Need Sales - Get PR

Over the past couple of months I have spoken to over 100 small and medium sized business owners, and have asked them the same question:

What is the one thing that would improve your company?

99% of the time (the odd man out wanted more donuts) the answer is something along the lines of, “we’d like more sales”.

With a little more digging, it’s clear that the organization really doesn’t have a problem with sales.  Irrespective of whether this is a B-to-C or B-to-B company, or the company sells a product or a service, once in front of the prospective customer (in-person or virtual), they can make the sale with a good success rate. 

 

What it comes down to is a need for business owners to increase the number of prospective customers they can sell to.  Oh, by the way, that’s called marketing.

Marketing can very simply be broken down into three prospect buckets:

• had no idea the company existed, which is why there was no interaction
• have some idea the company exists but doesn’t have the motivation to purchase from them
• have previously purchased (or interacted at a very close level)

OK, so there is a fourth group – prospect knows the company, but doesn’t want to purchase from them – so lets leave those naysayers out of it. They are way too much work to convert.

For the first bucket (never knew the company existed) there is also a good chance that if the prospect doesn’t know the company, then visa-versa, the company probably doesn’t know the prospect.

While instinct may be to purchase a full-page newspaper advert, or place a series of 30-second TV commercials, neither come very cheaply.  You see, the reality is that advertising takes a consistent, extensive budget. Even the lower cost online advertising, if used to any degree of success, needs a sizable budget.

The company can’t turn to direct mail, because you don’t know the prospect’s details.  You could purchase a database, but it’s going to be a lot of hard work.  The company probably doesn’t have a good conference/trade show to go to…. so the options of marketing are running out.

Oh, there is of course public relations. 

You see, the whole world of PR just makes sense.

There’s no database to purchase because each publication (virtual or hard) already hits a pre-defined target audience.

There is next to no production cost required (unlike most advertising).

In fact, so long as you have something newsworthy and of interest to say to a defined group of people, I bet any reader $100 I can find a publication that will want to cover that story… hell, I bet $100 I can find a few publications that will have an interest.

So, the only challenge, is to find something to say that’s newsworthy and of interest.

I’ve yet to find a small to medium sized company that isn’t doing something amazing in this economy. 

So to all businesses out there that need more sales, my message is simple – tell the amazing story.  If you can find the right media that has the same interest as your target audience, you’ll be driving potential customers to your door.

 And as an added bonus, PR doesn’t just hit that first bucket. At no additional cost you’ll be promoting sales in the other two buckets.  Sounds like a winner to me.

Seven solid press release ideas

All too often, when there is an annual PR program put in place, it dictates how many press releases have to go out.  That’s fine, but inevitably you get to about two months in and expected press releases are not ready to be released for unexpected reasons and now the whole team is determined to meet an (often irrelevant) KPI. 

Result: you are left with a burning desire to release something, with nothing to say.

Of course, all good PR pros will tell you not to waste your (and the media’s) time on anything unless it is 110% news worthy. 

Well, even when it looks like dire, consider that all companies have news – you just need to find it.  Now, some is going to be more relevant and news worthy than others. For example, when was the last time you saw an announcement of a company’s new web site?  Yeah, well that used to be page 5 business fodder 12 years ago!

Here (with a little help from PRWeb) are some of the most common release topics that might spark some ideas:

Announcing a new product or feature

Product launches are fundamental to fueling your company’s growth. Generate maximum visibility for your next product launch with preliminary PR support (to set the market) and at-launch PR support to stimulate interest.

Winning an award

Awards give your company credibility with your customers—and sending out a news release is a great way to get the attention your award deserves. Whether you are a local restaurant celebrating your Zagat Rating or your company has been voted best place to work—let the world know.

Hosting a fundraising dinner or technology summit

Successful events need publicity—and what better way than to announce your event online, where millions of people can learn how they can participate in or support your event. Whether you are hosting a fundraising dinner, or launching a technical summit, keep your prospects up to date while driving traffic to your web site by promoting your event.

Announcing an employee change

Employee promotions and new hires can be newsworthy. And sharing that news with the world shows that your business is growing and that you value your team.

Launching a new partnership

Sharing news about your business partnerships is one of the best ways to promote your success, highlight your company’s growth, build credibility for your company and your partner’s company, and potentially lead to new customers for both organizations.

Sharing survey results

Market research is an effective tool to build credibility and awareness for your key initiatives—especially when the information is broadly communicated. Whether you’re using survey data to identify industry trends or to build support for a key program, share that information.

International Expansion

The more successful your organization, the more news worthy.  And nothing says 'success' more than expansion into new international markets.  If you start hiring or setting up an office in a new country (or continent) then share that with both your target and home media - both have interests for slightly different reasons.

What other good ideas do you use for press releases?

14 Press Release Pillars - Writing Tips for Effective Press Releases

Whether you are writing a press release for the domestic or international media, some things are just the pillars of good press release writing.  These need to be considered in the first round of press release writting and then developed for each of the international markets.

Writing a press release can be daunting for some and confusing for others.  As an agency we can get push back from clients after we write a press release because they don’t understand why certain things are written in a certain way.

