PR Report
Helmut Berg - EuRA PR Liaison

Dear All, 

If a member of the Council assumes responsibility for a certain field of activity within EuRA, it is widely expected by the others that they can lean back and wait what will be done. However, there are fields where something can be done centrally for the association and at the same time the members can do something for themselves and for the entire group. PR is such a field. We will search contact to major publications. At the same time I want to encourage all of you to become active yourself.  This is what the following article is about.  If you want to grow your business, you have two choices: 

  1. You wait until the clients find you and buy your services.
  2. You are becoming active and make your potential clients aware of you and your business/services
Alternative A is less tiring but not very promising. So let’s talk about alternative B.  

In order to approach your clients you have a selection of choices: Advertising, Sales Promotion and finally Public Relation.  Public Relation can work for every size of business, no matter whether big or small. This also applies for our industry.  

Today I would like to give you some ideas and inspiration what you could do in order to make your firm more known – in context with your membership to EuRA. Those of you who are already active by doing PR might find confirmation in what you are doing, others might resume that they should start doing something.  

Public Relations (PR) are an important element of Marketing. PR is identified by the most by means of articles that appear in a newspaper. However, PR can be much more, such as an interview in radio or TV, a press conference or a breakfast with journalists or a research in a newspaper. 

Following I will concentrate on PR in its generic way as an article for/in newspapers and similar publications. 

What differs PR from advertising? If you see a full page advertisement about a car or about a perfume or a TV and video set you see that the creators of these advertisements try to influence you emotionally – mostly by images and not by many words. These advertising pages cost a fortune.   

PR is much more factual and much less expensive. The latter is why it is a good tool for promoting your business.  In PR you are allowed to ‘tell stories’ as well but only based on facts and figures.  But most of all: with PR you position yourself as a specialist in your field. Articles are a clever way to do this – when they appear and when they have appeared. You can use them in multiple ways: 
  1. First of all to you wave the flag to be an expert (targeted to HR people)
  2. You have interesting content for your website (instead just to say “we are the best”
  3. As attachments to your proposals that you send to your clients
  4. As topic for a newsletter you send to your clients
Attached please find a very basic article that you can use for your purposes (click here). You just need to adjust to your company name and other relevant data. This article can be sent to local papers as well as to trade magazines.  It is important that you call the paper first and find out who the journalist is that you would have to send the article to.  Journalists are sometimes very thankful that they get something decent that is ready to be used.  Therefore you might send it as attachment to a mail in Microsoft Word format - (please email Dominic Tidey for a Word format copy).  Do not forget to mark the page clearly visible as “Press Release”.  The Release should have your full company name, the name of the responsible manger, all co-ordinates such as telephone, fax and E-Mail address.   

If the article will appear, do not expect a lot of clients to call you the same day or next morning.  You should realize, that PR is a tool with long term effect. You can not measure an immediate success, but you can be sure that every article that appears about you percolates bit by bit in the brains of your audience. One adds to the other. And if the readers see you in a daily paper today and in a trade magazine tomorrow they will value you highly.  

Featuring your EuRA membership in every article will further enhance your profile.  

In the next edition I would like to give some additional ideas on what topics you can use for articles.    

And by the way: do you all have the EuRA-logo on your website?