How to Talk To Reporters

My first career was in politics, and my first big job was on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., working for Congressman Norm Mineta. My first day on the job, I had a mandatory meeting with the press secretary who explained – in no uncertain terms – that “it was all about the Congressman,” and that if my name ended up in the news, I would be fired. The message was harsh, but it made sense. I learned to appreciate the importance of PR in politics, and I managed to keep my name out of the news throughout my tenure in Washington.

Rayburn House Office Building

In the late 1990’s, I needed a career change, moved to San Francisco, and eventually landed a job in the technology practice of PR-giant Burson Marsteller. I was thrilled about the prospect of working with start-up technology firms, but I was still intimidated about talking to reporters.

As a result, I focused a lot of my creativity on writing brilliant email pitches hoping reporters would call me instead of me having to call them. As you can guess, this wasn’t a strategy for long-term success (especially after the dot-com bubble burst and reporters lost their patience with the PR industry!).

After quite a bit of bumbling, I started to figure it out. Trust me, I still get nervous when I’m pitching an important story for a client, but these best practices help me stay calm and on script:

Before you pick up the phone:

• Do your research. Identify the right reporter at the right media outlet for your pitch.
• Send the reporter a brief, carefully-tailored pitch explaining your news and the context for your story, i.e., why it is important, timely, and relevant.
• Give the reporter time to respond to your email (24-48 hours is plenty of time in today’s lightning-fast news cycles.)
• Write out a brief script for yourself so you stay on message when you’re lucky enough to catch a reporter live on the phone.
  

  Ring, Ring

When you do happen to catch a reporter or editor:

• FIRST! Ask if the individual is on deadline. Don’t plunge into your pitch without first checking to make sure the person has the time to listen.
• Stick to your message.
• Keep it brief.
• Listen! One of the biggest benefits of PR is that it gives you a chance to talk directly people who influence your marketplace. If you listen closely, you’ll gather valuable feedback you can leverage to focus your message and improve your next pitch.
• When answering a reporter’s questions, keep it short, sweet and to the point.
• If the reporter asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, say so, and tell the reporter you’ll follow up. Then follow up ASAP.
• Keep track of your conversations on your press list (an Excel document is fine). Over time, you’ll learn the reporters’ preferences, and you’ll be able to build valuable profiles that will help you reach the right person fast.
• Take a final scan what the reporters on your list have written BEFORE you start making contact. Nothing is more embarrassing than learning that the reporter just covered the topic you’re pitching.

Contacting reporters and editors is intimidating, but most reporters and editors, when pressed, will admit that they are “grateful for every good pitch they get.”

A good pitch is something to be reckoned with

PR offers an impressive array of tools – press releases, media alerts, contributed articles, op-eds, press conferences, speaking engagements, etc. – to help you get your story across. But the pitch, to borrow from Douglas Adams, is the “the most massively useful thing” you can have.

Your pitch is your opening salvo. You send your pitch to reporters, editors, and other media influencers in hopes of gaining attention, winning respect, and building life-long relationships for your business.

A Good Pitch

Good Pitch

A good pitch tells a story. It begins with a compelling subject line, there are characters to develop, it draws people in, and it leaves them wanting more.

A good pitch should include a relevant statistic, testimonial, case study, or some other newsy hook that gives your story greater relevance.

The pitch must also be timely, and it must carry a tone of authority, but without being pompous or arrogant.

And the pitch needs to be brief. Really brief.

So, a good pitch is a timely, succinct, well-written, newsworthy message that breaks through the noise to gain the reporter’s attention and convinces her to respond to you instead of the hundreds of other people vying for her attention.

Phew! It’s no wonder there are so many bad pitches out there. But the truth is that most pitches aren’t bad. Rather, they are tired, and boring, and sad.

Don’t panic.

The deep thought is that you shouldn’t expect to break through the first time you reach out to a reporter. People seem to forget that reporters are people, too, and the goal is not to get your story written NOW – the goal is to initiate a relationship that becomes mutually valuable over time. You provide content and context to fuel the reporter’s writing to help her tell a greater story in which your business plays a role.

