influence.

Key Takeaways

• A PR plan turns publicity into purpose: Move beyond random media hits by creating a strategic roadmap. A solid plan aligns every action with your core business goals, ensuring your efforts build a consistent and powerful brand narrative.
• Measure your results to guide your next move: Your PR plan is a dynamic guide, not a static document. Regularly track key metrics like media sentiment and website traffic to understand what’s working, and use that data to refine your approach for maximum impact.
• Prepare for both crises and growth: Effective PR is proactive, not reactive. Build a crisis communication protocol into your plan to protect your reputation, and recognize when scaling your reach requires the expertise and connections of a professional agency.

What is a PR Plan? (And Why You Need One)

If you’re serious about shaping how the world sees you and your brand, you can’t just hope for the best. You need a strategy. A PR plan is that strategy—a detailed document that outlines exactly how you’ll manage your public perception and build meaningful relationships. It’s your guide to intentional communication, laying out your goals, who you want to reach, what you need to say, and the specific tactics you’ll use to say it, from media outreach to digital content.

Without a plan, your PR efforts can feel scattered and reactive. You might get a lucky media hit here or there, but you won’t build the kind of lasting momentum that establishes you as a leader in your field. A plan turns your efforts from random acts of publicity into a cohesive campaign designed to achieve specific business goals. It’s the difference between throwing spaghetti at the wall and executing a well-crafted recipe for success.

Your Blueprint for Building a Stronger Brand

Think of your PR plan as the architectural blueprint for your reputation. It provides the structure needed to build a strong, consistent, and positive public image. This roadmap helps you define clear goals, outline the tasks required to meet them, and even anticipate costs. By ensuring every press release, interview, and social media post aligns with a coherent message, you can effectively shape and protect your brand’s reputation. This consistency is what builds trust and credibility with your audience over time, making your brand memorable for all the right reasons.

PR Plan vs. Marketing Plan: What’s the Difference?

It’s easy to confuse a PR plan with a marketing plan, but they serve distinct functions. A marketing plan is primarily focused on promoting and selling products or services. Its success is often measured in leads, conversions, and sales revenue. A PR plan, on the other hand, is a long-term strategy focused on building and maintaining a positive reputation. It’s about earning trust and credibility through authentic storytelling and relationship-building. While marketing speaks to customers, PR speaks to the public—including journalists, investors, and the community. The two should work together, but PR lays the foundational trust that makes marketing more effective.

The Core Components of a Winning PR Plan

Before you can land a feature in a major publication or become the go-to expert in your field, you need a solid game plan. A winning PR plan isn’t just a list of reporters to contact; it’s a strategic framework that guides every decision you make. Think of it as the foundation of your brand’s public identity. Without it, your efforts can feel scattered and ineffective, like shouting into the wind. With it, every press release, interview, and social media post works together to build a powerful and consistent narrative.

Building this foundation comes down to four core components. First, you need to know exactly what you’re trying to achieve. Vague hopes won’t cut it; you need clear, measurable goals. Next, you must understand who you’re talking to on a deep level. Who is your ideal audience, and what do they care about? Once you know your goals and your audience, you can craft the key messages that will resonate with them. Finally, you’ll choose the right tactics and channels to deliver those messages effectively. Getting these four elements right is the key to turning your PR efforts from a guessing game into a strategic advantage that builds lasting credibility and influence.

Set Clear, Actionable Goals

The first step in any successful PR plan is defining what success actually looks like for you. It’s not enough to say you want “more press.” You need to get specific. This is where the SMART framework comes in handy: your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, instead of “get more media coverage,” a SMART goal would be “secure three podcast interviews on top-tier business shows within the next quarter.” This clarity gives you a target to aim for and a way to know if you’ve hit it. Setting clear, actionable goals transforms your PR from a series of random activities into a focused campaign designed to deliver real results for your brand.

Identify Your Ideal Audience

You can’t be everything to everyone, and your PR shouldn’t try to be. To make a real impact, you need to know exactly who you want to reach. Who are they? What do they read, watch, and listen to? What motivates them? Take the time to examine your ideal audience’s demographics, hobbies, and perspectives. Figure out what they care about and where they get their news. This understanding is crucial because it informs every other part of your plan, from the messages you craft to the media outlets you target. A deep knowledge of your audience ensures your story reaches the right people through the right channels, making your strategic PR planning far more effective.

