How to Get More Results From Your Marketing/Public Relations

By Don Levin, APR, Fellow PRSA
and Marcela Kacmarova, Account Executive
Levin Public Relations & Marketing, Inc.
White Plains, NY

Here are 47 ways your marketing/public relations department and firm can increase results and value.

Overview

1. Learn what your CEO expects from your marketing/PR activities and concentrate on that. Work toward being invited to advise at board level meetings.
2. Use PR for the right reasons — to motivate audiences, to launch something new, to cut through message clutter, to anticipate crises, and to add corporate value. Also, to attract investors, merger candidates, partners and recruits; to improve competitive position; to attain fair pricing of corporate securities.
3. PR builds reputation. The most important factor in corporate reputation is your CEO. Keep your CEO involved even if he or she prefers public anonymity. CEOs realize that credibility, conduct (executing strategy in a professional manner) and communication are their primary responsibilities.
4. Revise your marketing/PR and business objectives continually. Weight each objective so that you can allocate effort in proportion to its relative value.
5. Receive continual updates on company developments from the sales, product, application, research and development departments as well as other relevant units. Fully integrate marketing/PR and the rest of the organization. Put marketing/PR in early planning sessions — the time when ideas can make a difference.
6. Write a plan. State exactly why you have a PR function and what it is expected to accomplish. Budget all activities, including 10-20% for opportunities. Disseminate monthly and year-to-date progress and results reports.
7. Broaden the PR function to include support for recruiting and investor relations (even for privately held firms), both technical and financial analyst relations. Function should embrace the company's total effort to communicate with all of its audiences.
8. Survey target audiences periodically to learn their motivations. Realize that you can never know too much about your markets, intermediary buying influences, customers, and prospects. Supplement information from sales teams (buyers prefer to be nice to sales people — tell them the truth about their misgivings). Compare coverage of your company with four competitors in five or ten publications over the last six months and use it as a baseline.
9. Minimize training time, hiring and training. It is easier to teach a good writer your business than it is to teach someone who knows your field to write.
10. Prepare for possible crises such as misuse of products (e.g., by a product recall) production or distribution stoppages; and corporate financial difficulties.

Strategy

11. Know what PR can and cannot do. PR can increase awareness, develop relationships, create a brand, clarify misconception, and resolve crises. PR cannot make bad products acceptable, hide blatant mistakes, or whitewash poor decisions.
12. Realize that the vast majority of companies devote too little effort to marketing, especially if top management is inexperienced in the function. Better mousetraps do not sell themselves.
13. Assume your customers and prospects do not know you as well as you think. Buyers change every day; they hear from your competitors; they form misconceptions from ill-informed colleagues; they rely on old ideas; they are swamped and must make decisions based on partial information. Your marketplace needs your positive story day in and day out, so repeat communications often. Encourage feedback. Marketers are most effective when they continually create new ways to interact with buyers.
14. Enhance company relationships with intermediaries, buying influences, partners, and other sales channels. Motivate referrals.
15. Differentiate your company from its competitors. Stake out territory and reject encroachment. Pre-empt. Build on your strengths and repair your weaknesses.
16. Demonstrate leadership: Become an authority on developing standards for issues in your field.
17. Create the "big idea," the overriding activity that will command marketplace attention.

Publicity

18. Update and prioritize a tiered media list for each new story idea. Pare down your media list to reporters likely to be interested in that specific story. Use BusinessWire and PRNewswire to reach databases, analysts, and major websites - never as a replacement for personal delivery to your top reporters.
19. Create a list of story ideas, hard news, personality pieces, trend analyses, issue tie-ins, opinion articles, round-ups, user studies (case histories).
20. Create case histories narrated from a user's point of view. It may take contact with 100 users to find a few willing to let you use their name.
21. Customize and tailor stories for individual newspapers or counties. Do not rely on blanket distribution to the media.
22. Research editorial calendars. Pitch reporters months in advance of a scheduled feature.
23. Meet reporters face to face, preferably in their offices, to develop new ideas and build relationships. Tack reporters meetings onto business travel.
24. Use top management for interviews and as a source for reporters. Train managers before they are interviewed. Prepare content, delivery, responses. Teach what reporters expect. Review a list of touchy questions. "Off the record" is not an option; neither is "No comment."
25. Streamline the clearance process for your publicity text. Don't let your text get "muddy" from multiple edits.
26. Write useful, clear, factual releases with opinion only in quotes. Quote the highest level person involved — e.g., your CEO, regional chief, new technology inventor, or divisional senior vice president.
27. Create publicity programs. One release may or may not get results (depending on its news value). Build media relationships and continually provide useful information.
28. Get another opinion on your written publicity materials. Is the news upfront? Is the significance of the news fully explained? Will a cub reporter new to the media or a specialty understand the story? Is the text for general media free of jargon?
29. Give reporters a list of company experts (trained in media relations), identifying issues each can comment on.
30. Dramatize your message.
31. Prepare a full set of materials for various reporters (and other audiences) including frequently-asked questions, fact sheets, white papers, speeches or speech digests, recent news releases, your annual report, brochures, ads, and other selling information.
32. Scan the last three issues of a publication before you pitch it. Have the latest issue open in front of you as you pitch.
33. Show great respect for the reporter's time. For example, ask the reporter if he or she is on deadline. Plan for continual editor follow-up.
34. Keep e-mail pitches to one screen size with links to additional material, if necessary. Avoid attachments.
35. Consider giving a reporter an exclusive, or an advance on a feature story.
36. Find out why reporters refuse your stories. Of course, they hate inaccuracy, lateness, insignificance, unsubstantiated or speculative material, and stories that will appeal to only a small portion of their readership. Reporters want to deal with people who know their publication well.

