Ask most PR teams where their best work ends up, and the honest answer is: a coverage report.
Think about a typical thought leadership campaign. An MD spends time with the PR team sharpening a view on where the industry is heading, and the team shapes it into a bylined article, takes it through several rounds of sign-offs, and lands it in the sector’s leading trade title. Everyone’s pleased, but six weeks later the sales team is still sending prospects last year’s brochure.
The sharpest thinking that business produced all year has gone no further than the newsdesk, and the same thing happens to research campaigns, expert commentary, and customer stories.
That bothers me, because PR output has passed a test most marketing content never faces. Before a journalist runs your story, they scrutinise it: they question the evidence, challenge the argument, and ask whether the claim really stands up. So, anything that makes it into print has already satisfied someone with no reason to be kind to it.
That’s what makes PR output the strongest candidate a business has for hero content – the core asset every other channel draws from. Getting there doesn’t take much, but it does mean changing how campaigns get planned, and being honest about what deserves a second life.
The waste starts at the brief
Most PR briefs serve one audience: the newsdesk. Teams pick angles for their headline potential and shape the story around whatever editors want that month, which makes perfect sense if coverage is the goal. The trouble is that a line written for a headline often has nothing to say to a procurement manager halfway through a buying decision, and nobody can fix that afterwards. If nobody captured what sales needed to hear, no amount of reformatting will produce it.
So, bring the other channels in at the start. An hour with your sales, marketing and internal comms leads is usually enough to make a few small but useful changes:
- In spokesperson interviews, ask what customers tend to challenge them on, and capture those answers alongside the media angle.
- For research, add three or four questions about buyers’ real problems next to the headline ones.
- Film the interviews you’re already doing, so other teams have footage to work with.
Clients tend to respond positively when I talk them through this, and I think there are two reasons why. It connects their PR with the rest of their marketing, so both teams end up pulling in the same direction. It also saves them time, because they realise they already have a bank of ready-made content that has cleared sign-off, and is just waiting to be used.
Not everything deserves a second outing
Original thinking travels furthest. A clear point of view your spokesperson is willing to defend belongs here, because once a journalist prints it, the business has an argument it can repeat in pitches, at events and in recruitment. Proprietary data sits alongside it, with the added bonus that you can cut a single finding by sector or track it year on year.
Reactive commentary, on the other hand, travels badly. It earns coverage by hooking onto the day’s news, so it tends to expire with that news. Stunts rarely translate either, and if we’re honest, the list of titles that ran a story impresses comms teams far more than it impresses buyers.
There’s a simple way to tell the difference, though. Strip out the news hook and ask yourself whether the content would still be true and interesting in six months’ time. If it would, treat it as hero content; if not, enjoy the coverage and move on.
The channels PR forgets
Social tends to dominate conversations about repurposing, but there’s an equal opportunity in sales and internal comms that PR teams often overlook.
Sales teams need reasons to get in touch with prospects – that go beyond checking in. A published view from your MD on the prospect’s own sector gives them exactly that, as does a relevant finding, and a point a journalist has already tested lands harder than the same point on a brand’s own slide. It’s worth giving sales a one-page brief for each campaign, setting out the three points most relevant to each target sector, and the objection each one answers.
Take the MD’s article from the opening. Its core argument becomes a talking point in the sales brief, with a line for each sector it touches, while the MD records a two-minute video expanding on it for LinkedIn. Internal comms runs it in the staff bulletin with a note on what it means for customer conversations, and marketing builds a short email around it for prospects in that sector, linking back to the published piece. A single piece of the MD’s thinking ends up working across five channels, and every version carries the credibility of having passed an editor first.
Employees who find out about a campaign through LinkedIn can feel like spectators. Brief them before the story goes live, and they become credible messengers with customers, candidates, and their own networks. Email teams can do something similar, turning sector-specific insight into nurture content that beats the generic monthly newsletter.
Measuring beyond the top of the funnel
Coverage figures tell you who saw the story, but they say very little about what happened next, and the simplest way to find out is to ask. How often did sales use the campaign with prospects, and did those conversations go further than usual? How many useful pieces of content did it produce across the business? The more a campaign feeds, the better value it looks. None of this will give you perfect attribution, but a sales director telling the board the campaign came up in a dozen pitches will be far more persuasive than any reach figure.
The newsdesk will always be the toughest test your content faces, which is exactly why it should see your best work first. If you plan from day one for every audience that comes after it, the hardest work PR does will finally earn its keep across the whole business.
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