Don’t Hire PR For 3 Months to “Dip Your Toe.”
I hear some version of this all the time: “We just need PR for the next three months.”
So a company brings in a PR person for 90 days, and then everyone is disappointed when the coverage doesn’t transform the business. The uncomfortable truth is that three months of PR is usually not a PR strategy; it’s a deadline, and the media doesn’t particularly care about your deadline.
Journalists aren’t sitting around wondering what you need to accomplish before December 15. They’re asking a very different question: is this interesting to my audience right now?
There’s another issue, too. A lot of companies want PR to solve a branding problem they haven’t actually worked out — the website says one thing, the CEO says another, and LinkedIn is off doing its own thing. The PR person is then handed the job of turning all that into compelling coverage, which is a tall order, because PR can’t manufacture clarity; it can only amplify it.
That’s why the strongest PR relationships start well before the announcement. The work is figuring out what the company actually knows, what its people can legitimately speak to, what data and trends it can offer, and what it can say that others can’t.
There’s a sharper question underneath all of it: what do you want the brand to become known for?
Once you know that, PR gets a lot easier. And this is where companies misread what they’re actually paying for — you’re not paying someone to “get you press,” you’re paying them to spot the moments when your expertise or data is genuinely useful to a reporter, and to put you in front of the right journalist at the right time.
Sometimes that becomes a big story; sometimes it’s a single quote in a piece nobody predicted; sometimes it’s television; sometimes it’s nothing at all.
That’s because the media isn’t an advertising channel — you don’t get to buy the headline.
That’s also why I don’t love treating PR as a three-month experiment. If you want guaranteed exposure for 90 days, buy ads. I’ve genuinely said that sentence more than once to people who wanted to bring me on to “dip our toes in PR” and see if it works.
If you want journalists to independently decide your company is worth talking about, that’s a different game, and it takes longer than 90 days. Not because a PR person needs you on retainer forever, but because reputation takes longer to build than a campaign takes to launch.
The best PR isn’t a megaphone; it’s credibility borrowed from a third party. And the reason that credibility matters is that the media doesn’t work for you — which is exactly what makes the coverage valuable.