Often, the reason entrepreneurs and small business owners fail to gain publicity is because of a lack of planning – ie. no media plan template or PR strategy. If it’s not in the diary, then it’s unlikely to happen. Is this you?

Even the smallest of media planning steps can help make a big impact in growing your business. It can also help you manage your time better, make better use of the opportunities presented to you, collaborate better with other members of your team, and allow you to plan your work months in advance and not miss those important deadlines.

If you read and implemented the actions from the last post on customer avatars, you will have put together a list of what your ideal customer is reading, listening to and watching. Study those media outlets and the types of content they produce before you begin your media plan.

This will give you clues as to what you should be creating. A small amount of time doing this research upfront, will see you gaining greater success when it comes time to pitching.

DOWNLOAD THE TEMPLATE

This template above will ensure you won’t need to start from scratch when it comes to setting up a plan. The free download I’ve made available comes in either a Word document format or excel spreadsheet, depending on which works best for you and your team. 

When I started out doing public relations many moons ago, clients were always keen to know what had been done and what the results were. It’s why the calendar is such a powerful tool, because you can clearly show your progress and note results.

This becomes even more important if you happen to be working in a team and want to track progress throughout a major campaign or long-term project.

What is a media plan?

Before you jump in and start creating your plan, what is a PR plan? 

A media plan is a document to bring together the what, where, when and how of your public relations campaigns. That is, you need to know:

• WHAT business stories and messages you’re going to share. Knowing your value proposition can really help here.
• WHERE you’re going to share them from traditional means like newspapers, radio, TV and magazines through to online platforms like online news sites, social media and blogs.
• WHEN is the best time for this story, article or interview to take place that aligns with your business’ vision and mission or financial goals
• HOW you’re going to get that attention, such as a press release, guest blog post, media pitch or other.

Setting up your free downloadable media plan template

Open a Word document or Excel spreadsheet and create a table in your pr planning template. If you download the above, you’ll notice the following steps have been done for you.

Add in categories along the top bar to form your media plan outline, including announcement date, subject, content, vehicle, contacts, status, deadline and importance.

• Announcement date: This is the date your product, service or story angle is to go live. Or, it could be the day you want the story, article or guest post to go live.
• Subject: The subject of your media pitch, which is often the first thing a journalist will look at when you pitch.
• Content: What content will you be pitching? What is the hook, message or storyline that’s going to lure people in? 
• Vehicles or Channels: This is what vehicles you’ll use to get your message out there. Think press releases, blog posts, video, guest podcast and newsletters.
• Contacts: This should list all the media contacts, journalists or bloggers’ names, their contact details and website addresses. Learn more about how to create a free media contact list. Know that this list and the relationship you have with each contact will develop and grow stronger over time.
• Status: An idea of what needs to be done and what’s already been accomplished. It’s your “to do” list.
• Deadline: Obviously, the deadline when everything needs to be complete.

Importance: If you’re working on multiple campaigns at once, and particularly if you’re looking at including magazines which can have a four- to six-month lead time, this publicity plan template allows you to prioritise your campaigns.

A PR plan template can be as detailed or brief as you like, as long as it’s easy to follow. You could put one task in each row or put all the tasks for one campaign in a row. It’s up to you. (You can get the downloadable template if you don’t want to start from scratch and instead have a sample media schedule to follow).

If you’ve been tasked with publicity and social media as one project, you may even want to combine them into one document to avoid having multiple pages. You may just need to incorporate a separate column to determine which is which. Again, do what works best for you.

Add in your PR news stories and content

If you already have publicity opportunities planned, add these to your free downloadable media plan template. Then go through all seasonal, holiday and month-based news story topics you could cover. We cover these inside our Public Relations News Calendar, which also includes a handy:

• digitally fillable daily and monthly planning calendar in PDF,
• monthly story prompts for PR, social and blogging, and
• campaign timeline, activities and budget section.

Seasonal stories

For a fashion business, that might mean focusing on fashion trends for the start of each new season – summer, winter, autumn and spring, Mother’s Day fashion in May, Spring cleaning your wardrobe in September and Christmas office party attire in December.