And that is the beauty of public relations.

PR is not a race to the finish; it’s a courtship. You start pitching, and eventually, you will get a response. The response will contain helpful nuggets of information that you can use to improve your next pitch. And then you take a deep breath, and you try again. Very soon, you will get results.

The process itself becomes valuable in that it leverages the knowledge of the people who influence your market to generate useful feedback. You will soon learn how to leverage the feedback to help you focus your message, hone your business model, and supercharge your brand.

That’s it. That’s all there is.

What is your PR strategy?

Public relations (PR) is a two-way conversation involving a series of carefully orchestrated tactics that enable an organization to present its image to the public via people with influence over the public.

These “influencers” include a variety of potential targets, such as reporters, editors, bloggers, and other individuals who are in a position to help you tell your story to an active audience of listeners, readers, or viewers.

As a business owner, your job is to build your brand and grow your customer base. PR is a great tool to help you achieve this goal. If you can engage an influencer — we’ll imagine an old-fashioned reporter in this case — in a conversation and convince him to mention you or “cover” your news – you will win legitimizing exposure that you can leverage to energize your marketing efforts and stimulate word-of-mouth communications about your business.

The reporter’s objective, meanwhile, is to tell an honest story about something newsworthy happening in the world. The reporter’s goals are to engage an audience and drive market share. Just like you, news organizations have business goals to achieve. The reporter’s job is delicate and challenging, and he simply isn’t interested in receiving anything that isn’t news.

Organizations are famous for spamming reporters without taking the time to determine whether a story is newsworthy and for failing to do the research to make sure they’re contacting the right reporter at the right time with the right information. As a result, reporters are so inundated that even the best stories struggle to get through.

Social media, meanwhile, has opened up new paths to news with friends and connections working hard to curate stories for their fans and followers to read.

PR is indeed a wonderful tool. You can use it to sway opinions, build legitimacy, energize sales, and stimulate word-of-mouth communications about your business. But it doesn’t happen overnight.

You need a strategy.

This series of blog posts will give you an introduction to PR along with some of the tools, tips, and tactics you need to create a strategic PR plan to supercharge your business.

Marketing Requires a Constant Drumbeat of Activity

“Measure, measure, measure, Aha!”

That was Eric Rodenbeck’s message at last Friday’s Creative Mornings/SF event. Creative Mornings is a monthly breakfast lecture series for creative types, and Eric, the lecturer, is one of the founders of Stamen Design, a design and technology studio in San Francisco. Eric and his team design and build maps and data visualizations for a wide variety of clients. Check out this article if you want to know more about Stamen’s work.

Eric showed us time lapse data visuals illustrating a number of things, including: the accumulation of near-earth satellites being discovered in our solar system; the start of trading on a typical day on NASDAQ; and the Astronomic Microlensing “signature” NASA scientists are using to find planets. He also showed some of the crazy, oddball scenes that are part of artist John Rafman’s Google Street View project.

Eric spoke about what happens when you just leave the telescope on. You measure, measure, measure, and inevitably the “aha” moment arrives.

Eric said that Stamen’s work illustrates, “A way of looking at the patterns without going so crazy you have to drill a hole in your head to let the pressure out.”

Indeed, as Rafman’s Google Street project so vibrantly illustrates, if you keep the camera’s rolling, something interesting will happen.

The flip side, of course, is that you’ve got to have a pattern to measure – a regular drumbeat of activity –if you ever hope to achieve your aha epiphany.

Marketing requires a constant drumbeat of activity.

Social media has given small business owners countless ways to measure marketing activity. Never before have we had so many detailed indicators — opens, forwards, opt outs, retweets, mentions, likes, hits, and Google Analytics  — to tell us whether or not our marketing efforts are working.

The challenge, however, is having the patience to execute a well-designed marketing plan combined with faith that your marketing efforts will pay off.

Unfortunately entrepreneurs often get frustrated because they aren’t seeing the bottom line impact of their marketing efforts as quickly as they would like, and they bail on an otherwise beautifully conceived marketing plan. Alternatively, business picks up and the entrepreneurs abandon their marketing efforts because they’re “just too busy to market.” When they finally get back to marketing,  they’ve undermined their efforts by missing the beat. No constant drumbeat, no regular patterns, no aha moment.

