If you plan press trips, you have to know these 5 key do's and don'ts.
Don't develop your next media visit before reading this.
If you missed last week’s press trip-focused AMA session, cohosted with my travel writer colleagues Aly Walansky and Jill Schildhouse, here’s good news: We’re sharing the highlights over the next few weeks!
We received so much great feedback, including:
“Thank you, all, for a phenomenal press trips AMA – I learned a lot, which I will very much keep in mind for those Italy invitations!”
“Thank you very much for allowing me to partake in today's press trip seminar. The information provided was extremely helpful and I know that I will be taking everything learned and utilizing it when planning future press trips.”
We firmly believe that the ROI you get out of a press trip is directly proportional to the thought and care you put into your press trip planning and execution — and that’s why we’re sharing all this insider info!
Before we dive in, we want to set the record straight on one thing so we’re all on the same page:
Press trips definitely aren’t a free vacation for us. In fact, they aren’t even a vacation and often we actually lose money by attending them.
We’ve heard some comments from publicists over the years along the lines of, “Well, you get all these amazing free vacations …” No, press trips aren’t vacations. Are they fun? Usually! Do we enjoy them? Usually. Are we grateful for such cool jobs? Absolutely!
But please don’t forget that we’re working our butts off on these trips — not only by running around with you for 12 or 14 hours a day, but also trying to keep up with client emails, editor requests, source interviews, and assignments (not to mention our families and personal matters, etc.) in any downtime.
And we’re often having to turn down assignments that would need to be done during a press trip because there’s not enough time in our schedule to get it done, which means we are actually losing money in the process.
Choosing to attend a press trip is a massive time commitment and monetary investment on our end, just like it is on your end. We all need to prove ROI at the end of the day.
So we’re starting at the beginning of the process, with invitations:
Part 1: Invite Do’s and Don’ts
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