Craft Your Key Messages

Once you know who you’re talking to, you need to decide what you want to say. Your key messages are the main ideas you want people to remember about you or your brand. These shouldn’t be complicated or full of jargon. Instead, they should be clear, short, and consistent across every piece of communication, from a formal press release to a casual social media post. Think about the one or two things you want to be known for. Is it your innovative approach, your unique backstory, or the incredible results you deliver? Weaving these core ideas into compelling narratives is what makes your brand memorable and helps you build a connection with your audience.

Select Your PR Tactics and Channels

With your goals, audience, and messaging in place, it’s time to choose how you’ll get your story out there. This is where tactics and channels come in. Your tactics are the specific actions you’ll take, like pitching journalists, securing speaking engagements, or publishing bylined articles. Your channels are the platforms where you’ll execute these tactics, such as specific magazines, podcasts, or industry events. The key is to focus on where your target audience already spends their time. Don’t waste energy on a platform they ignore. By strategically selecting the right mix of tactics and channels, you ensure your message not only gets delivered but is also heard by the people who matter most to your brand’s growth.

How to Build Your PR Plan, Step by Step

A great idea without a plan is just a wish. The same goes for public relations. A PR plan is your roadmap, turning your brand vision into tangible results. It provides structure, focus, and a clear path to follow, ensuring every action you take is intentional and moves you closer to your goals. Think of it less as a rigid set of rules and more as a strategic guide that helps you make smart decisions. For leaders like you—CEOs, authors, and entrepreneurs—your story is one of your most valuable assets, but it won’t tell itself. A plan is the difference between reactive damage control and proactively shaping your public narrative. It helps you organize your thoughts, align your team, and build a reputation that reflects your true impact. Ready to build yours? Here’s a straightforward, seven-step process to create a PR plan that actually works.

Step 1: Analyze Where You Stand

Before you can figure out where you’re going, you need to know where you are. Start with an honest assessment of your current situation. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a fantastic tool for this. What are you already doing well? Where could you improve? Are there market trends you can capitalize on, or potential challenges on the horizon? This initial analysis gives you a clear picture of your starting point. Understanding this landscape is the first step in building a strategy that leverages your strengths and addresses your weaknesses, setting a solid foundation for everything that follows.

Step 2: Define What Success Looks Like

Vague goals lead to vague results. Instead of aiming for “more press,” get specific about what you want to achieve. Do you want to be featured in three industry-leading publications this quarter? Are you hoping to increase speaking engagements by 50%? Setting clear, measurable goals is crucial because it gives you a benchmark for success. These specific targets, often called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), will guide your efforts and make it easy to determine if your PR work is effective. When you know what you want to achieve, every decision becomes simpler and more focused.

Step 3: Know Who You’re Talking To

You can’t craft a compelling message if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach. Take the time to deeply understand your target audience. Go beyond basic demographics and explore their motivations, challenges, and media consumption habits. Where do they get their news? Which social media platforms do they use? What kind of content resonates with them? Creating detailed audience personas can help you visualize who you’re speaking to. This understanding allows you to tailor your messaging and choose the right channels, ensuring your story connects with the people who matter most to your brand.

Step 4: Develop Your Core Story

Your key messages are the heart of your PR plan. These are the main ideas you want your audience to remember about you and your brand. They should be clear, concise, and consistent across all your communications, from press releases to social media posts. Think about your unique value proposition, your mission, and the core story you want to tell. What makes you different? What impact are you making? Your strategic PR planning should center on these messages, ensuring that every piece of content reinforces the narrative you want to build. This consistency is what builds a strong, memorable brand identity over time.

Step 5: Choose Your Tactics and Set a Timeline

With your goals and messaging in place, it’s time to decide how you’ll achieve them. Your tactics are the specific actions you’ll take, such as media outreach, guest blogging, speaking at conferences, or launching a social media campaign. Every tactic should have a clear purpose that connects directly back to your goals. Once you’ve chosen your tactics, map them out on a timeline. A detailed schedule keeps you organized and ensures your efforts are coordinated and timely. This is also where collaboration is key; your PR and marketing teams should work together to create a cohesive strategy.

