The 3 PR Strategies I Stopped Recommending to Clients After They Backfired

A few years ago, I sat across from a client and watched their excitement drain in real time. We had spent three weeks crafting what I believed was a flawless press release for their product launch. The result? Zero media pickups. Not one.

That moment forced me to confront something uncomfortable. After more than eight years in marketing and PR, several of the strategies on which I had built my reputation were quietly failing. Not because they were poorly executed, but because the landscape had shifted underneath them while I kept running the same plays.

Here are three tactics I used to swear by — and what I do instead now.

Blasting press releases for every client announcement

For years, my default move for any client milestone was the same: write a press release and distribute it through a wire service. New product feature? Press release. Leadership hire? Press release. Partnership announcement? You guessed it.

It felt productive. Clients loved seeing their name on a newswire, and I could point to the distribution numbers as proof of reach. But reach and results are two very different things.

Journalists I had relationships with started telling me they were drowning in pitches — and most wire releases went straight into the delete folder. According to a State of the Media report from PR Newswire, one of the top challenges PR professionals face is that press releases simply aren’t generating the media pickup they once did.

The turning point came when a client’s genuinely newsworthy funding round got buried because the journalist I pitched had already ignored three of our earlier non-newsworthy releases that quarter. We had trained the media to tune us out.

I stopped sending press releases for anything that wasn’t material news. No more releases for minor product updates or routine hires. Instead, I started pitching personalized story angles directly to three to five journalists who actually covered my client’s space. I researched what each reporter was writing about and framed the pitch around why their audience would care — not why my client was excited. The volume of outreach dropped dramatically. The pickup rate tripled.

There was a time when landing a client in a major national outlet felt like the ultimate win. I would pitch broad stories to the biggest publications I could find because the logo on a “press page” seemed like it mattered. And for a while it did — at least for optics.

Then I started paying closer attention to what happened after those placements ran. One client got featured in a well-known business publication, and the team celebrated for a week. But when we dug into the data, the piece had driven almost no traffic to the client’s site and generated zero qualified leads. The readers of that outlet simply were not the client’s buyers.

Meanwhile, a short interview on a mid-size industry podcast — one I had almost turned down — brought in 14 inbound inquiries in 48 hours. The podcast’s audience was small but perfectly aligned with the client’s niche.

That was the shift. I stopped building media lists based on brand prestige and started building them based on audience overlap. Where do my client’s actual buyers consume information? Which newsletters, trade publications and podcasts are they already subscribed to?

I now tell clients that reaching the right 500 people will always outperform impressing the wrong 500,000. Smaller outlets often say yes faster and give you more editorial depth. And the leads that come from a niche placement where the audience trusts the source are far more valuable than a vanity hit that looks good in a screenshot.

Treating influencer seeding as a shortcut to credibility

Influencer gifting used to be one of the first things I recommended to consumer-facing clients. The logic was simple: send free products to influencers with large followings and let the organic mentions roll in. A single unboxing video from the right person could drive a real spike in brand awareness.

But over the past few years, I watched the returns shrink. One client invested a significant portion of their quarterly marketing budget into gifting products to more than 20 influencers. The result was a handful of Instagram stories that disappeared in 24 hours and engagement numbers that looked thin even on paper. Worse, the audience that did engage showed almost no intent to buy. The ROI was impossible to justify.

The deeper issue is that audiences have grown skeptical. People can tell when a post is transactional even if it is not technically marked as an ad. The trust transfer that once happened naturally between an influencer and a brand has eroded — and blasting products to a long list of creators hoping something sticks only accelerates that erosion.

I shifted my approach entirely. Instead of seeding 20 influencers, I now help clients build genuine relationships with two or three creators who actually use and care about the product. These are people who mention the brand because it fits their life — not because a package showed up in the mail last Tuesday. I also started investing more in what I think of as earned influence: positioning clients as useful sources for journalists and creators so they get pulled into conversations organically. The results are slower to build, but they convert at a rate that mass seeding never matched.

The common thread

All three of these mistakes had the same root cause. I was prioritizing volume over precision, prestige over relevance and shortcuts over trust. It took some painful client conversations and a few embarrassing campaign reports to see it clearly.

The best PR I have done in the past few years does not look like PR at all. It looks like the right story landing in front of the right person at the right moment. And that only happens when you stop running old plays and start paying attention to what actually moves the needle now.

A few years ago, I sat across from a client and watched their excitement drain in real time. We had spent three weeks crafting what I believed was a flawless press release for their product launch. The result? Zero media pickups. Not one.

That moment forced me to confront something uncomfortable. After more than eight years in marketing and PR, several of the strategies on which I had built my reputation were quietly failing. Not because they were poorly executed, but because the landscape had shifted underneath them while I kept running the same plays.

Here are three tactics I used to swear by — and what I do instead now.