Speaking Engagements

37. List the best conferences your CEO and other top managers should speak at. Pitch each program chairperson to arrange a speech or panel participation. Follow through. Offer to create a whole new session. Offer to sponsor a portion of the event if necessary.

Prospect Development

38. Keep internal and external audiences informed on company progress at least once a month. Report your messages in different ways. Maintain your database. Personalized, informal contact is many times more effective than mass mail. E-mail is worthwhile if it provides meaningful, timely information from the reader's point of view. Use examples, anecdotes as you would if you were across the desk.

Analyst/ Intermediary Relations

39. Prepare a tiered list of technical and financial analysts and other buying influences covering your field and company. Call each firm to find the best individual analysts to build relationships. Keep them informed; update your developments. Arrange meetings with the most important.

Your PR Firm

40. Your firm should be using all the latest tools on your behalf — "Profnet," "Mediamap" or equivalent media database, tailored software, time tracking, etc.
41. Make your firm your "partner."
42. Have your firm measure results against objectives.
43. Make sure your firm does not over-promise.
44. Establish a timetable for invoices and regular payment.
45. Keep your firm fully informed about your company's developments as early as possible. Give them continual feedback. Praise and complain as warranted. Meet quarterly if not more frequently.
46. Make sure your firm uses the Internet and e-mail to your maximum advantage. They should analyze and enhance your web site, create newsletters, pursue publicity in e-zines, track online coverage, etc.
47. Go over all of the above with your firm.


More Results (From Levin's Experience)

Here are some ways in which we have brought special results to clients. In addition to conventional publicity and marketing strategies …

For a financial-technology firm, we arranged interviews and speaking engagements, without press releases, to create a stream of coverage that increased corporate value and achieved the sale of the client's company at a surprisingly high price. We continually nurtured reporters, editors and conference chairpersons.

For a leading insurance brokerage firm, we concentrated on promoting a series of seminars attended by executives in its target niche.

For a small-satellite manufacturer, we helped create a new market category, nano-satellites, and merchandised a book written by the CEO.

For a young venture capital firm, we helped develop the "star" value of one of the founding partners.

For a voice-technology company, we created a campaign to recognize achievement by outstanding dealers.

For a premier teleservices company, we supported recruiting efforts at many of their 90 + offices around the country.

For an association of bookkeepers, we researched statewide chapters and newsletters of CPA organizations to promote a new certification program.

For a network-infrastructure firm, we created a high-tech, PR-management spreadsheet with a continually-updated media list, analyst contacts, editorial calendars, magazine columns, and notes on pitching status.

For a site-selection economic-development agency, after achieving extensive publicity, we created a special reprint packet for mailing to their prospect list.

For the industrial division of a major telecommunication company, we achieved bimonthly speaking engagements for the division chief at major customer conferences.

For the region's largest pest-control company, we organized a grand-opening gala for their new headquarters, with educational demonstrations.

For a commercial telecommunication-systems company, we provided strategic advice and crisis counseling after the failure of one of their products.

For a food-services firm, we boosted U.S. publicity by publicizing their expansion worldwide and in new vertical categories such as higher education.

For a call-center support organization, we launched a new related company from inception to promote a new knowledge management product.

For a prospective client, an ISP (Internet Service Provider), we suggested that the firm up-sell most of its current client list to maximize its immediate sales opportunity.

For a manufacturer of commodity products, we suggested a new customer service program with user groups, dealer feedback, regional dealer roundtables, educational seminars, and related activities.

For an association of metal manufacturers, we helped lay the groundwork for a marketing communications program to expand a new market by traveling to reporters in Canada.

For an automotive-parts manufacturer, we created a driver education program for high-school students, featuring three stunt drivers, and placed them on numerous television talk shows. The media accepted the news value of education; reporters had been unreceptive to an earlier commercial approach.

back to top