Whether it’s landing in the trades or on Jimmy Fallon, the work starts long before the media hit.
Landing coverage for legacy brands like Spam or Planters might seem easy. After all, those products have long histories, huge name recognition and cultural cache.
But no matter how high-profile the product, getting good media placement goes back to the unglamorous basics.
“Creativity gets you noticed, but trust gets you called back,” said Brian Olson, brand PR lead, corporate communications, at Hormel Foods.
It’s the steady, constant work of fostering relationships, establishing experts and being a go-to source that makes the biggest difference, Olson said.
Together with his team of four (plus agency partners), here’s how Olson puts in the work every day to earn the trust and attention of both audiences and journalists alike.
Find ways to be useful
Every PR professional worth their salt is spending tons of time figuring out how to appear in LLM results.
So are journalists.
Olson noticed that many of the recipe and food websites his team targets began writing stories in the last year focused on storing food.
“Obviously, those articles are getting high engagement because they keep posting them,” he explained. “It’s probably tied to AI and SEO and all the LLMs.”
Rather than just observing this trend, Olson set out to establish experts at Skippy as the go-to source for peanut butter storage tips. Because if they didn’t take that spot, a competitor would.
Taking that top spot as the peanut butter experts comes down to three factors, Olson said: reputation, responsiveness and expertise.
Their reputation has been decades in the making and comes over time, Olson said. It also comes from fostering relationships with journalists over time: being reliable, reaching out when you don’t need anything and helping them do their jobs better.
“We understand that journalists are doing more with less, and it’s a mutually beneficial kind of transaction,” he said.
That can even extend beyond journalists to other media sources, such as sending a snack bag to Jimmy Fallon.
“We know that’s not going to get on air, but it’s just fostering that relationship. So that’s something we do. So, it’s not always looking for instant gratification or instant external or media, but it’s just doing the right thing.”
The PR team also needs to make sure that when the call does come in, their experts are prepped and ready to go. That means getting the basics right: ensuring you know the brand experts and have their numbers ready to go.
“But it’s more than that,” Olson explained. “It’s also being proactive and making sure they’re media trained. Sometimes we get it easy, and it’s a ‘here’s some questions — answer them over email.’ But if it’s an interview or an on-camera interview, they need to be well prepared.”
Bring home the bacon
Olson gets very intense when talking about bacon.
“One of my goals is, if there’s ever a trade publication — a food trade publication — doing an article or their annual bacon review … if we’re not part of that conversation, it’s kind of a failure on our part,” he explained. After all, Hormel has a number of bacon-related products, ranging from Black Label Bacon to Jennie-O Turkey Bacon to Hormel Bacon bits.
Trade publications, Olson believes, are an untapped goldmine, even in the B2C space he inhabits. Not only is it a great opportunity to show thought leadership in the industry, but now its importance becomes outsized with the rise of GEO.
“We’re seeing some of these trade pubs that are feeding the LLMs and feeding SEO and clicks to our website,” Olson said. “So, it’s more about quality over quantity. And we get some really good quality pieces with the trade publications.”
For Hormel, these placements can take many forms, ranging from traditional interviews to op-ed placements to podcast-style conversations.
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“We can still get excited about the USA Todays and the New York Times,” Olson said. “No one’s not going to be excited about that. But also paying attention to some of these smaller outlets that are really driving the conversation.”
Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.
The post Hormel Foods’ unglamorous guide to getting press appeared first on PR Daily.
