Fisher Public Relations: What the Best Firms Do Differently

Fisher public relations, as a discipline and a practice, sits at the intersection of storytelling and commercial strategy. The firms and in-house teams that do it well are not necessarily the loudest or the most connected. They are the ones that understand what a business is trying to achieve and build a communications programme that serves those goals, not just the PR department’s own metrics.

What separates strong PR practice from average PR practice comes down to a handful of principles: editorial rigour, commercial alignment, and the discipline to say no to coverage that does not move the needle. The rest is execution.

I have spent the better part of two decades sitting on the client side of this conversation, commissioning PR agencies, reviewing their outputs, and occasionally having to explain to a board why a programme that generated significant coverage had not moved commercial performance in any measurable direction. The gap between PR activity and PR outcomes is one of the most persistent problems in the industry, and it is almost always a strategic problem, not an execution one.

What Does a Commercially Grounded PR Programme Look Like?

A commercially grounded PR programme starts with a question that most PR briefs never ask: what decision do we want someone to make after they have encountered this coverage? Not “what do we want them to think?” or “how do we want them to feel?” but what specific decision, in a specific timeframe, does this programme exist to influence?

That sounds obvious. In practice, it is rarely how PR programmes are scoped. Most briefs I have seen start with a list of target publications, a set of key messages, and a request for a certain volume of coverage per month. The commercial question is either absent or buried in a vague objective about “raising brand awareness.”

When I was running an agency and we were pitching for a significant B2B technology account, the client’s brief was almost entirely focused on share of voice against three named competitors. There was no mention of what their sales cycle looked like, which decision-makers they were trying to reach, or what those decision-makers needed to believe before they would agree to a procurement conversation. We won the pitch partly because we reframed the brief around those questions. The coverage targets stayed, but they were subordinated to a commercial logic that gave them meaning.

That reframing is what distinguishes PR as a strategic discipline from PR as a media relations service. Both have value. But only one of them earns a seat at the table when commercial strategy is being discussed.

If you want a broader view of how PR fits within a full communications strategy, the PR & Communications hub at The Marketing Juice covers the discipline from first principles to advanced practice.

How Do PR Firms Build Genuine Media Relationships?

There is a version of media relations that treats journalists as a list of email addresses attached to publications. You send them things. Some of them publish the things. You report the ones that published the things. This is not media relations. It is media broadcasting, and journalists are increasingly good at filtering it out.

Genuine media relationships are built on a simple principle: the journalist needs to believe that you understand their job and that you are going to make it easier, not harder. Their job is to find stories that their readers care about, write them accurately, and publish them on deadline. A PR practitioner who consistently brings them stories that fit that description, who does not waste their time with irrelevant pitches, and who is honest when their client is not the right source for a particular story, will earn a level of trust that no media list can replicate.

I watched a PR director I worked with turn down a placement opportunity in a major national title because the journalist had misunderstood the client’s position and the resulting story would have been inaccurate. The client was furious. The journalist called her three months later with a story that needed a credible industry source and gave the client a profile piece that was worth ten times the original placement. That is what a long-term relationship looks like. It is not transactional.

The same logic applies to the content of pitches. Journalists who cover technology, for example, are not looking for product announcements dressed up as news stories. They are looking for angles that illuminate something about how their readers work or think or compete. A pitch that leads with the business problem rather than the product solution is almost always more effective. This is not a technique. It is a genuine shift in perspective from “what do we want to say?” to “what does this audience need to know?”

What Role Does Audience Specificity Play in PR Strategy?

One of the things I noticed when I was judging the Effie Awards was how often the most commercially effective communications programmes were built around a very precise audience definition. Not “marketing professionals aged 25 to 45” but something much more specific: the person who is three months into a new CMO role at a mid-market company, who is under pressure to show early wins, and who is looking for external validation before committing to a new agency relationship.

That level of specificity changes everything about how you build a PR programme. It changes which publications you target, which spokespeople you put forward, which angles you develop, and how you frame the stories you pitch. A programme built around a vague audience definition will generate coverage that is equally vague in its commercial impact.

Understanding your audience at that level of granularity requires research. Not the kind of research that produces demographic profiles, but the kind that tells you what your target audience reads, what questions they are asking, what concerns are keeping them up at night, and where they go to find answers. Tools like Hotjar’s survey templates can be useful for gathering direct audience feedback, particularly if you are running a programme that has a digital component and you want to understand what is resonating with the people who are actually engaging with your content.

There is also a useful body of work on audience segmentation in marketing communications. MarketingProfs’ work on audience profiling illustrates how granular audience thinking can reshape a communications programme, even in categories that might seem straightforward on the surface. The principle holds across sectors: the more precisely you define who you are trying to reach, the more effective your programme will be.

How Should PR Firms Handle the Measurement Problem?

PR measurement is genuinely hard. I want to be clear about that before I say anything else, because the conversation about PR measurement often slides into either defensive justification or unrealistic promises about attribution. Neither is useful.

