Five Mistakes You Can Make in Executing Your PR Campaign

Hi all, for the next number of blog posts, I’m going to be publishing a series entitled “Five Mistakes You Can Make in Executing Your PR Campaign.”   It covers off many of the pitfalls companies make in crafting and executing a PR strategy, along with some advice on how to spot and avoid those mistakes along the way. 

Now on to the words of wisdom….

Five Mistakes You Can Make in Executing Your PR Campaign

Executing on a PR strategy is about understanding the art of relationship and in telling stories that compel journalists into action. It’s about crafting press releases and pitches that provide appropriate, relevant and comprehensive information to reporters and editors under pressure. And it’s about delivering over the top service when a story opportunity presents itself. Done right, a PR program can result in positive headlines and column inches worth of coverage. Handled with a heavy hand, however, a poorly executed PR program can turn off more people than it attracts. Below are five common mistakes companies make in their PR efforts coupled with some advice on how best to avoid them.



Mistake #1 - Fail to plan

o Invest time in building a sound PR strategy. Understand your objectives and goals. Spend time envisioning the headlines you’d like to see for your business. Be honest with yourself – you may be in love with your company’s strategy or products – but is it really news fodder for CNN?

o Research your media targets thoroughly and build a targeted media list. As I said in my opening to this post, PR is a relationship business, and you need to invest in understanding the reporters and editors you plan to target. This includes reading what they’ve written, and subscribe to any advice they offer about how best to contact them. Have they written on a competitor, or covered your field in prior articles? All of this information will help you craft a honed and personalized pitch that in turn will up the probability of your story being covered. As part of your research, also consider the social media participation of a particular journalist. Are they on Twitter? Facebook? Do they have a blog? Social media provides new and potentially more direct opportunities to personally engage.

o Don’t expect customers, partners to immediately jump on board. When working on a press release or story pitch, it is common, and indeed preferred to incorporate quotes from a customer or partner, and to provide journalists with contact information for these story sources. But realize that it is critical to seek out approval from these parties in advance. Quoting a customer in a press release without their permission can be fatal to your relationship and undermine any good work you have performed up to this point. You also need to know that customers and partners require lead time – approval cycles in a large company can be complex, involving executives, PR folk and legal, and be assured; they will work to their own timeline, not yours.

o Just because the phone rings, you don’t have to start talking. You pick up the phone and there’s a reporter on the end of the line! Of course you are excited, and in the heat of the moment might find yourself participating in an interview you are not yet ready to give. I typically advice clients to confirm the reporter’s deadline then ask if they can ring the reporter back in a few minutes. Even taking five minutes to prepare your thoughts and determine the key points you want to make can turn this opportunity into a more positive experience for all.

o Invest in media training. If you have the opportunity to invest in media training, it will never hurt and will always help. You’ll learn how to handle an aggressive line of questioning, how to remain on message and best practices for appearing on camera.

Stay tuned for PR Mistake #2 – “It’s all about me” coming to you soon…

Going for the Money Shot – Leveraging e-Marketing to Drive Leads to Your Sales Person’s Doorstep

In my mind, one of the most effective mechanisms for lead generation today is the area of online, or e-marketing. Yet I’m consistently surprised by the number of companies who stick only to traditional marketing methods such as tradeshows and print advertising to attract and build the prospect funnel.

I would like in this blog to explore the field of e-marketing and discuss some of the methods I and my team have used successfully over time to drive and sustain successful lead generation activity.

There are a number of tactics one can leverage when engaging in e-marketing:

Banner Advertising

Probably the most familiar tactic, banner advertising allows you to both brand and engage in active lead generation in the online area. Just as the case with print advertising, investments in banner advertising can not be a drop in the bucket – one must aim for consistency of look and feel, frequency and reach in terms of eye ball views. That said, the online e-zine and blogosphere community, and specialized online communities of interest offer you a generous array of placement possibilities and for those seeking to do highly targeted marketing, some excellent communities specialized by role, or by interest area. Just make sure that you have a value added offer – a compelling whitepaper or a piece of independent third party research works well – as your offer to entice the viewer to click through and give you their contact information.

Electronic Newsletter Sponsorships

Where there are banner ads, there are typically electronic newsletter sponsorships as well. Where banner ads are a pull tactic – requiring the visitor to travel to the site, electronic newsletter sponsorships is a push tactic, with the newsletter (and your sponsorship ad and offer) out to a segmented audience of the site. For online magazines, electronic newsletters typically showcase the latest news and new feature stories. Through targeted PR efforts, you can actually double your visibility by placement of a sponsorship in a newsletter that features a story on your company. Again, the offer when sponsoring a newsletter is everything. It needs to be of high value and enticing enough that the reader clicks through to accept the offer.

Now there’s One Caveat …

With both banner advertising and newsletter sponsorships, a marketer should be aware that while these tactics may generate a volume of contacts, most of those accepting your offer should be considered “suspects” not “prospects.” It is vital that these leads receive further qualification attention as most are not advanced in the marketing funnel, and are not ready for a sales person’s call. Leads from these sources however, do allow you to build up a sizable database of contacts to regularly touch and work, and with a marketing campaign system such as Marketo or Eloqua, these leads can be matured and the wheat sorted from the chaff.

Search Engine Optimization

I’ll get this on the table now. I love search engine optimization. Fully and completely. Its painstaking work to achieve, but SEO provides that perfect intersection point between the buyer that is looking for a specific product or service, and the vendor who has exactly that ware to offer. SEO is achieved through pay for click advertising (PPC), auction bidding on key search terms, and most importantly, and most difficult natural optimization of your site (which affects rankings in the middle of the page where really, honestly, everyone looks). Some of our largest opportunities, and most rapid sales cycles came through leads from search engines. But again, the offer at the other end is critical to snag that prospect fully. Now find yourself a genius at SEO who has a passion for detail – because natural optimization is really valuable, but also really particular work.

Webinars

While all of the above tactics I view as primary lead generation tactics, Webinars are in my mind, a secondary – or advancing – tactic. We used to traditionally market our webinars to the pool of contacts we collected through the above sources in our leads database. They were then segmented and offered via an email invitation (HTML or text) a value-based Webinar (i.e. think about featuring a thought leader in the industry, or a customer to tell their success story). Our sales folk consistently shared with us that leads who had accepted an initial offer, then attended a webinar were more mature, and more ready for a discussion about our products. If the topic of the webinar is really compelling, or the speaker very well known there can also be a viral component to your marketing efforts. I remember one particular webinar we promoted to our database featuring an analyst firm, brought in a range of contacts from a banking organization representing six different locations, and all with similar titles and/or organizational responsibility. Clearly the topic had touched a nerve in that organization and the sales person responsible for that account now had a critical mass of interest to which to respond.