Category: Sales & Marketing

 

The first Winter Storm Watch has been issued for the Twin Cities area this weekend, with a possible 5-8 inches of heavy wet snow. Hardware stores are downright giddy. Weatherpersons on TV glow with qualified excitement (hoping the storm will track through these parts). Fans of winter are oiling snowmobiles, waxing skies and sharpening skates (despite the lakes being liquid as Everclear). City dump trucks are being retrofitted with big blades and loaded with sand.

Public Relations people — some who still have leaves to rake — are putting up their best seasonal pitches for the Holidays. Or they should be. If your company is doing something cool for the Yule, has a new product that’s geared toward the approaching winter — or even if you have a Turkey idea for Thanksgiving, or an idea that’s lovably “a turkey” — it’s time to make some noise about it.

Lisa Chapman, the totally awesome Marketing blogger on this site, has written an insightful blog about this subject that I encourage you to read and heed (her yard must be free of fall’s free-fall debris). Events that benefit charities, anything with kids or giving, you know, that sentimental feeling that tugs at the heart this time of year — it’s all there on Lisa’s blog. Plus she tells you how to do it (so I don’t have to)!

Check it out. Make your PR Holiday pitch list, check it twice. Media Santa’s, Festivus’ producers and assignment desk gnomes are waiting to hear from you.

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For more resources, see the Library topic Public and Media Relations.

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Martin Keller runs Media Savant Communications Co., a Public Relations and Media Communications consulting company based in the Twin Cities. Keller has helped move client stories to media that includes The New York Times, Larry King, The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, plus many other magazines, newspapers, trade journals and other media outlets. Contact him at kelmart@aol.com, or 612-729-8585

How to get Your Name in the News

Do you think Lady Gaga, marketing genius, achieved the distinction of being the most-searched woman on Google without a PR plan? According to ReadWriteWeb.com, “Lady Gaga was ranked 3rd overall in news coverage, in magazine websites and music blogs, with 4,326 articles.”

Most businesses barely have a marketing plan, much less a written, strategically developed PR Plan. Yet it could be the very thing that helps you save advertising dollars AND gain an edge over your competition.

Review Last Year’s PR

If you received PR coverage, review it for its content. Compare it to last year’s plan. What got the media’s attention and what didn’t? Which editors gave you positive coverage and which gave you negative coverage? Can you tell why? Consider calling them to discuss it.

Search online for all results that include the name of your business. Now do the same thing for your closest competitors. Why did they get the coverage? Were their stories particularly interesting in some way? Did they target media that you didn’t target? Make a list of these angles and media targets to add to your list of PR objectives.

Articulate Your PR Objectives

When you take a vacation, you choose the destination first, right? So start by putting your PR objectives in writing. It can be simple – even a bullet-pointed list will suffice. Topics to cover will depend upon the type of business, your customers, your competition, and your target media.

Example objectives might include:

• New product or service launch coverage
• Company events announced
• Employee promotions or additions spotlighted

PR Tactics and Tools

With your written PR objectives in front of you, brainstorm activities that will help you plan and execute effective and consistent PR tactics. Consistency is the key, so get out a calendar or create a timeline as an integral part of your plan.

Try these additional PR tactics:

• Create a comprehensive PR contact list, with their preferred method of being contacted (ex: email or fax?)
• For each media, list their deadlines. If they come up short for content at the last minute, your press release just might fill that need.
• Schedule time on YOUR calendar for PR activities. Make an appointment with yourself!
• Call the media contacts and introduce yourself. Offer yourself as a subject matter expert. Sooner or later, they’ll likely call you when they need a quote on a story ion your field.
• Don’t forget about blogs and social media. These days, PR online might even eclipse PR offline.

What PR tactics have worked for your company? What should others avoid?

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For more resources, see our Library topics Marketing and Social Networking.

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ABOUT Lisa M. Chapman:

Ms. Chapman’s new book, How to Make Money Online With Social Media: A Step-by-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs will be available very soon. With offices in Nashville Tennessee, but working virtually with international clients, Lisa M. Chapman serves her clients as a business and marketing coach, business planning consultant and social media consultant. As a Founder of iBrand Masters, a social media consulting firm, Lisa Chapman helps clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa @ LisaChapman.com

Media Tactics That Get Attention

Holiday media is crammed with advertisers claiming to offer the latest and greatest everything for everybody. Get out your boxing gloves, because it’s a seasonal fight for media space and consumer attention.