Step 6: Outline Your Budget

A plan isn’t actionable without a realistic budget. Determine what resources you can allocate to your PR efforts. This includes potential costs for hiring a PR agency, subscribing to media monitoring tools, creating content, or sponsoring events. Having a clear budget helps you make smart choices about which tactics to prioritize and ensures your plan is sustainable. It forces you to be strategic with your resources and focus on the activities that will deliver the biggest return on your investment. A well-defined budget turns your ambitious plan into a practical, achievable reality.

Step 7: Decide How You’ll Measure Results

How will you know if your plan is working? The final step is to define how you’ll measure your success. This goes back to the specific goals you set in Step 2. Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics you’ll track to gauge your performance. These could include the number of media placements, website traffic from earned media, social media engagement rates, or changes in brand sentiment. Regularly monitoring your campaign’s performance allows you to see what’s working and what isn’t, so you can make informed adjustments to your strategy along the way.

Common PR Plan Mistakes to Avoid

Crafting a strategic PR plan is a huge step forward, but even the most detailed framework can go off the rails if you’re not careful. The difference between a plan that gets results and one that collects dust often comes down to avoiding a few common, yet critical, missteps. Think of it like this: you’ve built a powerful vehicle, but now you need to make sure you don’t drive it straight into a ditch.

Many well-intentioned PR efforts fail not because of a lack of effort, but because of a flawed foundation. These mistakes often happen right at the planning stage and can undermine your entire campaign before it even begins. The most frequent issues we see are setting goals that are either too vague or completely out of reach, creating messages without a clear audience in mind, and developing a PR strategy that operates in a silo, disconnected from your core business objectives. By understanding these pitfalls ahead of time, you can build a more resilient, effective, and impactful PR plan that truly serves your brand.

Setting Unrealistic Expectations

It’s great to dream big, but when it comes to your PR plan, your goals need to be grounded in reality. A common mistake is expecting a viral moment or a feature in a top-tier national publication right out of the gate. While those are fantastic long-term aspirations, they aren’t immediate outcomes. The real danger lies in ambiguity, as poorly defined goals can significantly muddle a campaign’s effectiveness. A goal like “get more media coverage” is too vague to be actionable.

Instead, focus on setting clear, specific, and measurable objectives. What does success actually look like for you? Is it securing three podcast interviews in your niche this quarter? Or is it getting a feature in a key industry trade journal that your ideal clients read? Setting achievable milestones will not only keep your team motivated but will also give you a clear way to track your progress and prove your ROI.

Forgetting Your Audience

You can have the most compelling story in the world, but if you’re telling it to the wrong people, it won’t land. A PR plan that isn’t built on a deep understanding of its target audience is destined to fail. Insufficient market research often leads to a complete misunderstanding of who you’re trying to reach, resulting in messages that feel tone-deaf or irrelevant. This goes beyond basic demographics like age and location.

To truly connect, you need to understand your audience’s motivations, challenges, and media consumption habits. Where do they get their news? Which social media platforms do they use? Who do they trust? What kind of content do they find valuable? Answering these questions allows you to tailor your key messages and choose the right channels to ensure your story resonates and inspires action.

Misaligning with Business Goals

Public relations should never operate in a vacuum. Its primary purpose is to support and advance your broader business objectives. A major mistake is creating PR goals—like securing a certain number of media mentions—that have no clear connection to what your business is trying to achieve, whether that’s selling more books, attracting investors, or booking more speaking engagements. When PR is disconnected from sales and marketing, its impact is diluted.

A strong strategic PR plan ensures every effort works together to move you closer to your ultimate goals. For example, if your business objective is to establish yourself as the leading expert in your field to attract high-ticket corporate clients, your PR goal shouldn’t just be about mentions. It should be about securing bylined articles in respected industry publications that your target clients read. When PR, marketing, and sales align on shared KPIs, measurement becomes much more straightforward and meaningful.

How to Adapt Your PR Plan for a Crisis

Even the most carefully crafted PR plan can be thrown off course by unexpected events. A negative review, a product issue, or a public misstep can quickly escalate if you’re not prepared. Instead of reacting on the fly, the best approach is to build a crisis management component directly into your PR strategy. This doesn’t mean you expect the worst, but it does mean you’re ready for anything. Having a plan in place allows you to respond thoughtfully and protect the brand you’ve worked so hard to build.

