Creativity is the Driving Force of PR
By Anna Bartley
Published March 2022
A professor at NYU said this about the relationship between strategy and creativity in business:
“Game-changing strategies…are born of creative thinking: a spark of intuition, a connection between different ways of thinking, a leap into the unexpected.”
This really connected with me. I graduated from Penn State last year and working at Carve has helped me see how strategy and creativity work hand-in-hand to accomplish our goals on behalf of clients.
What I’ve been most surprised about is just how much of a role creativity plays. It’s the central role.
I see creativity as the driving force in everything we do – from how we approach our narrative-building work with clients, all the way to finding the right reporters to target, capturing their attention, and jumping on trends when the trend is right. No two days are the same, and there is not much that’s cookie-cutter about our strategies.
Here are some of the many – and sometimes unexpected – ways I’ve exercised creativity in my work at Carve.
4 Tips for Creative PR Strategies
Tip #1: Find Hidden Gems
At our core, PR professionals are storytellers. When we take on a new client, we host executive and team workshops to build the brand narrative, and land on content pillars that will drive our thought leadership work. This becomes the foundation of everything we do on behalf of a client.
It also helps us find the hidden gems that will most connect with the media.
We focus on finding the “wow factor.” A client’s wow factor is the angle that sets them apart from everyone else. What is the story that only they can tell? Finding that angle is creative gold.
When we started working with Reachdesk, we quickly found their wow factor was bringing a tech-forward approach to the old school and often manual practice of corporate gifting. For example, their software connects to CRM tools to automate processes and track deliveries and results.
That angle unlocked reporter interest and led to securing stories in top-tier media, like this piece in Yahoo! Finance:
Sometimes a client already has an idea of what their wow factor is; in that case, our job is to refine and deliver it to the world.
Also, gem mining never stops. We use creativity to keep uncovering those storytelling gems — whether it through What’s App voice memos, adding a question to our weekly meeting to spur a five-minute brainstorm, or checking out what a client has recently commented on LinkedIn and turning that into a pitch.
Tip #2: Jack (the Right) Trends
We study the client’s industry, including the trends capturing media attention and reporters covering the space. This includes subscribing to the national and trade publications and deep dives into the competitive landscape to understand how they’re perceived.
For some clients, we even do regular morning media scans that give our “Daily Take” of the industry and where they fit in.
With this knowledge, we can find ways to insert them into conversations already happening. Picking the trends to jump on means we have to analyze the fit between brand and trends. How can we offer a POV on a potentially controversial topic? Or should we just pass? If the client doesn’t obviously fit into a conversation, how do we creatively find the hook?
When the CBS Sports website crashed during the fantasy football drafts last year, we saw an opportunity to insert the voice of a managed service provider client. Since there were a lot of unhappy fantasy footballers out there, we acted quickly and creatively, and MarketWatch ran a piece as a result:
In another trend-jacking example, when the pandemic forced students to learn remotely, three of our clients (Learning Resources, Educational Insights, and hand2mind) launched free online resources like worksheets and videos.
Learning Resources secured more than 485 million impressions and 84 placements over four months by taking advantage of the trend, including this “Tips for Social Distancing at Home” piece on ABC News:
Tip #3: Use Mirrors
Creativity is especially important when reaching out to reporters.
Reporters receive hundreds of emails a day, so finding a way to stand apart is critical — and no easy feat. Remember the hidden gems you’ve already gathered? That’s where they start coming into play.
A strategy I’ve found success with is personalizing each pitch to the specific reporter. I’ll look at recent articles the reporter wrote and then mirror the headline with my own content.
For example, when searching for opportunities for TravelSana, a line of natural supplements for travelers, I noticed a reporter had just released this story:
So, I pitched TravelSana with this subject line:
Sound familiar? The reporter took notice and responded with a request to try the products mentioned in my pitch. In the end, it didn’t result in an article, but the pitch itself worked.
Moreover, the reporter turned out to be a freelancer and invited us to keep pitching her stories for other publications. Here, the relationship-building and future opportunities were the pay-off.
Having a hard grasp on what the reporter covers and cares about and making that understanding very clear to them is important. It shows the reporter that you’re invested in them — rather than what they can do for you. And it’s also a prime opportunity to put creativity to work.
Tip #4: Think Big
While most of our day-to-day activity revolves around media outreach, taking time to think about bigger, ground-up initiatives can have major rewards.
As an agency, we meet once a week to strategize campaigns for clients that align with their brand story. We tie the brainstorm to a specific hook like a brand’s goals for the future (ie, to become synonymous with ubiquitous AI) or coordinating their message with a major holiday.
One of our clients, Transfix, a transportation solutions provider, works closely with truck drivers. So for National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, Transfix wanted to give back in a substantial way to drivers that help the country every day.
We thought big. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition big. We even secured a celebrity partner.
As a result, the campaign was covered in ABC World News and other major publications. Sometimes, bigger is better.
One of my favorite parts of this job is the challenge that comes with finding creative ways to get a message heard. Sure, we could sit back and wait for clients to give us news and stories to pitch. For some clients, that might be enough.
But for us, it’s not. We would be letting too many opportunities pass us by.