How do you get a word in edge-wise? What’s holiday newsworthy, and how do you rise above the competition with editors who are equally bombarded (and equally stressed)?

Feature News Releases

Media Editors look for outstanding stories that will engage their readers’ emotions. You can get a feel for this prior to creating your news release:

• Review their past feature stories for examples of what they deem worthy.
• Look at their website or blog for more clues.
• Call the Editor and ask! They’ll actually tell you exactly what they’re interested in.

For example, if you’re targeting a local newspaper that’s circulated to the general public, it may be a deeply-felt human interest story related to the holiday season. To make your story stand out, bring it home to the reader by highlighting heartfelt experiences of helping real people in severe or unusual need. Make it interesting by making it really different. For instance, in this year’s economy, it could be a family that’s newly homeless due to job loss and how your company helped them. And be sure to tie it to the holiday season. How can your company help give them some happiness this season, despite their circumstances?

Customize Your Holiday Media Campaign

Media Editors can spot a generic and inauthentic news release in about two seconds. Your one-size-fits-all story just won’t hit the mark most of the time. So DON’T send the same story to every media outlet.

Do some homework, and craft your basic story to the individual media type and their audience. For example, publicizing an event that’s open to the public and benefits a charity may be perfect for a public service space on a radio station. It could be written as an invitation with background information. That same press release targeting television could be more effective if something visual is highlighted, such as the faces of the children involved, and the happiness they feel. TV might cover the event and run it afterwards, instead of before.

Online Press Releases

For holiday press, human interest stories have an excellent opportunity to go viral. Write your story, make it short, and include photos. Release the story:

• On your social network platform
• Distributed to free online press release sites

• Through your email database
• In your newsletter

The chances of it going viral increase if you:

• Run some kind of a contest (Photo submission? Story submission?)
• Utilize video (make it funny!), or
• Offer something free.

Timing and creativity are super important. So be BOLD!

What catches your eye during the holiday season?

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For more resources, see our Library topics Marketing and Social Networking.

.. _____ ..

ABOUT Lisa M. Chapman:

Ms. Chapman’s new book, How to Make Money Online With Social Media: A Step-by-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs will be available very soon. With offices in Nashville Tennessee, but working virtually with international clients, Lisa M. Chapman serves her clients as a business and marketing coach, business planning consultant and social media consultant. As a Founder of iBrand Masters, a social media consulting firm, Lisa Chapman helps clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa @ LisaChapman.com

 

It’s appropriate penning this blog on the Day After the Day of The Dead election date. The votes are in, the surprises are in. The Republicans are back — in most places! Seems like only yesterday they were here (shall we call them Zombies?!). Is this the change we can believe in? For many Democrats who served for decades and are suddenly today looking for a new line of work, it probably is.

Let’s go back to a seemingly simpler time when an elected politician stated, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Great words that echo through time and transcend partisan political lines. Of course it was John. F Kennedy who uttered them near the close of his inaugural address in 1961.

But this blog is not about politics, or great American rhetoric (or zombies), it’s about PR issues, so let’s look at this sentence. It’s as powerful a piece of American patriotism, summoning fellow country men and women to serve their nation’s ideals in whatever capacity that has ever been written. But Kennedy didn’t write it. His speechwriter, Theodore Sorenson, did. Sorenson died the day before the election. But his gifted use of language in this one line of a speech, simple but poetic, clever but not self-serving, brief but powerful and enduring, will live on.

Strong writers breathe life into words. If your public relations m.o. doesn’t start and end with a proven writer crafting your headlines, making the content in subsequent paragraphs stand out and leaving a memorable impression on those who read your news releases, Tweets or other communiqués, you are already at a disadvantage.

We’re not talking about having the commas in all the right places (that’s what good copy editors are for). But we are talking about what one longtime business journalist in the Twin Cities always insists on, whether it’s his own copy, that of a fellow journalist or a PR person that just bombarded him again with a pitch and press release: “Make it sing!”