 

Have good faith in your efforts.

My friend, The Sexy Grammarian, observed that the marketing she’s doing today will pay off two years from now. That’s not only a brilliant insight, it also points to the realization that you must execute your marketing plan with a certain amount of good faith if you ever hope to reap your rewards.

Here’s the good news, bad news, and bottom line for entrepreneurs.

Marketing isn’t easy. And while the social media frontier is immensely promising, it is also chaotic, largely unexplored, and constantly changing.

The bad news is that you might not figure it out your ideal marketing formula right away, but the good news is that you will get it right eventually if you keep trying and have faith in your efforts. And the bottom line is that you won’t know whether you are getting it right if you don’t keep track your efforts and observe the patterns.

Thanks again to CreativeMornings/SF, Eric Rodenbeck, Parisoma, and Apigee for a hosting terrific event.

What are the expectations of your ideal target customer?

I’ve been having discussions with my friend and colleague, the Sexy Grammarian, about target market. It’s a difficult construct for small business owners to embrace.

Sexy G believes it’s a scarcity issue. I agree. Entrepreneurs looking for business don’t want to eliminate anyone as a potential target. We need the money, and we’ll take it wherever we can get it.

This often seems like a good strategy in the short-term when you are concerned with making ends meet, but it’s unlikely to help you achieve your long-term business goals, and it’s not the best strategy if you have a vision of greatness you wish to achieve for your business.

Recently I stopped talking to my clients about target market. It misses the point. Instead, I ask my clients to describe their ideal target customer.

Ay there’s the rub…

Here’s why:

Your brand is your promise. Your promise is one of your most valuable business assets. It anchors you and secures your position in an ever-changing marketplace. It also gets people talking.

And here’s the rub: When you make a promise, you don’t make a promise to a group of people (unless you’re a politician). You make a promise to an individual; a real, living person. You make a promise to the busy professional who buys lunch in your café and expects a quality experience; you make a promise to the avid runner who buys shoes in your store based on your recommendation; you make a promise to the small business owner who hires your firm to build a website that will lead to more business. These people have expectations, they are paying you with their hard-earned cash, and they expect value in return. They expect you to deliver.

As a business owner, it’s your job to meet customer expectations by satisfying one person at a time.

Eventually, these satisfied people begin having conversations about you. The conversations – online and offline – revolve around whether or not you are keeping your promise.

Word-of-mouth marketing is and has always been the most effective marketing tool for small businesses.

It is therefore vitally important for you to reach your ideal customers – the customers who not only appreciate the value you offer but who also will engage enthusiastically in conversations with other people like themselves about how well you keep your promise. (It’s also important to get these people talking and sharing the right messages – but that’s another part of the story.)

Your brand’s value is determined by the conversations people are having about you in the marketplace. Real people. Real conversations. One conversation at a time.

Marketing Mix: What tactics must you embrace to compete in your industry?

Marketing mix refers to the combination of tactics a business uses to reach its target customers. It’s the winning recipe a business creates to grow and thrive.

There are three questions you should examine when constructing the marketing mix for your business:

1. What are the things you love to do?
2. What marketing activities are standard for your industry or profession?
3. What are the expectations of your target market?

Yesterday’s blog took a deeper look at how to incorporate the things you love to do. The basic premise is that you will be more successful engaging in marketing activities if you are passionate about them. The corollary I mentioned was that you shouldn’t be spending inordinate amounts of time on tactics you don’t enjoy. Right?

Well, there are exceptions.

There are marketing tactics that are (more or less) required for every particular industry or profession, whether you enjoy them or not.

Restaurants should advertise. Insurance agents should network. People who run communications firms should consider public speaking. And if you have a mobile food truck, you should be tweeting every day to let people know how and where to find you.

Ken Enjoys Public Speaking

There are two good ways to determine what makes sense for your industry or profession.

