Ready for PR?
Before you hire a PR agency or public relations consultant to help you get publicity for your company, you’ll want to do a little self-assessment ahead of time to determine what you have to work with.
Spend an hour or two going over these questions with your management team and prepare a short list of answers.
When you come to an initial meeting with this information, you will impress the PR people you talk to and have a much more useful conversation with them.
They’ll be able to give you a much better idea of what they can do for you, what kind of results will be reasonable, and how much it will cost.
I. What do you have to work with?
Company News
1. What new product announcements are planned over the next six months?
2. Any new services (consulting. training, etc.)?
3. Are you changing the way you deliver products or services (such as moving to online training)?
4. Anything new with pricing?
5. Any new hires to the management team?
6. Planning to move to a new location?
7. Any new partnerships?
8. Any new deals?
9. Have you won any awards recently?
Trends
10. What are the current trends in your market? How do you fit in?
11. What current business trends are affecting your business? Are you outsourcing? Feeling the effects of a market recovery or recession?
Experts
12. Is anyone in your company considered an industry expert? What is their area of expertise?
13. Who at your company is blogging?
14. Who is tweeting?
15. Who manages your Facebook page?
16. Who is responsible for your company’s presence on LinkedIn and other social networks?
17. Do you have anyone creating podcasts or videos?
Clients
18. Do you have any relatively new case studies? For what companies? What kind of results did they achieve with your software?
19. Do you have any users at large or well-known companies who are willing to be quoted?
20. Is there anything unusual about any of your users?
21. Is any user doing something different or unusual with your software?
22. Is there anything highly visual about the way people use your software? Or what they do before or after using the software?
23. If you analyzed the purchase patterns of your users, would that show anything interesting?
Education Strategy
24. Is there a topic about which you are trying to educate the market? Do you advocate a particular strategy or point of view?
Personalities
25. Is there anything unusual or quirky about your founder, president, or management team? This could include their background, hobbies, where they live, what kind of car they drive, their work style, etc.
26. Do you have any unusual employees (background, hobbies, etc.)?
27. If you have investors, are any well-known or unusual?
28. Is there anything unusual about the way you run the company? The perks you offer staff?
29. Do you do anything unusual for holidays?
30. Are there any topics (not software or business-related) about which you feel strongly?
Giving Back
31. Do you do anything to support the local community? Contribute to or volunteer at charities?
II. Where do you want to get publicity?
· What websites are most influential in your market?
· What blogs?
· What newspapers?
· What newsletters?
· What e-mail newsletters?
· What magazines?
· What online communities/social networks?
· What columnists?
· What radio or TV shows?
· What analysts?
· Who else matters in your market?
III. What are your goals for your PR effort?
· Are you looking for lead generation?
· Sales?
· Recruiting?
· Impress partners?
· Build a channel?
· Investors?
· Partners?
IV. In what time frame do you need to see results?
- As soon as possible
- 6-12 months
- 12-24 months
- Ongoing
What You Need to Accomplish With Your First Project
If you have been reading this blog for a while you know that we don’t recommend outsourcing one-off projects.
Instead we recommend that you find someone you can work with on a regular basis, who can handle a variety of similar projects for you.
When you are looking for someone you can have a longer relationship with, the first project is important.
You need to find out several things:
1. Can they do the work?
Yes, they looked good on paper and sounded good on the phone. Now you need to see if they can actually do the type of work you need done.
You need to find out… Did they do the work right? Did they pay attention to the details? Was it what you asked for? Was it the level of quality you need?
2. Do you like working with them?
Are they reliable? Did they understand what you wanted? Did they deliver work as promised? Do the two of you get along? Can you see yourself working with them over the long term?
3. Is the price right?
Did they take a reasonable amount of time to do the work? Is the price what you were quoted?
4. How much training do they need?
How quickly did they understand what you were looking for? Did they ask good questions? Did they listen to your answers and act on them? How much more education will they need if they are going to take on bigger projects? How do they learn best?
Choosing that first project…
A good first project is one that lets you answer all of those questions.
It should be something that takes relatively little of your time to pull together.
It should not require you to do a lot of training.
And preferably it should deliver something that will be useful to you whether or not you continue working with this person.
