NewsBusiness

You need to educate people about what you do

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PR Marketing is marketing that is driven by a PR – Public Relations – focus. It is no longer enough to sell to people, you need to tell/educate people about what you do.

You also need to position yourself and your business as an expert in your field. Not only with your prospective customers, but also with those people who are likely to influence your prospective customers. And how do you do this?

You need to completely re-focus your marketing so that you are informing people about what you do, in as many ways as possible. Traditional advertising is not an effective way to do this, instead you need to do four things:

[1] have a website that is packed with useful information about what you do, and is updated regularly

[2] communicate regularly with your customers and anyone else who expresses an interest in what you do

[3] inform the media about what you do – again on a regular basis

[4] find as many ways as possible to reach out to your target market and inform and educate them on what you do – offline and online

To find out more download the free 10-page report “Ditch Your Marketing …and do PR instead” here. You can also read an extended version of this post on ezinearticles.com What is PR Marketing?

Think about how you decide what product to buy or which company to use for a service. If someone you know makes a recommendation, and you trust that person’s judgement, you will – probably – use the company they recommend.

If you don’t have a recommendation, you might look in the Yellow Pages, or check the local paper, but neither of these sources can tell you whether you will be making a good choice.

But if you see a (good) review of a business or its product or service in the media, you’re more inclined to believe what you read than if you just saw an ad for the same company.

PR – in this sense, getting favourable mentions in the media – is just another version of word-of-mouth marketing, except it gets through to a lot more people.

People are subjected to 237 marketing messages every day (this is a conservative estimate). They use the internet to research purchases.

Many of the old style sales and marketing methods don’t work as well any more – some don’t work at all. Today, before making a purchase, people have to

*know about your business and products
*be reassured that your product/service will work for them (ie trust your business)
*remember your business at the point they need to make a purchase

PR can help at all three stages.

1) Aim to get regular media coverage for your business and its products in media you’d expect your potential customers to read (or watch, or listen to)
2) Keep your website up-to-date including information on any media coverage you have received
3) Stay in contact with your past, current and potential customers on a regular basis (ie at least once a month) via email

Does your business do this?

If the answer is no, we understand. It normally boils down to three things, ie lack of

1) Money (“we can’t afford a PR agency!”)
2) Time (“we just don’t have the time to do any of this”)
3) Expertise (“we wouldn’t know where to start”)

We say

1) You’d be surprised how affordable it is
2) You can do it yourself if you can commit 4 hours every month to PR
3) Funnily enough we can help you here as well

NOTE: If you think you’ve read this post before – you probably have! This text used to be up on our home page until we changed it today. Reduce, re-use, recycle!

Groundswell – winning in a world transformed by social technologies

This book, written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, analysts at Forrester Research in the US, is essentially a series of case studies of how companies have used social technologies such as blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter etc to engage with their customers.

The main premise of the book is that people – that is people who could well be (or who are already) your customers – are engaging in discussions and conversations online about your products and your company, whether you like it or not.

Your company can do very little about this, so the message is that companies need to enter this realm and engage these people. The authors admit this is a scary thought for many businesses, as it involves moving away from traditional marketing, based on one-way communication, to a more immediate ‘conversational’ and informal style.

Although some case studies in the book are of large, predominantly US-based IT businesses, such as Salesforce and Dell, there are also studies from non IT sectors (Lego, Del Monte) and smaller businesses like a South African winery and an online luggage store.

The many examples cited in the book range from Lego using the ‘groundswell’ to engage the AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego – who account for 5-10% of Lego’s entire business), to Dell dealing with a growing reputation problem (think “Dell Hell” and laptop batteries catching fire). Dell did this by talking directly to customers through blogs and forums. This last move – cleverly – allows knowledgeable customers to answer new owners’ tech questions about their computers, thus saving Dell a fortune in customer service costs.

Even if you’re not a big player like Dell, you can’t ignore the growing chatter online. If you’re in it you at least have a chance to engage with your present and potential customers, and you can even turn around negative sentiment with the right approach.

And remember – if you’re not there you can bet some of your competitors soon will be. If they’re not there already, that is.