The difficulty is structural. PR works through influence and association. It changes what people believe about a brand, which changes how they respond to subsequent touchpoints, which eventually changes their behaviour. That causal chain is long, it is non-linear, and it is almost impossible to isolate from the other things happening in a marketing programme at the same time. Anyone who tells you they can precisely attribute a sale to a specific piece of earned coverage is either working with a very unusual dataset or overstating their case.

What you can do is measure directionally. You can track share of voice over time and look for correlation with commercial performance. You can monitor branded search volume as a proxy for awareness. You can survey target audiences periodically on brand perceptions and track movement against baseline. You can look at referral traffic from earned coverage and track what those visitors do when they arrive on your site. None of these measures are perfect. Together, they give you a picture that is honest about its limitations but useful for making decisions.

The mistake I see most often is treating analytics outputs as facts rather than signals. I spent years managing large media budgets across multiple channels, and one of the things that experience teaches you is that every analytics tool, whether it is a web analytics platform, an email tracking system, or a media monitoring service, is giving you a perspective on reality, not reality itself. Referral data from earned coverage is particularly unreliable because of the way dark social sharing works: a significant proportion of the traffic driven by a piece of coverage in a major publication will arrive via direct or unattributed channels, which means your analytics will undercount the impact.

The honest approach is to triangulate across multiple imperfect signals, look for consistent directional movement, and resist the temptation to over-claim precision. That is a harder sell to a client or a board than a clean attribution model, but it is a more accurate representation of how PR actually works.

What Is the Relationship Between PR and Content Strategy?

The relationship between PR and content strategy is closer than most organisations treat it. In practice, the two disciplines often operate in separate silos: PR is responsible for earned media, content is responsible for owned media, and the two teams share a Google Drive folder and occasionally attend the same editorial meeting. That is a structural inefficiency that most organisations could fix without significant investment.

The most effective programmes I have been involved with treated earned and owned content as part of the same system. Original research commissioned for a PR campaign became the foundation for a content programme. Thought leadership articles placed in trade publications were repurposed for the owned blog and distributed through email. Journalist interviews generated quotes and angles that informed the social content calendar. The PR team and the content team were working from the same editorial strategy, not parallel ones.

This integration matters for several reasons. It creates consistency of message across channels, which reinforces rather than dilutes brand positioning. It makes the most of expensive assets like original research or executive time. And it creates a flywheel effect where owned content builds the credibility that makes earned coverage easier to secure, and earned coverage drives traffic to owned content that converts.

Content management platforms can support this kind of integration. Optimizely’s asset management tools, for example, are designed to help teams manage and distribute content assets across channels without the duplication and version control problems that typically emerge when multiple teams are working from the same source material. The technology is a supporting layer, not the strategy itself, but it removes friction that would otherwise slow the integration down.

The editorial discipline that underpins good PR is the same discipline that underpins good content marketing: a clear point of view, a specific audience, and a story worth telling. When those elements are present, the channel question becomes secondary. When they are absent, no amount of media relations skill or content production volume will compensate.

How Do the Best PR Firms Approach Thought Leadership?

Thought leadership is one of those terms that has been used so loosely that it has almost lost meaning. In its original sense, it described a practitioner or organisation that was genuinely advancing thinking in their field: publishing original ideas, challenging received wisdom, and being willing to take positions that were not universally popular. In its current usage, it often describes any content in which a senior executive expresses an opinion about their industry.

The gap between those two definitions is where most thought leadership programmes fail. A series of LinkedIn articles in which a CEO endorses trends that everyone in the industry already agrees with is not thought leadership. It is content marketing with a more flattering label. It generates low engagement because it offers nothing that the reader could not have arrived at themselves.

Genuine thought leadership requires three things that most organisations are reluctant to commit to. First, a genuine point of view: a position that is specific enough to be disagreed with, and that is grounded in real experience or evidence rather than industry consensus. Second, consistency: a willingness to return to the same themes over a long period of time and develop them in depth, rather than chasing whatever topic is trending in the trade press. Third, candour: the willingness to acknowledge complexity, admit uncertainty, and occasionally say things that are uncomfortable for the organisation’s own interests.

I have seen thought leadership programmes that were genuinely effective, and in every case they shared those three characteristics. The executives involved were willing to say things that were not simply promotional. They were willing to be wrong in public and update their positions. And they were consistent enough that their audience developed a sense of what they stood for over time. That kind of credibility is not built quickly, and it cannot be manufactured. But when it exists, it is one of the most valuable assets a brand can have.

What Does Good PR Agency Selection Actually Look Like?

I have been on both sides of the agency selection process more times than I can count: running pitches as a client, and presenting pitches as an agency. The selection criteria that most clients use are reasonable in isolation but often miss the things that actually determine whether a relationship will be productive.

Media contacts are almost always overweighted. Clients want to know which journalists an agency has relationships with, as though those relationships are transferable assets that will automatically generate coverage. In reality, media relationships are personal. They belong to the individual practitioners, not the agency. When a senior account director leaves, those relationships go with them. What matters more is whether the agency has a track record of building relationships in your sector, and whether their approach to media relations is one that will earn trust rather than exhaust it.

