Watch this Week’s PR Tip:

Preparing for Media Interviews

If you plan on doing regular, consistent media interviews – whether it’s television, radio, podcasts, or print – it’s a good idea to put together a list of potential questions that cover the basics of your business that any interviewer can use. Some hosts prefer not to have set questions but some need them to guide the interview and some will actually use them as a crutch and ask them to you verbatim.

I feel interviews are best done free form with nothing scripted. That doesn’t mean don’t be prepared but don’t read an answer word for word. This is YOUR topic so you should be able to answer anything about your business effortlessly. It’s good to prepare soundbites and know how to answer in a succinct matter.

Having a prepared list of questions helps an interviewer with potential questions to ask and can fill in on any blanks and help them guide your interview. I recommend putting together about 10 questions that flow in sequence sharing your mission, your story, and/or your message.

Watch this week’s PR tip video above and/or read the transcript below. And, if you’d like to learn more, join the PR Challenge and give it a whirl for the next 10 days. There is no cost to join and it will help you learn exactly how to land media interviews.

Transcript

Hi everybody. It’s Christina Daves with this weeks Free Publicity Friday PR Tip. This week I’d like to recommend that you put together a list of core questions – 5 or 10 of them- that can lead an interview. That can get it started, or, if the host is starting and maybe you’re stuck a little bit, that they could ask that question to keep things going. Sometimes television will ask that too. Really podcasts/radio do a lot of that.

But the thing that’s really important is don’t have canned answers. Know what those answers should be and be able to speak them freely, but it’s just a good idea. Sometimes people are going to ask you, and especially with podcast, they’re going to ask you for a list of questions. So if you have them ready, have them on your website, put them in your press kit, you’re one step ahead.

So that is this week’s PR Tip. If you like this tip and you’d like to learn more, I invite you to join us in our no-cost PR Challenge. It’s a 10-day challenge. It’s 10 minutes a day. I take you through every step of building your brand and then landing publicity. So please sign up and I will see you in the Challenge and then I’ll see you in the media.