Creating the Story: Everybody is Getting a Raise

Make the news.

On occasion, a beautiful, newsworthy acorn will fall from the sky landing right on our head. That’s a great gift and it has to be quickly planted and fully tended.

But more often, there’s a dry spell. We’re doing great things, seeing strong growth, or making an impact. But we can’t quite find the just-right seed of a story that will make a reporter push away the keyboard, sit back in their chair, and think “Hmm… we might have something here.”

Sometimes those seeds are homegrown.

In Pearl Meyer’s case, we were consulting to many boards and management teams—post-Covid and mid-2022-talent shortage—about raising pay above inflation rates in order to retain key players. We were helping our clients combat these difficult trends but that on its own wasn’t an exciting story. After all, that’s our mission. Yet, we wanted other clients and prospects to know this was something meaningful we could do for them.

What if we had eye-popping data on the subject—something wildly different from the norm and not well known, something easily defined as newsworthy? I worked with a colleague to develop and deploy a quick survey that might yield such data based on what we were hearing from clients. It delivered even more gems than we hoped.

Analysis led to surprising actions being taken at companies of all ownership models and sizes across the country. We uncovered trends in pay levels and timing that were far outside what is typical. A carefully constructed press release (that served as a canned story on its own) led to numerous SME interviews with our targeted trades and national media, including lengthy, high-profile pieces from CNBC, CBS, and The Wall Street Journal.

Backlinks from these stories drove many new visitors to our website, making the survey landing page one of the top five visited pages in 2022 and helped establish our senior subject matter expert as a go-to source for other stories throughout the year.