Research, Research and more Research

I have been at Magenta for a while now and I feel like I have a better understanding of the ins and outs of PR and the unglamorous and hard work that goes into making a PR strategy work.

One of the main things that I have learned is the amount of research that goes into each stage of a PR strategy for a client.

At uni I know whenever we start an assignment the tutor drills into us that the research aspect of the assignment is the most important part of the assignment and if your research is poor your assignment will be poor.

In PR there needs to be research into everything from the media your going to pitch a story to, the people to invite to event, the people you get to be the face of a brand, what event to have, what clients to pitch to. 

A lot of my tasks at Magenta have been to help with the research aspects of a strategy whether it be researching people to invite to event or put into a database for future events and researching media to invite to events to cover it for the papers that they work for.

With researching media you need to be aware of the type of event that is taking place and make sure that you collect information for appropriate media to pitch to. One of the events I was developing a media list for was a lifestyle/health/parenting event. I would call different newspapers in various states and research who the papers parenting reporter is or lifestyle or health reporter.

Sometimes at uni when your tutor says you need to do a lot of research you can not see the point but being at Magenta has taught me that research is key to getting everything else you do right.

Yes research is time consuming and tedious but it is also very important to getting the execution of your PR strategy to be a success.

So next time I have a PR assignment I will give the research more importance.

Jess