A crisis doesn’t have to define your story. With the right preparation, you can manage the situation with confidence and maintain trust with your audience. It’s about having the right systems in place before you ever need them. This proactive approach involves creating a clear communication protocol, drafting response templates, and defining who is responsible for what when a challenge arises. Let’s walk through how to set up each of these critical elements.

Build a Crisis Communication Protocol

Think of a crisis communication protocol as your playbook for tough times. It’s a documented plan that outlines exactly how your team will communicate, both internally and externally, during a crisis. As we often advise our clients, a well-structured crisis communication protocol is essential for managing your brand’s reputation during challenging times. It allows you to actively shape your narrative and ensures that all communication efforts are aligned with your overall goals.

Your protocol should identify potential crisis scenarios relevant to your brand, designate a primary spokesperson, and establish guidelines for communicating with the media, customers, and stakeholders. It should also detail your internal communication flow to keep your team informed and aligned. This document ensures everyone knows what to do, which helps you present a calm, unified front when it matters most.

Prepare Response Templates in Advance

When a crisis hits, time is of the essence. Fumbling for the right words can make a situation worse, which is why having pre-prepared response templates is a game-changer. This proactive approach not only saves critical time but also ensures your initial messaging is consistent, empathetic, and on-brand. You can develop templates for various scenarios, such as a social media apology, a press holding statement, or an internal team update.

These templates aren’t meant to be rigid scripts but rather starting points that can be quickly customized to fit the specifics of a situation. They provide a solid foundation, covering key message points and the right tone, so you can respond swiftly and thoughtfully. Having these ready allows you to control the initial narrative while you gather more information and formulate a more detailed response.

Establish a Clear Chain of Command

During a high-pressure situation, confusion is your enemy. Who has the final say on a public statement? Who is authorized to speak to the media? Without clear answers, you risk sending mixed messages or experiencing costly delays. Establishing a clear chain of command is crucial in crisis management. It ensures that everyone knows their roles and responsibilities, which is vital for effective communication and decision-making.

Your crisis plan should explicitly name the members of your crisis response team and define their specific duties. This team typically includes key leadership, your PR lead, and legal counsel. By outlining who is responsible for approving messages, monitoring media, and communicating with stakeholders, you create an organized structure that can function efficiently under stress. This clarity empowers your team to act decisively and speak with one voice.

How to Measure Your PR Plan’s Success

Once your PR plan is in motion, how do you know if it’s actually working? Measuring success is more than just a final step; it’s an ongoing process that shows you what’s resonating and where you need to adjust. A great PR strategy doesn’t just generate buzz—it drives tangible results that align with the business goals you set from the start. Vague metrics won’t cut it. You need to look at specific data points that tell the full story of your impact.

Tracking your progress helps you demonstrate the value of your efforts, whether you’re reporting to a board, your team, or just holding yourself accountable. It allows you to prove that your investment in public relations is paying off in meaningful ways. By focusing on a few key areas—media presence, audience engagement, website performance, and your standing against competitors—you can get a clear picture of your return on investment. Let’s break down the most important metrics to watch.

Media Coverage and Sentiment

The most traditional way to measure PR success is by tracking media placements. This includes every article, interview, podcast feature, or broadcast segment where your brand is mentioned. But it’s not just about quantity. The quality and tone of that coverage are what truly matter. This is where sentiment analysis comes in. It helps you understand how the public perceives your brand by categorizing mentions as positive, neutral, or negative. A single glowing feature in a top-tier publication can be far more valuable than a dozen neutral mentions in smaller outlets. Keeping a close eye on both the volume and the sentiment of your coverage gives you a real sense of how your story is landing.

Social Media Engagement

Social media is a fantastic real-time indicator of how your message is being received. When a piece of press goes live, watch how the conversation unfolds on platforms like LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram. Key metrics for evaluating PR success include likes, shares, comments, and new followers. Did a recent podcast interview cause a spike in your LinkedIn connections? Did an article about your work get shared widely with positive comments? This kind of engagement shows that your PR efforts are not only reaching people but also inspiring them to interact with your brand, which is a huge win.

