How PR works
PR comes down to one trade. You have a story that a publication's audience finds interesting. The journalist has space to fill and too little time to find everything themselves. If you deliver a relevant, factual and complete story, you get editorial attention and the journalist gets a good article. That's all it is, and nothing less.
That also means PR isn't a channel you switch on, but a process with four steps:
- Recognizing news. A funding round, a study with striking numbers, a product launch with social relevance, a response to current events.
- Creating a press release or pitch. Factual, short and written the way a journalist would write it. You'll find out how in Writing a press release.
- Reaching the right journalists. Not the longest list, but the journalists who demonstrably write about your topic. See Pitching journalists and check who covers what per outlet on the media pages, for example those of De Telegraaf or NU.nl.
- Tracking and leveraging publications. Measuring where you appeared and translating that attention to your own channels. See Free publicity.
Why media coverage is worth more than an ad
An ad says: we think we're great. An editorial article says: an independent journalist found this worth writing about. Media act as gatekeepers. If a journalist trusts your story, the reader trusts it too. You can't buy that effect, only earn it.
PR, marketing and content marketing: the difference
The three terms blur together in practice, but the distinction is simple:
| Goal | Channel | Paid? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing | Direct sales and leads | Ads, campaigns | Yes, per impression or click |
| Content marketing | Attracting your audience with your own content | Your own blog, newsletter, social | No, but there are production costs |
| PR | Reputation and visibility through independent media | Newspapers, sites, radio, TV, podcasts | No, attention is earned |
PR doesn't replace marketing, and vice versa. The strongest combination: PR builds trust and brand awareness, which makes your ads and content convert better. In the PESO Model®, created by Gini Dietrich (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned), PR is the earned quadrant: the quadrant with the highest credibility and the lowest direct costs.
What does PR deliver?
Four concrete results, in order of how quickly you see them:
- Brand awareness. One publication in a national outlet reaches more people than most SMB ad budgets can handle. Presscloud customers appeared in De Volkskrant, De Telegraaf, NU.nl, RTL and Quote, among others, and internationally in titles like Forbes and Business Insider.
- Trust. Editorial coverage works as social proof toward customers, candidates and investors. "As seen in" does more than "we say so ourselves".
- SEO value. Publications on news sites deliver mentions and often links from high-authority domains. That strengthens your Google rankings and your visibility in AI search engines, which weigh news media heavily as a source.
- Lasting effect. An article stays online and keeps getting found. Through Presscloud, 55,336 publications have been realized so far, and each one keeps working long after the press release was sent.
Who PR works for (and who it doesn't)
PR works for any business that meets three conditions: you regularly have something to say that's relevant beyond your own company, you're willing to be transparent, and you set aside time for it structurally. Startups after a funding round, D2C brands with a strong story, scale-ups entering a new market, and organizations in culture and government get the most out of it in practice.
Let's be honest: PR isn't for you if you expect one press release to drive sales directly, if you don't have a single newsworthy story, or if you want to set it and forget it. PR is a long-term investment that builds your reputation, not a sales channel with a dashboard full of conversions within a week.
Do it yourself, hire an agency or use software
There are three routes to media coverage:
- A PR agency. Strong in strategy, network and spokesperson work on big or sensitive matters. Expect a retainer starting at several thousand euros per month. For most SMBs, that's out of proportion to the number of press moments per year.
- Fully on your own. Free, but you build press lists yourself, hunt down contact details and lack insight into what your mailing delivers. The time investment is serious and the results are hit or miss.
- PR software. You keep control of the story yourself, the software provides the journalist database, the distribution and the measurement. Presscloud is built for this route: you write (or generate) a press release, put together a relevant press list from 79,777 journalists in minutes, and then see exactly who opens your release and where it gets published.
The routes aren't mutually exclusive. Some agencies work through Presscloud for their own clients.
Your PR strategy in 8 questions
Answer these eight questions and you have the core of a PR strategy in place:
- Who is my target audience? Pick one, not three.
- Which theme do I want to be known for? Claim a well-defined domain and stick with it.
- What challenges does my audience have? Ask your sales colleagues, they talk to them daily.
- What do I want my audience to know about us? New customers, partnerships, growth.
- Which media does my audience read? Note: those are rarely the media you read yourself. Explore which media write about your sector in the media overview.
- Which news formats can I alternate? Research, newsjacking, customer stories, launches, opinion.
- Which fixed news moments does my year have? Plan them ahead in a calendar.
- How do I measure the effect? Define your metrics up front (see below).
Measuring the effect of PR
PR is more measurable than its reputation suggests. Four metrics that together give a complete picture:
- Publications: which media ran your story and with what reach. In Presscloud you see this per campaign through Media Monitoring.
- Engagement: open rates and click rates of your mailings, so you learn which topics and headlines work.
- Website traffic: spikes in direct and organic traffic around publication dates.
- Lead source attribution: ask every inquiry how they heard about you. That way you connect publications to revenue, even when the sales cycle takes months.
