Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Writing effective PR requires experience, flair, knowledge of the media, contacts and an ability to understand the requirements of your industry. If you hire your own PR person, you will need to manage them and train them in the particulars of your hotel business. As I guess that your expertise is in the running of a hotel, you might find this rather more difficult to do effectively than, say, manage a top chef.

An external PR agency should have the advantage of having the taking the first 4 attributes for granted. They will still need to learn both your industry and your hotel’s particular take on it. That is the job of the client brief – you need to tell the agency in some detail exactly what you expect from them in terms of results. They in turn should be able to demonstrate creative flair and a cost effective approach to achieve these results. There can sometimes be a problem in their interpretation of your brief, but you should expect that to be ironed out as the relationship progresses.

Do-it-yourself PR is rarely to be recommended, unless you are very good at doing it through your previous experience, as both the PR text and the process will tend to be poor. This will result in a negative reception by readers for your articles, fewer hits in publications offering to publish it and a lower rate of return if you were seeking enquiries. If you go for an internal PR, you will need to assure yourself that you can hire someone with all the skills to make that happen and you’ll still need to ensure that they stay on-track and on-message.

Apart from the prestige of having such a person on your staff, I can see few cost benefit and time benefit arguments to say that you should go down that route unless you can occupy them all day, every day with PR and marketing activities which bring you incremental business.

You can easily devise a test to see whether it would work. Ask yourself how much additional business they would need to generate to cover their salary and overhead costs including the considerable chunk of your management time the job will take up? Take that cost and work out what turnover you will need to pay for the PR person – that’s probably 5 x to 10 x cost, depending on the return you expect. Then ask yourself if you think that the hotel can realise that increase in revenue by increased occupancy or increased event turnover. Also ask yourself if the hotel can actually accommodate the incremental activities you will need to hold – without embarking on a building programme?!


Regards

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions