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Public Relations Primer

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


Not every manager will need to get involved in public relations, or PR, but, from time-to-time, many will. So it is worth knowing and understanding the basics of one of the most important aspects of marketing.

What is PR?

The definition differs from one expert to another and the emphasis is very different on the two sides of the Atlantic. I personally prefer the simplicity of the definition offered by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) on their website:

‘Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.’

The UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) places its emphasis on reputation, and defines PR as:

‘Public Relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.

‘Public Relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.’

For me, PR is about engaging with your public, so the concept of PR is relevant not just at the corporate level, but also at the level of individuals who want to strengthen their careers. The principal approaches to PR are:

  • Writing
  • Collaborating
  • Engaging the press and professional media
  • Engaging through social media
  • Direct engagement

We will take a short look at each.

Writing

Getting your message out by writing articles, blogs (like this one) and books has a very simple effect: it says ‘we know what we are talking about’. By offering your public practical or insightful content, you are enhancing your reputation and strengthening your relationships with your readers. It has traditionally been largely one-way, but with the advent of social media and bookmarking, the ability for your public to comment on your writing and engage in a dialogue about it has grown mightily. This can only be a good thing for you, if you have something valuable to say, and you say it well. Please comment below!

Collaborating

If you can collaborate with other, non-competing, organisations, you can extend the reach of your PR activities to encompass their public as well as your own. If you engage them effectively, they can become your public too. So the relationship you need with the ideal potential collaborator is one of overlapping interests, but not conflict. This is not to say that there are not some valuable collaborations to be made between competitors too, but the risks (and rewards) are substantially higher.

Engaging the Press and Professional Media

For some people, PR and issuing press releases amount to pretty much the same thing. Without a doubt, the press is continually hungry for engaging stories that will interest their audiences, so if you do this correctly, this is nothing more than an example of a good collaboration. But what the media can do is get your message out, bundled in a package of objectivity and professionalism that amplifies its effectiveness considerably. But don’t blow it: if you are asked to comment on camera, on the radio, or even in print: prepare well, because if you don’t, and you perform poorly, the media can turn your reputation into an overnight shambles.

Engaging through Social Media

With so many forms of social media around, even the so-called experts are struggling to offer coherent advice as to which to focus on and how to do it well. The two tips that seem to surface again and again from the best of them, and which make greatest sense to me, are:

  1. Focus: choose one or two social media that your audience are most likely to engage with in numbers and in depth, and focus on using them well
  2. Social: the nature of social media is that they enable social connections, so you need to be listening to conversations and engaging with them as you would in a bar, cafe or restaurant. If you just use them for announcements, then you are losing most of their value.

Direct Engagement

From meeting customers in the street, to sending them information by newsletter, direct engagement has the capacity to be the most powerful form of PR of all – and therefore the ability to do your reputation most harm as well as good. The difference between a helpful advice email, with some good offers, and a piece of unwanted junk is subtle. As with writing, above, direct engagement has to have WAM factor: ‘what about me?’ says your public.

Further Reading 

You may like The Marketing Pocketbook. There are also some great resources on the PR profession websites:

 

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The Basics of Marketing

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


Marketing is not about selling. That may sound obvious, but too many people act as if the purpose of marketing is to sell: it is not. The purpose of marketing is to raise awareness of your product or services, so that people will be motivated to investigate further, or they will be aware of what you offer, if they need it in the future.

The challenges for marketing are:

  • Knowing who your potential customers are
  • Knowing what channels of information they most actively engage with
  • Knowing what messages will resonate most strongly with them

Using the answers to these, you can design a marketing campaign that answers the three questions that a prospective customer will have:

Question 1: What are you offering me?

If I am a customer of yours, then your product or service must meet a need or satisfy a desire in me. A strong marketing message sets up that need or desire, to prequalify readers, viewers or listeners and get the attention of those who are suitable targets. It then stimulates their interest by making a promise that the product or service can meet their needs. Finally, it amplifies desire, by showing the customer what they will get (beyond the product or service itself) by buying. This bit is about benefits and you must link them to strong positive emotional states. The favourite of many advertisers is, of course, the promise of love, romance or the three-letter alternative. Now they want it, you need to answer the next question…

Question 2: Is it good value?

They want it, but how much are they prepared to pay for it. Focus on value not cost. Done well, some customers won’t even care about cost (think of the people who queue to buy the latest hi-tech, hi-cost products that simply replace things they already have – desire; not need). But if they do care about cost, you must show how the benefits you are offering outweigh this – and the ratio is a measure of the customer’s perception of value. If you can satisfy them on this too, they don’t only want it, they want to go out and get it. So now answer…

Question 3: How can I get it?

Choose a delivery strategy that is consistent with the image you want to convey for your product or service and then (in most cases) make it easy for the customer to buy. Why ‘in most cases’? Because for certain products or services at the premium end of their market, you can add to the perceived cachet of the product by making it hard for the customer to buy. This increases its sense of exclusivity and therefore of its perceived value.

Getting your message out

Promoting your product means providing prospective customers with plentiful relevant information. It needs to answer their questions about your product or service, but also about you, and why they should buy from you. There are a near infinite number of media that you can use, in combination. Here is a selection.