Website Traffic and Conversions

Ultimately, PR should support your business objectives. One of the best ways to see this in action is by tracking what happens on your website. After a media feature is published, you should see a noticeable increase in referral traffic—that is, visitors who click through from the article to your site. Using tools like Google Analytics, you can see exactly which placements are sending the most visitors your way. More importantly, you can track conversions to see if these new visitors are taking the desired action, whether that’s buying your book, signing up for your newsletter, or booking a consultation.

Share of Voice

Share of voice tells you how much of the conversation in your industry revolves around you compared to your competitors. It’s a powerful metric for understanding your brand’s visibility and authority within your niche. Are you being quoted in articles more often than other experts in your field? Is your name appearing in more headlines? A growing share of voice is a clear sign that your PR plan is successfully positioning you as a go-to leader. While this can be complex to measure without specialized tools, it provides invaluable insight into your market presence and the effectiveness of your strategy.

Tools to Streamline Your PR Planning

A solid PR plan is your roadmap, but the right tools are the vehicle that gets you to your destination efficiently. Juggling media lists, tracking mentions, and reporting on your success can feel like a full-time job in itself. Luckily, there’s a whole ecosystem of software designed to make your PR efforts smoother and more effective. These tools help you manage everything from media relationships to campaign performance, giving you back the time you need to focus on strategy and storytelling. Think of them as your personal PR assistants, working behind the scenes to keep everything organized and on track.

Media Monitoring and Tracking Tools

You can’t measure what you don’t monitor. Media monitoring tools are your eyes and ears, scanning the internet, social media, and traditional press for mentions of your brand, competitors, and key industry topics. This is how you’ll know when your story lands and what the conversation around it looks like. Tools like Muck Rack not only help you find the right journalists but also allow you to tailor your pitches for more personalized outreach. Using dedicated PR software helps you get stories out, manage your media contacts, and report on performance, turning raw data into actionable insights about your brand’s reputation.

Outreach and Relationship Platforms

Public relations is built on relationships, and these platforms act as your digital rolodex. They go beyond a simple spreadsheet by helping you manage your media contacts, track your conversations, and organize your outreach efforts all in one place. An integrated platform can link to your email, providing real-time feedback on who opened your pitch and when. Tools like Prezly are designed to help you manage your media relationships and pitch stories effectively, ensuring no opportunity falls through the cracks. This level of organization is crucial for building and maintaining the strong connections that lead to consistent media coverage.

Project Management and Reporting Software

A successful PR campaign has a lot of moving parts. Project management software keeps your entire strategy organized, from content calendars to press release schedules. Whether you’re using a broad tool like Hootsuite to plan and schedule content across social media or a PR-specific platform with built-in project management features, the goal is the same: to create a central hub for your team. These tools ensure everyone knows their responsibilities, deadlines are met, and your campaign is executed flawlessly. They also simplify reporting, helping you pull together key metrics to demonstrate the value of your work.

How to Keep Your PR Plan Current and Effective

Think of your PR plan not as a static document, but as a living, breathing guide for your brand. The media landscape, your industry, and even your audience are constantly changing, and your strategy needs to keep pace. A plan that was brilliant six months ago might be ineffective today. Staying agile is the key to long-term success. By regularly revisiting and refining your approach, you ensure that every effort is still working hard to help you reach your goals and that you’re ready to pivot when new opportunities arise.

Schedule Regular Reviews

The best way to keep your plan relevant is to schedule dedicated time to review it. Whether it’s quarterly or twice a year, put a recurring meeting on your calendar to assess what’s working and what isn’t. During these check-ins, you should update your PR strategy to account for any shifts in your audience, competitors, or technology. Ask yourself: Are we on track to meet our goals? Have new media outlets or journalists emerged that align with our brand? Are our key messages still resonating? Treating your PR plan as a dynamic guide ensures it evolves right alongside your business.

Adapt to Market Changes

A great PR plan allows you to proactively shape your story, but that requires staying tuned in to the world around you. Market dynamics, industry trends, and cultural conversations can shift quickly, creating both challenges and opportunities. As our own strategic PR planning guide explains, PR is a long game, and building a strong reputation takes consistent effort. Part of that effort is paying attention to what’s happening outside your company walls. By staying informed, you can adjust your messaging to be more timely, find new angles for your stories, and maintain a relevant voice in your field. This proactive approach is what separates a good PR strategy from a great one.

