The Art of Business: Long Live PR
To develop your creative design firm, you can spend all the money you want on advertising, but you’ll never buy the key ingredient of success — credibility. Public relations provides it, and it’s cheaper to boot. That, in a nutshell, is the argument made by marketing gurus Al and Laura Ries in “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.”
The book is really aimed at large companies, and it makes for very interesting reading, particularly if your career is dependent on advertising agency work (the book suggests that corporations should spend far less on advertising campaigns). But the book’s central lesson — build brand through public relations — can, and should, be applied to small, even one-person shops.
In addition to credibility, media coverage provides an added free bonus — more media coverage. Every public relations event or mention leads to more mentions and greater media coverage. Media begets media. The Ries’s cite the example of Michael Dell, who, at the dawn of the PC era in 1985, made sure that computer analysts for all the trade publications received Dell machines for testing. “PC Week’s” rave review of the Turbo, Dell’s first IBM-compatible machine, appeared shortly thereafter. Almost immediately, the company got boatloads of media attention and began selling more than a thousand Turbo machines per month.
Make PR Work for You
So what can you do to build an effective public relations campaign? Here are a few ways to get your message across:
1. Focus on key influencers. When you’re seeking new customers or clients, it’s easy to focus on them as if they make decisions on their own. They don’t, of course. They seek others for their views — bosses, editors, analysts, colleagues, and external advisers, colleagues. Identify who these key influencers are. It may take some dogged research or simply a few questions of your client.
Endorsement by this group, or in some situations just awareness or lack of criticism, can help influence a decision in your favor. The very mention of you and your company on a Web site or in a print publication provides some nice credibility cushioning in your marketing materials. Whenever possible (discretion is imperative), include “key influencers” as a target for all your PR and marketing efforts.
2. Create or participate in an event. Events enable you to reach an audience-to-order. Try to hook up with business groups in your city or targeted industry that might need speakers on a regular basis. Check upcoming calendars for local seminars, conferences, and conventions (often six to eight months in advance) and offer to make yourself available as a speaker, panelist, or instructor. Have a list of pertinent topics ready. And don’t dismiss smaller, less scintillating engagements. Media begets media and invitations to larger events may very well stem from the Rotary Club invitation you loathed to accept.
If you’re unconvinced as the value of even participation, look no further than the cadre of publishing consultants who show up annually at Seybold Seminars and other publishing conferences. They get all the leads they’ll ever need from having their mug shots appear in print and online catalogs and speaking to auditoriums filled with potential customers.
But you don’t have to wait for others to sponsor an event: Host a half-day seminar yourself, provide a technology demonstration, or throw an open-house party for colleagues, suppliers, and clients. This can involve lots of preparation and expense, but the pay-off is in the “buzz” you create and its impact on your audience.
3. Get media coverage. If only if were that easy. But media coverage is more a matter of persistence than uniqueness. If you want to be among the small proportion of businesses that successfully achieve media coverage, you need to recognize that it isn’t just a matter of writing and distributing press releases. The key to success in this area is the same as for most items on this list — providing information and insights in a way that’s relevant and interesting to the audience.
In this case the audience are editors and journalists who want to preserve their audience share (and their integrity) by publishing material that people will read, or watch. You need an understanding of what makes compelling news or feature content, and how that differs between each media outlet. You need to find something about your business that fits that definition, identify a compelling “angle,” and pitch it to the best choice of media. Once you figured out the angle, you decide how best to present your pitch, be it a press release, casual e-mail, phone call, letter to the editor, forum postings, or other creative method of conveyance.
4. Write or contribute to articles. Research shows that articles achieve more readership, acceptance of their content, and behavioral change than advertisements. That’s because they have more credibility. Web and print magazines continually look for content. Exposure is your compensation. If you’re not a writer, don’t be afraid to enter a dialogue with a writer or editor. I’ve written many stories about, or quoted, creative professionals after being contacted by them.
5. Create a newsletter. A newsletter is a good a means of keeping in touch with customers, potential customers, referrers, and other important audiences.
It’s effectiveness that depends on how relevant and useful it is to the audience, and how often it is distributed. Certainly, newsletters can be distributed too frequently. But if a newsletter is your only keep-in-touch strategy, do you want people to only be thinking about your business every two months? Every month or two weeks seems to be good interval. If you’re planning a newsletter or already have one, take the time to research readers’ preferences for content and distribution frequency and modify if necessary.
Not a Lot of Work
If all this sounds like a lot of work, it is — and it isn’t. The time spent planning and writing a newsletter easily transfers to ready material for an article or seminar. If the article is published in a magazine, you’ve got a ready link for your web site. Best of all, and it bears repeating a third time, media begets media. The time you put into a public relations effort today can reap benefits for months to come.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on January 20, 2003
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