Getting Good Value from PR

Sometimes the same question comes up from several sources, which makes you wonder if there is something in the air or if it’s phases of the moon. This time, the question was PR. More specifically, how can a small company get good value from PR?

You could refer to the now-famous Proctor and Gamble study which measured the effectiveness of a mix of marketing activities and found that PR delivered the highest ROI and drove as much sales volume as their advertising, and for a whole lot less. Plus, it had spillover benefits to other areas of marketing, advertising, and sales. That’s a greatly simplified summary, so you should read the article.

First of all, ask yourself – why am I doing PR? Is the goal to gain more industry visibility? Are you planning an IPO or trying to find a buyer? Do you want to promote your CTO as a thought leader? Plan out your PR activities (and other supporting marketing activities) accordingly; and that means not just the activities, but a review of your messaging and positioning statements. In fact, do you know your target audience’s opinion of you now? Perhaps you need to do a little reality check first, before you spend money persuading them to change their minds about … what? What do they think of your product?

Do you try PR yourself or hire an agency or consultant?

Don’t try doing PR yourself unless you already have the experience, skills, and time. Please.

I’ve had good success putting agencies/consultants on a fixed retainer and working with them to target specific publications and influential analysts. In a perfect world, you find a PR professional who knows the etiquette, the who’s who, and already have relationships with editors and analysts in your target space. Less perfect is the agency who gets up to speed at your cost. You can’t always find a perfect match, so in those cases, I’ll go with a referral to someone who is good, can get up to speed fast and do a creditable job while learning about your market space.

Unless you’ve just polluted the Gulf Coast, PR efforts are more effective than advertising because readers know the information is being presented by an impartial journalist, industry analyst or blogger. The more influential and credible the journalist, the more weight it carries. At the same time, you need to craft your message and information carefully because you have absolutely no control over what will be written. So with that in mind, remember that it’s all about building good relationships with the media, because not only will that get you more ink, you may be able to improve the tone of the article that gets written. Whether you’ve hired a PR professional or will be handling PR yourself, it never hurts to remember a few good practices:

Make sure you have real news. It’s not about you, it’s about what the publication’s readership will find interesting. Otherwise you’re just wasting the journalist’s time. The fact that you’ve moved from one location to another isn’t news, the fact that you’re moving because you’ve just bought another company for its technology and need to consolidate offices is more newsworthy. Too many no-news phone calls or emails to your contact, and you’ve lost any chance of building a relationship. It’s the same for any company big or small – it has to be news worth reading. Sometimes you can spin the story to tie in to a bigger issue in the marketplace, to lend more weight to the information.

Be easy to work with. Journalists are under real stress these days. Publications are folding up at an unbelieveable rate, losing ad revenues, and laying off staff. Fewer editors/reporters trying to cover the same topics means you need to be high value and professional. Be on time for phone calls, get all your background information together, have information ready to email before or just after your interview, make sure your top business or technical manager is available and waiting for a call with the journalist, provide a media kit online with artwork they can use … the list goes on, but you get the idea.

Make sure your spokespersons are trained to deal with the media. There is no such thing as “off the record”. Need I say more?

Provide content. Write your own stories and offer them up to selected journalists. Case studies. They love customer case studies. Include quotes from your customer. Let the journalist have the byline for the story.

Back to the understaffed world of publications – not only are print versions dying, publications now have to provide free content online in order to compete and maintain visibility. And here you have an opportunity, because how do online publications get extra content and build a reader community? By getting content from their readers. You can submit comments, articles, link to your blog. Be thoughtful, helpful, avoid badmouthing the competition, take the high road. Establish a credible presence on the site and the editor will love you, depend on you, call you when they need a quote or information.

And finally, the mantra. In marketing, as in life, there are no silver bullets. You need to execute a number of different initiatives, and the accumulative effect is what will make a difference. If Proctor and Gamble relied on PR alone, that in itself would not have delivered a high ROI. One article in Widget News won’t send sales soaring. A consistent PR program feeding out a steady diet of stories about customer successes and innovations, speaking engagements at key industry events, and other activities that drive up visibility in combination with other marketing activities will increase the effectiveness of your PR activities and vice versa.