Sector experience is important but often misapplied. Clients frequently require that an agency has worked in their specific category, which makes sense for highly regulated industries where category knowledge is genuinely essential. For most categories, however, what matters more is whether the agency understands the commercial dynamics of your business: who your buyers are, what they care about, and how your PR programme fits into the broader commercial strategy. An agency that has worked extensively in your category but approaches it as a media relations exercise will deliver less value than one that is newer to the category but thinks commercially.

The question I always found most revealing in agency pitches, whether I was asking it or answering it, was: “Tell me about a time you told a client their brief was wrong.” The answer to that question tells you more about how an agency will behave in a real working relationship than any credentials presentation. Agencies that cannot answer it, or that give an answer which is really about how they diplomatically agreed with the client while pursuing a slightly different approach, are agencies that will optimise for client satisfaction over commercial outcomes. Those are not the same thing.

The broader question of how marketing disciplines, including PR, connect to business performance is something I return to regularly across The Marketing Juice’s PR and Communications coverage. The fundamentals do not change much, but the way they are applied continues to evolve, and it is worth staying current on the practice as well as the principles.

How Does Digital Change the Practice of Public Relations?

Digital has not replaced the fundamentals of public relations. It has changed the distribution landscape, the speed at which stories develop and spread, and the range of channels through which earned coverage can travel. But the core practice, identifying a story worth telling, finding the right audience for it, and placing it through a credible third-party voice, remains unchanged.

What digital has done is expand the definition of “media.” A newsletter with 50,000 highly engaged subscribers in a specific professional niche may be more valuable for a B2B PR programme than a placement in a national newspaper with ten times the circulation. A podcast that is the primary information source for a particular professional community may generate more qualified attention than a piece in a trade magazine that the same community nominally subscribes to but rarely reads deeply. The media landscape is more fragmented and more specific than it was twenty years ago, and PR programmes that are still optimising for traditional media metrics are missing a significant part of the opportunity.

Search is another dimension that most PR programmes underweight. Earned coverage that ranks in search for terms your target audience is actively using is worth considerably more than coverage that generates a spike of traffic and then disappears. Search Engine Land’s coverage of how content performs in search is useful context for understanding why the durability of coverage matters as much as its initial reach. A PR programme that thinks about search visibility as part of its editorial strategy will generate compounding value over time rather than a series of disconnected spikes.

The digital dimension also changes how you think about amplification. Earned coverage does not have to rely on organic reach alone. Paid social promotion of earned coverage, particularly in B2B contexts where you can target by job title and company size, can significantly extend the reach of a piece without compromising its editorial credibility. The coverage was earned. The promotion is simply ensuring that the right people see it. That distinction matters, and it is one that more PR programmes should be making use of.

Platforms and tools that support content distribution and optimisation have become more sophisticated. Optimizely’s partner ecosystem, for example, reflects how the technology layer around content and communications has matured, with integrations that allow teams to connect editorial, distribution, and performance data in ways that were not practical a decade ago. The technology does not replace editorial judgement, but it removes enough friction to make a well-designed programme meaningfully more efficient.

What Are the Most Common Structural Failures in PR Programmes?

Having reviewed a significant number of PR programmes over the years, both as a client and as someone who has been brought in to assess why a programme is underperforming, the structural failures tend to cluster around a small number of recurring patterns.

The first is the absence of a clear editorial calendar that is tied to the business calendar. PR programmes that operate reactively, pitching stories as they emerge rather than planning a narrative arc that aligns with commercial milestones, tend to generate coverage that is disconnected from the moments when it would be most useful. A product launch, a sales push into a new market, a recruitment drive: all of these benefit from a PR programme that has been building relevant credibility in the preceding months, not one that is scrambling to generate coverage at the moment it is needed.

The second is a mismatch between the spokesperson and the story. Executives who are not comfortable with media, who stay rigidly on message rather than engaging genuinely with a journalist’s questions, or who lack the depth of knowledge to go beyond the prepared talking points, will consistently underperform as PR assets. The solution is not better media training, although that helps. It is a more honest assessment of which executives should be doing media, and a willingness to put forward spokespeople who are genuinely credible in the areas where the programme is trying to build authority.

The third, and perhaps the most common, is a lack of editorial courage. PR programmes that only pitch stories that are safe, that reflect well on the client without any risk of challenge or controversy, generate coverage that is equally safe and equally forgettable. The stories that earn the best coverage are usually the ones that take a position, that acknowledge a tension or a problem, that offer something genuinely useful to the journalist’s audience. Those stories require a client who is willing to be specific and occasionally uncomfortable. Building that willingness is part of the PR firm’s job, and it is a harder part of the job than writing the pitch.

The marketing technology landscape that surrounds PR has evolved considerably, and platforms like those covered in Forrester’s analysis of marketing cloud developments reflect how the infrastructure supporting communications programmes has changed. But infrastructure is not strategy. The structural failures I have described are not technology problems. They are strategic and organisational ones, and they require strategic and organisational solutions.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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