Thought Leadership – 10-cents on the Dollar, Try Public Relations
Thought Leadership – 10-cents on the Dollar, Try Public Relations
So if you count yourself among Richard Florida's "creative class," and your firm provides creative marketing services to brands, it's time to amp up your own marketing program. While your competition is in disarray it is the perfect time to enhance your thought leadership position and provide that compelling reason for your clients to retain, or maintain, your services. Public relations offers the perfect solution, and for something less than 10-cents on the dollar of typical marketing efforts.
How so, you say? Public relations can be the most efficient marketing solution for creative businesses, which cannot afford or find it ineffective to advertise their wares. A carefully designed PR campaign will deliver key message points (sub-text: your sales message) to influential audiences (read prospective clients) with editorial credibility, and at a fraction (really, about ten cents on the dollar) of the cost of traditional marketing/advertising campaigns.
After defining your companies’ distinctive point of view (read competitive advantage), PR can deliver valuable editorial content for both emerging companies as well as established firms. The key to success lies in effectively mining one's intellectual property, finding the gems that make your voice distinctive, then packaging that content in a newsworthy manner and presenting it to the “right” journalists. Packaging in the PR sense means wrapping your insights around timely, topical issues that have the media’s attention. So what might be timely now…?
For example, suppose you are a corporate strategist who specializes in tracking and predicting consumer trends, whose impact spells life or death for client brands? In this climate of consumer shutdown, marketers eagerly seek every ounce of intelligence available as they seek to devise ways to maintain consumer loyalty and attract new customers. In this client’s case, understanding the culture of recession, how changing consumer behavior impacts brands and what marketers might do to attract customers, becomes central to the public relations message. Define and package that message and the media should respond.
If your PR firm does their homework, organizes the message and locates the appropriate journalists and editors, respond they will. In the case, the trend forecaster was quoted in a BusinessWeek cover story entitled, “Surviving the Storm,” in a U.S. News & World Report column, “With Economy Down, Consumers Nest,” in The Wall Street Journal column, “Marketers Take a Softer Tack to Reach Uneasy Consumers,” in the Street.com,” Vigilante Consumerism Emerges,” in Women’s Wear Daily, “Where in the World are the Luxury Shoppers,” reaching a total audience of 7,536,199 in the span of 30 days. And, beyond the direct reach of these publications, coverage in nearly 100 related blogs extended the message reach significantly. No client could hope to advertise in these media in a single month, let alone a year, and all for the monthly retainer of less than 10 cents on the dollar value.
Certainly, not every business can integrate itself so directly into today’s headlines, but playing upon the major trends of the day provides an working perspective and effective approach to making PR work in the creative services arena.
While the client happily basks in the reflected glow of their recent publicity, now is the time to consider the next step – how to use those articles and columns as marketing tools. But that is best left for another day.
Thought Leadership 10cents on the Dollar Try Public Relations - To learn more about this author, visit Len Stein's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
Times are tough and likely to get tougher for creative marketers who toil for major brands. As leading advertisers continue to adjust (read slash) their budgets in the face of client cutbacks (though marketing gurus urge maintaining or increased spending in recessions) creative vendors of all stripes will face pass-along cutbacks, unless... they can make themselves indispensable.
So if you count yourself among Richard Florida's "creative class," and your firm provides creative marketing services to brands, it's time to amp up your own marketing program. While your competition is in disarray it is the perfect time to enhance your thought leadership position and provide that compelling reason for your clients to retain, or maintain, your services. Public relations offers the perfect solution, and for something less than 10-cents on the dollar of typical marketing efforts.
How so, you say? Public relations can be the most efficient marketing solution for creative businesses, which cannot afford or find it ineffective to advertise their wares. A carefully designed PR campaign will deliver key message points (sub-text: your sales message) to influential audiences (read prospective clients) with editorial credibility, and at a fraction (really, about ten cents on the dollar) of the cost of traditional marketing/advertising campaigns.
