With the best products in the world, you’d hope that customers would be flocking to your door.  But without the right marketing and publicity blend, no-one will even know that you exist.  Neil Hopkins looks at the core basics. 

Think of a Public Relations (PR) or Marketing Executive and you’ll (rightly or wrongly) conjure up an image of a slick-suited, smart talking, young up-and-comer waving their hands around wildly talking about yields, expected returns, ATL, BTL or TTL campaigns.  Which is all very well and good if that’s what you like and what you want to pay for or even if you understand what it means! – but we know from experience that many small business people don’t want to (or can’t) pay for such a hyper-mobile extravagance for their business. 

Yet every business has a need for the type of topics that the suit will be talking about – after all, without some kind of PR and marketing approach, how will people know that you exist?  Word-of-mouth is good enough for some companies, but most really need something a little more concrete to get them into the public consciousness. 

Many small businesses appear to be frightened of PR and marketing and indeed, many claim that their PR submissions are rarely carried by the local media – a fact which discourages them from submitting anything else and so a vicious cycle starts.

Perhaps more to the point, the PR and Marketing industry has woven a natty little shell around itself, making it appear that these are subjects that only the initiated and know about and perform.  This really isn’t the case however, and, with a little knowledge, planning and care of execution, you can make PR and marketing work for you.  The way that I look at this is to roll PR and marketing into ‘Communications’ – another single word which covers a number of angles.  However, if you think about it, both PR and marketing are about communicating with your audience, so the definition makes sense.

In planning any kind communications campaign, there’s one word that will save you a lot of time, brain-ache and frustration.  And that word is: Strategy. 

Strategy is a horrible word.  Yes, it does convey the type of ordered, structured, considered approach that you need to be adopting, but it’s so off-putting as it conjures up something that appears to be far more than it actually is.  In fact, the simpler the strategy, the better. 

Before you even start thinking about external communications, you need to thoroughly audit your current communications methods.  Is your website up-to-date, for example, and does it have everything that you do on it?  Does your company literature reflect your profession and your latest advances?  Are your letterheads showing all of the right details?  It’s all very well attracting people to your company with a PR and marketing campaign, but if they don’t like the quality of what they see at first point of contact, they’ll go elsewhere. 

In order to build your strategy, there are certain questions that you need to ask yourself and your colleagues – the answers to which will guide your every forward-going action. 

1) What am I trying to get people to buy?  2) Why should they buy it / What will owning this product mean to them?

These first two questions will define your USPs (Unique Selling Points) and give you a concrete idea of your exact product – especially useful if you offer consultancy or other services which customers couldn’t load in the back of their cars.  You might be selling a television and the reason that people should buy it is because it comes in red, when the leading competitor only sells in tones of grey.  This will mean that your customers will find that your television fit in with their decor. 

Your high volume colour printer might print 50 more copies per hour (104,000 more copies per working year roughly) than the leading competitor – saving time.  Whatever your product, you’ll have a USP for it and be able to demonstrate how it will make life better for your customers.

3) Who is going to buy it?

This is perhaps one of – if not the most – important questions you need to ask yourself as you construct your strategy.  Are you selling to the public, or to businesses?  You then need to ask yourself a supplementary question in order to most effectively target your potential customers (depending on whether you’re public or B2B facing):

1.  What age range / type of person am I trying to sell to?
2.  What type of business am I trying to sell to?

By knowing your market, you can begin to construct your strategy in the way that would best appeal to them.  For example, you would be unlikely to target the retired person with the latest games console, nor would you target a big multi-national company with an accountancy proposition as this type of business is more than likely to have an in-house financial team who already do this.

Once you know the ‘who’, you can begin to effectively structure and target your communications for maximum efficiency.

With this baseline established (your product, its USPs, and the target audience), you can start to construct the rest of your strategy.

4) How and where are you going to communicate with your audience?

This question is split into three parts:  style, method and location.

Style depends solely on the product, its USPs and the target audience.  Consider mobile phone advertising – the funkiest phones are often marketed at the younger end of the market (with graphics and semantics to match), while the high-end portable office solutions (such as the Blackberry among others) have images and words directly targeted to the upwardly mobile professional.  Only you will know what suits your product best.

Method will again depend on the above criteria and is divided into three separate divisions:  Above the Line (ATL), Below the Line (BTL) and Through the line (TTL).  While these sound awkward, they’re actually fairly simple definitions:

ATL – think of press advertising or billboards – i.e. easily visible and targeted to everyone
BTL – direct mail and anything where you use databases to get something direct to a customer or potential customer e.g. fliers through the post or e-marketing newsletters
TTL – a mixture of the above two – so you might put an advert in the local paper and send something out to your existing database through the mail. 

Not all products will suit all of the approaches, and you might not either for a number of reasons (time and budget being two of the most pressing!).  Pick your milieu carefully and then maximise it.

Location: now it is time to get technical.  You need to consider where your communications (whether ATL or BTL) are going to have the most impact for the money that you’ll spend. 

If you want something highly visible (ATL), look at newspapers/magazines, billboards, radio advertising etc.  If you want to get directly to your potential customers (preferably by name), look at BTL initiatives including fliers, letters, catalogues or e-marketing work.  Your product and target market will largely dictate the way that you structure your campaign.   

If you’re looking at drawing up an ATL campaign, you need to consider the following:

 

• Readership/listener/footfall figures (if using billboards).  Compare all of the players locally and find a happy medium between the highest figures and the price that they’re charging (or that you’re willing to pay) for the privilege of advertising.
• Distribution location.  Make sure that once you’ve placed your communications message, it will be seen by all of the right people.  Do you think that your product will sell best in a publication that’s dropped at a variety of locations for people to pick up, on a billboard in a railway station or on the most popular local radio station?
• Of all the competitors, check out their distribution and the costs that they’re charging to find your happy medium. 
• Quality.  Don’t skimp a few pounds to advertise in or on something that you think is lacking that magical x-factor that will make people pay attention.  If you’re thinking that, your customers will as well.

5) When to communicate

The final point in laying down the basics of a PR and marketing strategy is to consider the ‘when’ of communicating – and this is probably the most simple of all the steps.  Put simply, you don’t want to advertise in May for a Christmas Sale and you don’t want your communication to go out a week before Christmas publicising your December offers.   

Not all communications are time sensitive, but for those that are, you need to make sure that:

 

• You’re early enough to give your customer ample opportunity to start looking for your product but not so early that they forget about it by the time that you want them to buy
• You’re communicating near enough to the event to keep it in their minds, but not so near that it’s been and gone before they’ve seen your message.

It’s a fine balance but one that isn’t too hard to achieve.

With the what, why, who, how, where and when covered, all that is left for you to do is start constructing your own communications plan.  Bearing in mind these questions will help to focus your thoughts on the best way to get your message out into the world. 

Oh and don’t forget  - the Business Partnership was started because local businesses didn’t talk to each other – how’s that for Marketing & PR?