What's the Right Timing for Publicity? Publicity Dilemma 2

Guest post by Marcia Yudkin

What's the Right Timing for Publicity? Publicity Dilemma 2

Media outlets are in the news business. And as you can tell from
the close resemblance between the words "news" and "new," the
mission of the media is to bring you interesting and timely
reports on what's new. If you're an entrepreneur or
organizational marketer and you feed your news about what's new
to the media at the appropriate time, you're helping both them
and yourself. You give them news to share, and you receive
credibility and exposure to potential customers.

Ah, but what is the appropriate time? Media deadlines are the
most important element in proper timing. Follow these guidelines
to make the publicity process work in your favor.

In one group are radio, television, newspapers and web sites,
which have short-range deadlines, and in another group are
magazines, which have considerably longer-range deadlines. For
the short-range deadline media, one week is generally enough lead
time for those media outlets to pick up your story. For
magazines, the lead time depends on the publication schedule:
Monthly magazines need to receive your press releases or pitches
3-6 months ahead of time, while those published every other month
need even longer lead time. Weekly magazines need 3-6 weeks
advance notice, whenever possible.

When announcing events or looking for coverage for them (as
opposed to, say, announcing a new product or providing
perspective on a trend), you often need to add a few weeks to the
lead time, because daily media often have a weekly rather than
daily publication schedule for their calendar listings. That is,
upcoming events get published in a batch once a week on Thursday
or Friday rather than every day.

The biggest timing complications arise with a product launch,
because magazines need to receive your publicity materials 2-3
months before the newspapers, radio, TV and websites in order for
them to feature new stuff around the same time. If you rely
simply on press release distribution for publicity, either
magazine coverage will lag way behind the other media or the
newspaper etc. coverage will be premature.

Solve that dilemma by sending publicity materials directly to the
magazines at least three months before you want the coverage to
appear, then wait until the week before you want the coverage to
hit up the newspapers, radio, TV and websites, either by
contacting them directly as well or by doing a general press
release distribution. That's right - do publicity in two
batches.

Using the guidelines above, plan your timing carefully so you
don't have publicity appearing before your product is ready for
purchase or after it's too late for customers to plan to attend
your events.

Bonus Tip: Improve your timing even more by looking up or
requesting a publication's "editorial calendar." This is an
issue-by-issue rundown of planned topics - for instance, the
March 16 issue will cover network security, the March 23 issue
software upgrades and so on. If you dovetail your publicity with
a particular publication's editorial calendar, you're
practically a shoo-in!


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Publicity expert Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free
Publicity, Persuading on Paper, Web Site Marketing Makeover and
eight other books. She has engineered coverage for herself or
her company in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Success,
Women in Business and dozens of newspapers around the world. Get
free access to a one-hour audio recording in which she answers
the most common questions about getting media coverage at
http://www.yudkin.com/publicityideas.htm

Greg Cryns
Wahm Search Engine