Our friends at PR Web have a useful little tool that helps remind us all what a great press release encompasses.  We’ve taken that writing and added our own spin to it here.

Start Strong: You only have a matter of seconds to grab your readers’ attention, so you want to capture it with a strong opening. Your headline, summary and first paragraph should clarify your news. The rest of your release should provide the detail.

Remember the simple who, what, where, when, how rule for your summary.

Identify Yourself: If your release does not identify the source of the information within the first few paragraphs, you may lose the promotional value your release can provide.

One should also consider the importance and relevance of the voice.  If it is not strong enough, consider a joint release to increase.

Write Professionally: If your release contains hype, slang, excessive exclamation points or some other common mistakes chances are it will be viewed as an advertisement rather than a news release, which may hurt credibility. Or worse, a media outlet may pick up your release and publish without modification, opening any sloppy writing to a larger audience.

Maybe, just maybe, hype, slang and excessive explanation points are the way your reader thinks and communicates (I guess not though).  My point is that you need to think about the writing style for the reader.  For example, IBM’s and Apple’s writing style are different.

Limit Jargon: The best way to communicate is to speak plainly using ordinary language. Using an abundance of technical language and jargon limits your reading audience.

Or worse still, the editor will not be familiar with your jargon/acronyms and will incorrectly use them in their reporting.

Make sure your Information is Informational and Timely: Think about your audience. Will someone else find your story interesting? Answer the question, “Why should anyone care?” Make sure your announcement contains information that is timely, unique, highlights something new or unusual, and provides useful information to your audience. In other words, don’t make it an advertisement for your business.

This has to be the number one reason a press release does not get past an editor.  News has to be exactly that – newsworthy.

Avoid Clichés: You don’t listen to clichés. Neither will your audience. Avoid phrases like “customers save money” or “great customer service” to announce or describe. Focus on the aspects of your announcement that truly set you apart from everyone else.

In our multi-cultural world, clichés do not translate well.  Just avoid.

Pick an Angle: Make sure that your release has a good hook. Tying your information to current events, recent studies, trends and social issues brings relevance, urgency and importance to your message.

The media loves controversy and sells their publication on it.  Use this power.

Communicate beyond words: Use multimedia files like images, video, links and other features that will capture the attention of your readers and highlight your news. Attach logos, head shots, product shots, photographs, audio files, video files, PDF documents or any other supplemental materials that build up your release. Use anchor text and hyper links to point readers back to your site ensures both your Website and your important keywords receive simultaneous promotion in your press release.

A picture is worth a thousand words. A video is worth a million words.

Illustrate the Solution: Use real life examples to illustrate how your company or organization solved a problem. Identify the problem and why your solution is the right solution. Give examples.

Case studies and testimonials are vital for building credibility.  Without credibility your press release is a dead duck.

Don’t Give Away All the Secrets: If you’re running a new promotion this season, tell readers where they can go to learn more. Provide links in your press release directly to the page on your Website where readers can learn the specifics about your news and then act upon it. If you give your readers no reason to click through to your site, they’re not necessarily going to.

You want to create traffic, engage the audience (part of the road to a sale) and measure your success.  Links do this for you.

Stick to the Facts: Tell the truth. Avoid fluff, embellishments, hype and exaggerations. If you feel that your press release seems sensational, there’s a good chance your readers will think so too.

The truth always comes out – maybe today, maybe tomorrow or maybe long in the future.  The press live to find the truth. The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists’ number one stated oath is to report the truth.

Use Active Voice: Verbs in the active voice bring your press release to life. Rather than writing “entered into a partnership,” use “partnered” instead. Do not be afraid to use strong verbs. For example, “The committee exhibited severe hostility over the incident” reads better if changed to “The committee was enraged over the incident.”

Strong is good.

Economize Your Words: Be concise. News search engines sometimes reject news releases with overly long headlines, excessive lists and high overall word counts. Eliminate unnecessary adjectives, flowery language or redundant expressions such as “added bonus” or “first time ever.”

Enough said.

Proofread: Write your press release in a Word or other text document instead of writing it directly on the online submit page, so you can print it, proofread, rewrite and proofread again. The more time you take to do it right, the better your company’s impression to the world.

If you are proof reading your own work, then we highly recommend you don’t proof read the same day that you write. Better still, use the four eyes principal and have two separate people proof read the release to check and double check all of the points above.

PR Multiplying or Dividing?

There was an interesting story we tweeted about a few days ago originally written by our friends at PR Newswire that suggested there is some disagreement about the skill set PR pros need to succeed in today’s environment, and there are three points of view emerging:

• The traditionalist, who values the ability to write, build relationships, isolate and convey key messages and build publicity strategy above all else.
• The digital enthusiast, who values social media acuity, digital content production and editing and coding skills highly.
• The quant, which focuses on data, analytics and how PR integrates with business processes.

At NettResults we like to think of it as multiplying and dividing.

If you have a list of 1,000 subscribers or 5,000 fans or 10,000 supporters in a social media world, you have a choice to make. You can create stories and options and benefits that naturally spread from this group to their friends, and your core group can multiply, with 5,000 growing to 10,000 and then 100,000.