  • Advertising: newspapers, magazines, radio, television, online, billboards, posters, leaflets
  • Promotional: brochures, pens, apparel, stationery, bags, websites
  • Sponsorship: events, causes, awards, hospitality
  • Direct: mail, email, telemarketing, newsletters
  • Signage and branding: buildings, plant, vehicles, uniforms, products
  • Public Relations: articles, press releases, interviews
  • Events: conferences, exhibitions, hospitality and entertaining, trade fairs
  • Social media: Instagram,Twitter, blogging, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok

Further Reading 

You may like The Marketing Pocketbook and a couple of earlier Pocketblogs:

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Customer Journey: Mapping your Relationship

Customer Journey

Customer JourneyYou can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. That’s the principle behind mapping out your customer journey. It’s a way to get an insight into how it feels for your customers to deal with you at each step along the path.

And since understanding your customer is vital to making them feel good about buying and using your product, customer journey mapping is a valuable tool to support this Big Idea.

Continue reading Customer Journey: Mapping your Relationship

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Colour Psychology: Creating a Feeling

Colour Psychology

Colour PsychologyWe associate colours with brands and brands with colours. Some colours and combinations immediately evoke a brand. And others instantly trigger a feeling. This is the role of colour psychology in marketing.

Much of what people think they know about colour psychology is little more than pseudo-science. Chromatic astrology, if you will. But there is also a growing body of research evidence to fall back on.

And what that underlines is that, for whatever reason, there is some firm basis for colour psychology.

Continue reading Colour Psychology: Creating a Feeling

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April Fools’ Day – April Fish

April Fools' Day

April Fools' DayI don’t suppose we’ll ever find out the origin of April Fools’ Day. But it would make the basis for a great prank!

It does seem sad to me that, in most workplaces, the tradition of harmless jokes is dying out. Yes, I do understand the need to avoid giving offence or causing disruption. So, if we’re ever to see a bit of inoffensive leg-pulling, April Fools’ Day (tomorrow) is a good time for it.

Please don’t take this post as licence to disrupt or offend. But, if you can come up with something genuinely witty, why not? Make April Fools’ Day a source of fun for your colleagues!

Continue reading April Fools’ Day – April Fish

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A/B Testing: Finding the Optimum

A/B Testing

A/B TestingWhy is Amazon so successful? A big part of the answer is A/B Testing. Unknown to most users, we are subject to thousands of A/B tests every week. It tells Amazon how to layout a page, which products to offer you, and even the font size on the buy buttons.

A/B testing is ubiquitous on the internet and it powers millions of marketing decisions a day. Yet the idea is shockingly simple. What has changed is the technology that allows marketers to carry out their A/B tests on statistically significant samples quickly and easily. That’s what the internet and web technologies have given us.

So what is this age-old idea, and what can it do for you?

Continue reading A/B Testing: Finding the Optimum

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Multi-Level Marketing (MLM): Pyramid Schemes?

Multi-Level Marketing

Multi-Level MarketingI’m sure Multi-Level Marketing has been around since ancient days. Send out street urchins to sell stuff and take a big chunk of their income. Get them to recruit other homeless kids and let them have a share of what their protegé earns.

But Multi-Level Marketing (or MLM) is big business now, with one estimate* putting it at around the US$200 billion per annum mark, worldwide.

So, we have to ask:

  • What is Multi-Level Marketing?
  • How does it work?
  • Is it a good way to earn a living (here’s a spoiler: no)?
  • And how do you spot an MLM scheme if offered one?

Continue reading Multi-Level Marketing (MLM): Pyramid Schemes?

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The Long Tail: Infinite Consumer Choice

The Long Tail

The Long TailThe Long Tail is the other half of the same chart we saw in an earlier Big Ideas article: the Pareto Principle. Vilfredo Pareto took an interest in the head of the chart, where a small number of people accounted for a huge proportion of wealth. In 2006, Chris Anderson published a book that looked at the huge number of products that form the remainder, when you exclude the few that account for the majority of sales.

How many categories of item does Amazon list? I found the statistic from January 2018 that:

Amazon lists more than 3 billion products across 11 marketplaces worldwide.

But most of their sales and revenue come from the top few highest performing goods in each category. A small number of books may sell thousands a month. But there are millions of books that rarely sell any in a given month… or year.

Continue reading The Long Tail: Infinite Consumer Choice

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Tribes: From Shared Interest to Change

Tribes

TribesSeth Godin is a marketer and a communicator. His stream of valuable ideas about 21st century marketing is something we’ve written about before. And we’ve featured his idea of Permission Marketing in a previous Big Ideas article. But perhaps the most resonant of his ideas is that of Tribes. This is the idea that marketers need to lead change. And we do that by building a coalition of the willing: a tribe of like-minded people who share our vision.

What I like best about Godin’s idea of Tribes is that it works well on two totally different levels. And different managers in our readership will find greatest resonance in one or the other. The idea of tribes can be about:

  • leading change to build a better future
  • creating demand for a new product, idea, or service

So, Tribes is a big idea about change leadership or about marketing… or maybe about both.

Continue reading Tribes: From Shared Interest to Change

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Social Media: Making Connecting and Communicating [too] Easy

Social Media

Social MediaWhen I first thought about Social Media as a Big Idea, it seemed like a good topic. Until I started to think about it. Because forms of Social Media are ubiquitous – we all use them, so what can I tell you that you don’t already know?

Well, take a look, and find out.

Continue reading Social Media: Making Connecting and Communicating [too] Easy

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