How to Develop Confidence in Your PR Skills

Confidence in your PR skills is essential in building a successful business.

You don’t have to conjure up confidence. There are some practical steps that will help you develop confidence. It’s important to take those steps and watch your confidence soar.

Follow these steps below to help you build your confidence. 

Preparation and Planning

First you want to be prepared when you’re pitching new clients with your services whether they come to you or you’re finding them. You want to think through and plan how you’re going to sell your service and how you will provide the best possible service and value to clients. 

You can build your confidence by being prepared and knowing the value you can add for your clients. Learn your skills extremely well because that’s part of the value you bring. The other part of value is the results you bring for your clients. 

Being an effective PR professional comes from preparation and planning. Be prepared to show new clients the results you’ve had for others. Your confidence grows as you bring results to each client you serve. 

Pitching For Your Clients

Secondly, when you pitch for your clients to a publicist, you want to be fully bought into the approach you’re taking on behalf of your clients. You don’t want to come across wishy washy. Your confidence will come through with your energy level and your commitment to the idea and pitch for your clients. You have to believe in what you’re saying. 

If you prepare and plan you will know how you’re going to present your clients to someone and you’ll be confident that if it’s not working out, you’ll have a plan B to resort to. You’ll have another approach with new strategies you can pivot with if your first approach doesn’t work.

Pitching and PR is a very strategic and tactical type of sales. 

You're convincing the person on the other end of that email or pitch that what you're telling them about the company you’re pitching, their product and service, is something they should be paying attention to. This is what sales and marketing does for products also. 

When you believe it, you’ll sound like an expert and you’ll feel genuinely confident. Your pitches will then convert really well. 

Related: What is Quantum Growth (and Why Do You Need It)?

Always Keep Learning PR Skills

The second thing you can do to create confidence in your PR skills is to always have a hunger for learning and training. Have a passion for curiosity and always be working on professional development. 

Study the trends in your niche. 

As you study the trends and stay ahead of trends and learn more about your clients business, you’ll know the vast universe of opportunity available to them. You’ll be able to position them against their competitors. And you’ll be able to show them how they fit in with certain publications. 

You’ll study and be familiar with who you’re reaching out to and what they cover and how you fit in with what they’re doing. 

Learning every aspect for your client gives you the confidence that will allow you to be the best provider for your clients. It gives you the confidence that you offer the best service. 

Develop your curiosity and try to be a subject matter expert and dive into deep learning. 

Learn everything there is to know about the niches you want to serve or your client’s business. Know their competitors and what they’re doing.

When you talk to clients you’ll have a complete picture of where they fit in and how you can serve them. 

Niche Down

It’s important to niche down because you can’t learn everything about every niche. If you don’t serve someone specific, then you can’t serve anyone in the best possible way. 

Niche down so you can dive deep and be the expert in that niche. You’ll know everything there is to know including all the trends and you’ll know the things that are evolving as they happen.

Practice Your PR Skills 

The third way to build confidence is to practice your PR skills. 

As you practice and do the same tasks over and over again, you’ll see that what you’re doing is working for your clients. This will give you a huge boost of confidence. 

One thing you will practice and learn is to know how to pivot if you hear a ‘no’ from a journalist. You don’t have to give up. Instead you become persistent and patient and come back with the right information at the right time until you hear a ‘yes.’ 

Over time and with practice you learn to not let a ‘no’ get you down. 

Practice and experience of committing to an outcome and trying different tactics to achieve that outcome gives you confidence. Your experience will help you go back to that same contact and redo your pitch with a new idea. 

Know The Fundamentals

Having solid fundamentals is important too. You want to position the right story, the right product to the right editor and the right publication at the right time.

Being persistent, patient, and passionate results in placements. 

Build relationships with the media where you’re someone who serves them and you’ve become a reliable and strategic partner to them. 

You want to be someone who will always have what they need. You’ll have the resources, images and be able to quickly get them samples overnight  if that’s what they need. You’ll be the drama free option and they’ll always go to you first because they believe that you know what you’re doing and you’ll make their job easier. 

They’ll know that you're never going to slow them down. You're never going to be a bottleneck for them and you're always going to come back to them with solid ideas that you know are aligned with what they talk about. 

Those are the fundamentals that make you an exceptional PR and a professional and exceptional expert in pitching the media and being the best possible service provider for your clients.

I created this community for profitable PR pros. I created all of the programs that lead towards mastery of PR skills so that you can confidently sell the services you're offering to clients. The journey I want for you is to charge premium prices, secure high end clients and have a consistent predictable occurring business. Then learning how to scale a profitable PR agency. That’s the entire journey I want to take you on. 

The very first step of that is mastering your PR skills. You’ll learn to master those skills until they’re easy to do. You’ll know when and what to do as you follow a framework. 

The ‘Pitch Lab’ is a program I’ve created where you’ll learn everything there is to know about PR. You’ll learn how to master your skills, how to provide an amazing service, build media lists, create strategic pitches,  tell the right story to the right person at the right time, think through your client's business and come up with really good ideas. The ‘Pitch Lab’ is where you’ll learn how to build out a great strategy.

I have everything available for you to build and grow an online business and PR agency. Contact me to learn more.