Or you can put the group through a sales funnel, weed out the free riders and monetize the rest. A 5% conversion rate means you just turned 5,000 interested people into 250 paying customers.

Multiplying scales. Dividing helps you make this quarter's numbers.

So it is with PR.  You want to ever increase your sphere of influence, or put another way, you want to increase the number of journalist you can call up.  At the same time you want to concentrate your time on the 5% (or is it another 80/20 rule?) that don’t just passively receive your news stories, but actively read into them, converse with you and find the story they can report on.

This is why an intellectual rivalry between traditional PR pros and digital enthusiast PR pros is a loose/loose battle.  To be good at PR in today’s rapidly evolving media market, you need to be both a traditionalist and a digital enthusiast.  Gone are the days when having one Millennial digital evangelist in your PR agency’s office was enough – today each of your teams need to be made up digi-traditionalists.

Oh, and they better be able to measure that success. Results are king.

PR pros and journalists - conjoined twins that constantly squabble

Public relations and journalists have always had a love-hate relationship; simultaneously relying on each other for their professional livelihood while at the same time holding untold (and sometimes voiced) resentment.

They are like conjoined twins that constantly squabble.

Both professions are miss-understood by the general public, but well understood by the other.  Today, the facts are that there are becoming less professional journalist and more public relations professionals. And the trend is getting more dramatic.

In their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism Robert McChesney and John Nichols tracked the number of people working in journalism since 1980 and compared it to the numbers for public relations. Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found that the number of journalists has fallen drastically while public relations people have multiplied at an even faster rate. In 1980, there were about 45 PR workers per one hundred thousand population compared with 36 journalists. In 2008, there were 90 PR people per one hundred thousand compared to 25 journalists. That’s a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped, better financed.

Oh, and that was 2008 – in the USA.  One can only imagine how those stats have multiplied in the past 4 years taken at a global level.

The researcher who worked with McChesney and Nichols, R. Jamil Jonna, used census data to track revenues at public relations agencies between 1997 and 2007. He found that revenues went from $3.5 billion to $8.75 billion. Over the same period, paid employees at the agencies went from 38,735 to 50,499, a healthy 30 percent growth in jobs. And those figures include only independent public relations agencies—they don’t include PR people who work for big companies, lobbying outfits, advertising agencies, non-profits, or government.

Traditional journalism, of course, has been headed in the opposite direction. The Newspaper Association of America reported that newspaper advertising revenue dropped from an all-time high of $49 billion in 2000 to $22 billion in 2009. That’s right - more than half. A lot of that loss is due to the recession. But even the most upbeat news executive has to admit that many of those dollars are not coming back soon.

So, do PR folks and journalists even need to play friendly.  My father was a serious journalists having worked in several countries and eventually settling in the UK writing for The Times and The Sunday Times.  I’ve been involved in public relations (both client and agency side) for over 15 years, so maybe my view is bias, but even in the day of citizen journalism and hyper blogging, the scope of a PR pro and a professional journalist rely on the skills, contacts and reach of each other.

Assuming they have to play in the same sand box, how do PR and journalist folks reconcile the difference in number and budgets to hand?

Well, the number game is not so difficult.  With the ever-increasing efficiencies of technology, there is not only the ability to communicate with multiple people at once (it was only 15 years ago when the best way to do this was to print and envelope stuff your press release), but we can use these tools to understand and build stronger relationships.

One of the age-old truisms for a PR pro is to understand the media and the journalist’s contributions before pitching.  Only ten years ago a PR agency would have piles of newspapers and magazines going back at least a year.  Of course there in no reason for this any more.

So we can speak quicker, to more people, with more meaning and at a deeper level then ever before. This goes for PR pros and journalists equally.

What has caused the budget differences?  In other words why the increase in PR?  I think that is relatively simple.

1 – Globalization.  More companies are conducting business outside of their home city, so need to have a PR strategy in place to speak to their potential and existing customers.

2 – The cost to offer PR services has decreased.  Therefore more PR agencies can offer the service (it’s still a relatively low cost business to start) and more companies can afford to use these professionals (or carry the function in-house).  The fact that there are less traditional media outlets doesn’t really matter – the fact that are so many non-traditional media available just increases the requirement of the PR agency.

3 – Those larger companies that were already implementing an integrated marketing program have spent the past 10 years shifting their expenditure within the marketing functions – money coming from the advertising line item and flowing to the PR and social media line items.

4 – More media is now consumed by more people.  So what if there are less newspapers in existence? How many people did actually read multiple newspapers who were not directly involved in the industry? If you were the type of person who read a newspaper in yesteryear, there are still plenty to choose from. And the number of people logging in online to news / views from newspapers, blogs, twitter, facebook etc etc far exceeds newspaper subscription rates in the past. Oh, the fact that so much media is actually free to consumers doesn’t hurt either.

So yes, the PR pro needs the journalist, and for a journalist to act professionally and profitably (they are of course producing and writing more stories, quicker, than ever before) they need the PR pros.

The technology allows for greater communication and sharing of knowledge.

Now all we need to do it get the remaining children to stop squabbling in the name of better media for all.