Despite the preponderance of words in all the communication channels of the 21^st century — and the corrosive effect text messaging is having on language and attention spans — good writing is still a highly valued skill, and a talent that can’t always be taught. Treat your written PR pieces for the gems that they should be. And if you have a truly gifted writer on staff, bump that scribe a raise, before he or she runs off for another profession.

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For more resources, see the Library topic Public and Media Relations.

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Martin Keller runs Media Savant Communications Co., a Public Relations and Media Communications consulting company based in the Twin Cities. Keller has helped move client stories to media that includes The New York Times, Larry King, The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, plus many other magazines, newspapers, trade journals and other media outlets. Contact him at kelmart@aol.com, or 612-729-8585

Search Engine Optimization & PR: Google Me This

I am not a Geek. Let’s get that out there right away. I’m a former pop culture writer and editor and now a PR guy, a flack, a publicist (mostly, 8-5 anyway) with some good ideas and communication skills. And like most people I know, I try to keep abreast of the technologies and social media implications of the profession and try to leverage them to the client’s advantage. The occasional webinar or seminar helps.

Over the years, however, I’ve relied on close colleagues and friends — and the occasional kindness of strangers — who are Geekish to lead me through the forest. Some days we are in the thick, others days we reach the clearing. Ten years ago, clients started asking about search engine rankings, what today is conventionally called SEO — Search Engine Optimization.

“How do I come up better in searches?”

“Good question. Let’s see who can help you with that.” And I’d call up the guys who knew how to help.

Today, I offer the latest SEO insights from the giant that practically invented search, Google. It’s very contemporary, even providing a section on mobile sites. Of course, if you’re like me, some of it may be pure Geek to you. Understood. Share it with the teckie in your org, or your own Geek Friends. But scan it for insights to try and stay current —at least on the thinking — even if the moving parts piece of this leaves you cold and uncertain.

Here’s the link to it: Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

See you in the forest clearing. Bring marshmallows. We’ll do smores and talk PR and stuff.

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For more resources, see the Library topic Public and Media Relations.

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Martin Keller runs Media Savant Communications Co., a Public Relations and Media Communications consulting company based in the Twin Cities. Keller has helped move client stories to media that includes The New York Times, Larry King, The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, plus many other magazines, newspapers, trade journals and other media outlets. Contact him at kelmart@aol.com, or 612-729-8585

3 Ways to Approach Ad Planning

Especially in hard economic times, setting an advertising budget is enormously important. Many companies cut advertising when revenues shrink, or expenses creep up.

Reducing your ad spend could be an expensive mistake, further escalating the problem. If you’re not consistently in front of your customers – in the media – your sales may take an additional hit.

Before You Set Your Ad Budget

Step back and take a moment to think about a few factors before you start. How much you spend on advertising depends on your position in the market, the competition you face, and other factors.

You should:

• know and understand your competition and THEIR advertising strategies,
• analyze your performance compared to last month and last year,
• note the length of the selling season compared to last year, and
• watch for selling trends, such as shifts in demographics that may affect buying trends.

3 Ways to Plan Your Ad Budget

No matter how you budget, there never seems to be enough marketing money to go around. But using one or a combination of these budgeting methods will help you implement your marketing plan.

1. Budgeting a percentage of sales: Provides a good budget starting point, but when sales decline, you have less money to solve your marketing problems. It’s also not a good approach if you’re trying to expand into a new area.

2. Budgeting according to the tasks you want to accomplish. Ties the amount you spend to the marketing mix activities you have developed. If good marketing objectives have been chosen, this plan offers the best chance of reaching them, but it doesn’t take affordability into account.

3. Budgeting based on what your competition spends. Should enable you to stay competitive in the market and allows you to respond rapidly to a competitor’s marketing campaign. However, basing your activities on those of others may restrict your own company’s growth potential.

Have you found effective ways to plan your advertising budget?

(Thanks to Realtor.org for the 3 Ways to Plan.)

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For more resources, see our Library topics Marketing and Social Networking.

.. _____ ..

ABOUT Lisa M. Chapman:

Ms. Chapman’s new book, How to Make Money Online With Social Media: A Step-by-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs will be available very soon. With offices in Nashville Tennessee, but working virtually with international clients, Lisa M. Chapman serves her clients as a business and marketing coach, business planning consultant and social media consultant. As a Founder of iBrand Masters, a social media consulting firm, Lisa Chapman helps clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa @ LisaChapman.com