Business and product plans

Then look at products or services you plan to launch and events you’re organising or which you’re involved with. Maybe you’re doing a trade fair in August and hosting your own fashion parade in November. Add these to your pr campaign template.

Evergreen content ideas

If you can see gaps in your calendar, look at an evergreen content strategy and topics you could write as guest posts or articles to ensure consistency with your media pitching.

Hot news items and piggybacking

What you will need to keep in mind is that as your campaign progresses you may find opportunities to piggyback off hot news items. This is where you will read a publication, watch a TV show or listen to a radio show where a hot topic related to your campaign is being discussed or has made headlines.

There is an opportunity here for you to piggyback off this news. The key to its success is to find a way to take the story or issue a step further with your opinion, experience or twist. Media love looking at ways to expand a hot topic that the public are talking about.

Media callout services

Another opportunity is via media callout services. These services, like Sourcebottle and Help A Reporter Out – feature ‘callouts” from journalists and bloggers who are looking for talent to include in a story they’re working on. The best way to keep on top of this is to sign up to their alerts so you’re first to hear each day.

This is just a small taste of the type of media stories you could use.

Make your planning actionable

From here, the key is to plug all these tasks into your calendar to make sure you stick to your timeline. I highly recommend using Google Calendar if you like to use online platforms. It really is a great way to put in all your tasks and colour code your PR activities, so you can see which tasks need doing and when.

Alternatively, print out your PR plan outline or PR strategy template and stick it to your office wall, so you have a daily reminder of what needs to get done. I like the physical element of “crossing” things off and seeing that progress visually. It’s also hard to ignore when it’s staring back at you each day.

Unless PR is your day job, if it’s out of sight it can also often be out of mind. We can easily get wrapped up in other tasks and forget to do the crucial pieces at the right time to increase your chances of success.

The free download provided comes as a PR plan template Excel and Word document. If I use the Excel version, I like to highlight cells or rows with a colour to indicate whether it’s not started (white), in progress (Yellow) or completed (green). If something gets cancelled but must remain in the calendar, then it can be highlighted in red.

This system works well for teams, as it’s hard for people to get confused and builds in some accountability if different teams members are responsible for different elements of a PR campaign. It will avoid seeing things slip through the cracks if you happen to have a big project with many moving parts that a larger team is working on. Google Drive documents like Google Sheets and Google Docs allow for comments in the side and tagging, which can help too.

If you need help getting your team set up with a good system for managing campaigns, reach out.

Keep revisiting your PR plan template

Don’t write it and leave it. The key really is to keep refining it. It’s a living document that will evolve as your campaigns progresses. Add in new content as it presents. Determine what has worked and what hasn’t and note these for the next six- to 12-month plan. It will save you a lot of time when you next need to create a plan, because you have data and anecdotal information to create a far stronger plan next time.

You can access a done for you free media plan template with our downloadable media template in excel or Word version to use, which also gives you a media plan sample within it to show you how to use it and increase your chances of media success. Sometimes having a PR plan example can help on knowing where to start and lift you out of any procrastination you might be experiencing.

How can you improve your PR planning?

Now you have an example media plan and understand the media plan format, this means no excuses. I challenge you to set aside an hour or two of your time to put together a 12 or 6-month media plan.

Once it’s complete, come back and let us know what you learned during the process. Did you find it difficult to come up with ideas? Maybe (and often what is the case) you started adding ideas and had an abundance of stories you’ll be able to use in your campaigns.

We discuss media plans more in-depth in the do your own PR course, Publicity Alchemy. This is a five-week course that will guide you through everything from creating your contact list to following up a journalist after pitching. You will have lifetime access to the PR program so you can refer back to it each time you go through a launch or strategy.

It also includes real life examples and templates, so you’re never having to start from scratch. Often it’s the starting that can prevent us from achieving what we most want. Publicity is a powerful tool in any business, because unlike advertising, when we know how to run campaigns, we can do them for free again and again.