After defining your companies’ distinctive point of view (read competitive advantage), PR can deliver valuable editorial content for both emerging companies as well as established firms. The key to success lies in effectively mining one's intellectual property, finding the gems that make your voice distinctive, then packaging that content in a newsworthy manner and presenting it to the “right” journalists. Packaging in the PR sense means wrapping your insights around timely, topical issues that have the media’s attention. So what might be timely now…?
For example, suppose you are a corporate strategist who specializes in tracking and predicting consumer trends, whose impact spells life or death for client brands? In this climate of consumer shutdown, marketers eagerly seek every ounce of intelligence available as they seek to devise ways to maintain consumer loyalty and attract new customers. In this client’s case, understanding the culture of recession, how changing consumer behavior impacts brands and what marketers might do to attract customers, becomes central to the public relations message. Define and package that message and the media should respond.
If your PR firm does their homework, organizes the message and locates the appropriate journalists and editors, respond they will. In the case, the trend forecaster was quoted in a BusinessWeek cover story entitled, “Surviving the Storm,” in a U.S. News & World Report column, “With Economy Down, Consumers Nest,” in The Wall Street Journal column, “Marketers Take a Softer Tack to Reach Uneasy Consumers,” in the Street.com,” Vigilante Consumerism Emerges,” in Women’s Wear Daily, “Where in the World are the Luxury Shoppers,” reaching a total audience of 7,536,199 in the span of 30 days. And, beyond the direct reach of these publications, coverage in nearly 100 related blogs extended the message reach significantly. No client could hope to advertise in these media in a single month, let alone a year, and all for the monthly retainer of less than 10 cents on the dollar value.
Certainly, not every business can integrate itself so directly into today’s headlines, but playing upon the major trends of the day provides an working perspective and effective approach to making PR work in the creative services arena.
While the client happily basks in the reflected glow of their recent publicity, now is the time to consider the next step – how to use those articles and columns as marketing tools. But that is best left for another day.
Thought Leadership 10cents on the Dollar Try Public Relations - To learn more about this author, visit Len Stein's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
 | |
 |
No article feedback found. |
| |
Leave Your Feedback |
 | |
| |||
Dianne CramptonDianne Crampton is an executive leadership coach, team culture consultant, author and president of TIGERS Success Series, Inc. Dianne has been helping CEO's and Executives connect their employees to their core values and goals for over 20 years using the trademarked TIGERS team culture process, which stands for trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success. To download a free white paper on behaviors that build strong teams and behaviors that will predictably tear them down go here. Dianne's contribution to the 2010 Pfeiffer Consulting Journal (an imprint of John Wiley and Sons Publishers) entitled TIGERS Hearted Teams is available in November 2009. Her new book TIGERS Among Us: 5 Winning Business Team Cultures And Why, Three Creeks Publishing will release in March 2010. To receive publishing discounts, subscribe to the free TigerTracks Newsletter here. - Visit Dianne Crampton's Website |
|||
|
To learn more about the Evan Elite Author Program please contact us. | |||
 | |
|  |
Subscribe to Len's articles
 | |
|
|  |
 | |
|
| |
 | |||||||
|
 | ||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
|
| ||
 |
| Have you written articles that would be of value to entrepreneurs? Become an expert on our site by publishing them! Expose yourself to a wide audience, drive more traffic to your website and get more sales! Click Here for details. |
|
|
 |
| Modeling the Masters: Learn the true secrets behind Walt Disney's business success factors & grow your company! Video produced by Phanta Media |
|
|
 |
"Learn straight from Evan how you can Make a Full Time Income (And More) from a Website"
Click Here To Learn More |
|
|
|
|
Get advice & tips from famous business owners, new articles by entrepreneur experts, my latest website updates, & special sneak peaks at what's to come!
|
|
|
 Confidentiality Agreement Biography Business Coaching How Search Engines Work Mirror Marketing |
|
 | ||
 |
Top 50 Business Plans
Top Business Plan Blogs | |
 |
Top 50 Social Media Blogs
Top 50 Social Media Blogs | |
| ||
 | ||||
| ||||
|
| ||||
| ||||
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
Email us your ideas on how to make our website more valuable! Thank you Sharon from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for your suggestions to make the newsletter look like the website and profile younger entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez and Sean Combs!
|
|
|
