Making Meetings More Tempting

I need to qualify this by admitting that I do very few meetings. That is partly because I live in deepest South London, where the Underground remains a mythical concept, but also because I rarely find them to merit the three or so hours they’ll take out of my day (if taking place centrally).

Even if I lived on Oxford Circus, though, I’d still be dubious in some cases due again to concerns about time-efficiency. Being so perennially busy all the time, while a lucky thing, hardly helps.

But in which cases specifically? Well, those ones where only a single or a few clients are going to be discussed. In other words, meetings with you and a client of yours, or meetings with a very small travel PR agency or a wider lifestyle one boasting three or less relevant travel clients.

What to do if you are one of these? What to do in general if you feel meetings are becoming harder to come by? One option to consider is reaching out to another similar agency or independent travel PR and suggesting you team up for occasional days of meetings. In this scenario, the journalist gets to hear twice as many pitches while your clients’ costs will be halved. I know of some PRs who already do this very effectively.

This also links to something I’ve touched on before — pooling resources for multi-agency events. There’s a similarly smart logic at play there.

There are also Zoom meetings or phone calls, of course; those never appeal to me as I dislike both forms of communication, but they’re probably preferable for some writers.

Otherwise, be as flexible as you can in terms of timing and venue, and always promise something useful and breezy. I recall once pinning down a notoriously elusive writer while I was in PR by promising to only pitch her “three exclusive ideas, and not just blather through a client list”.