Adjust Your Strategy Based on Performance

Your PR plan is built on goals, but you can’t know if you’re hitting them without measuring your progress. This is where your key performance indicators (KPIs) come in. Regularly check your results against the goals you set. If a specific tactic isn’t delivering, don’t be afraid to change your plan. PR is an ongoing process, so flexibility is key. Maybe your bylined articles are getting incredible traction, but your press releases are falling flat. That’s valuable information. Use that data to reallocate your time and resources toward the activities that are actually moving the needle for your brand.

When to Hire a Professional PR Agency

Creating your own PR plan is an empowering first step, but there comes a point in every brand’s journey when calling in the experts is the smartest move you can make. Handling PR yourself can take you far, but a professional agency has the experience, connections, and dedicated time to take your visibility to the next level. Think of it less as handing over the reins and more as bringing on a strategic partner dedicated to your growth. If you find yourself spending more time trying to land media placements than running your business, or if your goals have grown beyond your current reach, it might be time to consider professional help.

You’re Ready to Scale Your Reach

You’ve built a solid foundation, but now you’re aiming for bigger stages. Maybe you want to transition from local news to national outlets, or from niche blogs to industry-leading publications. When you’re ready to scale, a professional agency can build a comprehensive PR strategy designed to manage your reputation and build key relationships with the media and the public. It’s about moving from simply getting your name out there to strategically shaping how a much larger audience perceives you and your brand. An agency helps you make that leap, ensuring your message is consistent, powerful, and reaches the right people on a national or even global scale.

You Need an Expert Strategy

If your PR efforts feel scattered or you’re not seeing the results you want, it’s likely a sign that you need a more cohesive plan. A professional agency doesn’t just send out press releases; they help you actively shape your story and ensure every tactic works together to achieve your core business objectives. Hiring experts saves you an incredible amount of time and helps you get better results, faster. They already have the established media contacts and the know-how to pitch your story in a way that resonates with journalists. This inside knowledge and experience can be the difference between a pitch that gets ignored and one that lands you a feature story.

The Benefits of Partnering with an Agency

Working with a PR agency gives you access to a team of specialists whose sole focus is to amplify your message. They handle the complex, time-consuming work of research, media monitoring, and performance tracking, so you can focus on what you do best. Agencies also invest in professional tools and software that help them manage media relationships and report on campaign performance, providing you with clear insights into your return on investment. Ultimately, partnering with an agency is an investment in expertise, established relationships, and a proven process for generating the kind of media attention that builds credibility and authority in your field.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How is a PR plan different from a marketing plan? Think of it this way: marketing is focused on selling, while PR is focused on your reputation. A marketing plan uses paid ads and promotions to drive sales, and its success is measured in leads and revenue. A PR plan, on the other hand, uses storytelling and relationships to build trust and credibility with the public. PR lays the foundation of trust that makes all of your marketing efforts more effective.

How long will it take to see results from my PR plan? Public relations is a long game, not an overnight fix. While you might get a few quick wins, building real, lasting momentum takes consistent effort. You should think in terms of quarters, not days. Generally, you’ll start to see more significant results—like features in target publications and a noticeable increase in your authority—after three to six months of dedicated work.

My business is still small. Do I really need a formal PR plan? Yes, absolutely. A plan is arguably even more important when you’re small because every bit of time and money counts. A formal PR plan ensures your efforts are strategic and focused, preventing you from wasting resources on random activities that don’t move you closer to your goals. It helps you build a strong reputational foundation right from the start, which is essential for growth.

What’s the most common mistake people make when creating a PR plan? The biggest misstep is creating a plan that isn’t directly tied to clear business objectives. It’s easy to get caught up in chasing media mentions for the sake of vanity. But if those placements aren’t reaching your ideal audience or helping you sell more books, attract investors, or land clients, they aren’t truly working. A great plan always starts with your business goals and works backward from there.

How do I know when it’s time to hire a PR agency instead of doing it myself? It’s time to hire an agency when your ambition outgrows your bandwidth. If you’re aiming for major national media, feel like your efforts have plateaued, or find that PR is taking too much time away from running your business, that’s your cue. An agency brings established media relationships and a dedicated team to the table, helping you achieve bigger goals much faster than you could on your own.