Here are 9 characteristics of an ideal first project for your new marketing person:
1. Requires relatively little background knowledge about the company and its products/services.
2. Has a process that is fairly simple to explain or is already defined somewhere.
3. Requires materials or information that is easy to gather and can be easily sent to someone by email.
4. Is not critical to the business or highly confidential.
5. Takes 5-10 hours to do.
6. Does not require the involvement of a lot of other people in the company or outside it.
7. Has an output that you can easily describe.
8. Has goals that are easy to define or where it will be easy to tell if they have done a good job or not.
9. Does not have a hard and fast deadline.
This is why we say a nurture marketing project makes an ideal way to start working with someone. Nurture marketing meets all 9 of these characteristics.
Join the Revolution
Today we’re taking a break from our usual nurture marketing tips and doing something a little different…
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m tired of all the bad news that seems to be popping up with regularity these days – all the talk about a double-dip recession, stock market drops, federal budget crises and more.
I’m bringing back something we did when the recession first hit, a couple years ago.
Back then I felt a little overwhelmed with what was going on and I decided that the best way to deal with it was to take action. So I put this pledge up on our website and asked people to sign.
The text is below – it’s pretty simple.
If it strikes a chord with you, I hope you’ll sign too. And I hope you’ll share it so other people can sign. You can sign and share here:
http://www.proresource.com/join-the-revolution
I truly believe that if we work together, that we can turn this economy around.
And doing something about it feels a whole lot better than doing nothing.
We’re also going to be making some changes to our Facebook page in the next couple weeks, working to make it a place where people can get help with their nurture marketing programs and where people can go to give help. If you “like” us, you’ll get all the details. (But I’ll probably include them in the newsletter too.)
Here’s the pledge:
I’ve had enough bad news, enough talk of a double-dip recession. Yes, the world has changed. But the world is always changing. I see new opportunities that are available to me and I’m taking advantage of them.
I’m going to take action:
1. I’m going to invest time and effort in growing my own business.
2. I’m going to do something to help someone else grow theirs.
3. Then I’m going to put work aside and have some fun!
Here’s the link again if you’d like to sign too:
http://www.proresource.com/join-the-revolution
How to Get Marketing Freelancers Up to Speed Fast – Part 2
In the last post, I said that we use a 2-part strategy to educate marketing freelancers effectively and inexpensively.
Here’s the second part…
Whenever we can, we choose the first project a new marketing freelancer works on so they can learn while they are doing productive work.
For us, that means we look for a customer-facing project. In marketing, a good first project is very often a case study or gathering testimonials.
That lets the marketing freelancer learn how people use the product or service, what it does for them, how they use it, and where the value is. Sure, you can tell them this yourself, but the information sinks in faster and more thoroughly when they hear it directly from the customers. Plus, they hear the language customers use, which is most likely different from what you say internally.
That information then provides a powerful foundation that informs everything else they do.
If the next project is designing a brochure, writing a sales letter, doing a press release, or updating the website – the result will be better because the freelancer now has a better understanding of how customers think and where they find value.
Even the best, smartest, most experienced marketing freelancers need to do this ramping up – they’ll do it better while working, and you’ll be getting useful work while they are learning. It’s a win-win.
So think about what kinds of projects do not require a lot of knowledge to do AND will let your marketing freelancers learn more about your business while they work.
Ideas For Educational Articles
Need ideas for articles that you can use in an email newsletter, a nurture program (email or regular mail), a blog, or just to add to your website to provide keyword fodder for search engines?
Here’s a list I came up with for clients:
- What concepts people need to understand before they fully appreciate the value you provide
- What steps you go through when you work with people
- What your customers or clients should prepare before they start working with you
- Why your company is better than competitors
- What kind of clients you want (or don’t want)
- What kind of results people should expect from working with you
- Common objections you run into during the sales cycle (and how you deal with them)
- Common misconceptions people have about the type of work you do
- How people can get more out of what you do for them
- Legal issues they need to be aware of
- Financial issues they need to be aware of
- Top 10 reasons to work with you
- Worksheet that helps people figure out how much money they will save by working with you
- What is different about the way your company does things
- What kinds of things can go wrong with the type of work you do (and how you keep that from happening)
- What people don’t know about your company (that you wish they did)
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