First, take a look at what your competitors are doing. Start by taking into account your direct competitors – the folks you run into at local Chamber of Commerce meetings. How are they marketing themselves? Look at their websites, blogs, press releases, etc. Next, examine what the major brand names in your industry are doing to market. These companies are successful for a reason. Study their brand messages and their marketing tactics, and see if you can emulate these successful brands on a smaller scale.

Second, investigate some of the trade associations that represent members of your industry or profession. Most trade associations offer market research, marketing guides, workshops, or mentoring programs to help people succeed at marketing. Trade associations are interested in the health of the industry as a whole, so most of them provide resources to help individual members compete. A rising tide lifts all boats, after all.

(Check out Associations Unlimited if you haven’t yet discovered the trade association that’s right for you. You can access the Associations Unlimited database through your local library.)

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the expectations of your target market.

“We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh

Your Marketing Mix: What are the things you love to do?

Marketing mix refers to the combination of tactics a business uses to reach its target customers.

The first question to ask when selecting your marketing mix – your winning marketing recipe – is what are the things you love to do?

Many people are tweeting and blogging today because they feel they have to. Everyone else is doing it, so I need to, too. Right?

Wrong. If you are spending time doing something that doesn’t feel right, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. There’s a nice interview with marketing guru Seth Godin where he explains (nine minutes into the interview) emphatically why he doesn’t Tweet. It’s not him.

Step one, therefore, is to focus on the things you love doing and can imagine yourself doing enthusiastically to spread the word about your business. If you love to meet people, network. If you enjoy public speaking, teach a workshop. If you are a natural writer, try blogging. If you know how to communicate a story, experiment with public relations. If you are one of the rare people who can say something compelling in 140 characters, please tweet.

So ask yourself, what do I love to do? What do I want to spend my time doing to grow my business?

Write if you want to

Similarly, you should ask yourself whether there are things you are doing that you don’t enjoy. Can you eliminate those things from your marketing mix and put greater focus on the things you love?

The next few blog entries will help you determine an appropriate marketing mix for your business.

What is Your Marketing Mix?

Winning Recipe

Marketing mix refers to the combination of tactics a business uses to reach its target customers. It’s the winning recipe a business creates to grow and thrive.

Most businesses lurch and stumble into a marketing mix without ever realizing that they ultimately have control over the recipe. They forget that marketing is largely a creative endeavor.

Whether you are brand new in business or you are running a spectacularly successful organization, it always makes sense to step back and examine your marketing mix – especially with new social media tools popping up every day.

How do you get started?

There are three questions I ask small business owners to consider when they are creating their marketing mix:

1. What are the things you love to do?
2. What marketing activities are standard for your industry or profession?
3. What are the expectations of your target market?

Tomorrow, I’ll delve deeper into each of these questions. Meantime, here’s a quote from business author, speaker, and consultant David Maister, which sums it up well:

“Done right, a planned mix of marketing activities aimed at a consistent audience can make you irresistibly attractive, and lead the target audience to the right conclusion – that it is with you they want to have a relationship.” David H. Maister, Managing The Professional Service Firm

Interview with Janeen Smith, MS, MFT, Referral Queen

I recently interviewed Janeen Smith, MS, MFT about what makes a good business referral. Janeen is a San Francisco-based psychotherapist who helps people create the relationships and lives they want through psychotherapy, counseling, and education.

Janeen recently started a new BNI group, which is where we met. I am not a BNI member – I was a guest of Mike, a mutual friend and member of Janeen’s BNI group.

BNI stands for Business Networking International and markets itself as the world’s largest business networking organization. BNI’s motto is “givers gain.”

Janeen is indeed a natural referrer. Before we officially started the interview, Janeen was already thinking about people I needed to meet.

Janeen Smith, Referral Queen

KS: Is it ok if I turn the tape recorder on?

JS: I just had a flash. I’m listening to you talk about marketing and listening to what you do, and seeing you light up about it. As I was thinking about you, and I started thinking about my dear friend, and I started imagining you two as partners in a firm, and then I come back and I think, I would love for you to meet my friend. That’s how I roll in the referral world.

KS: Please introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your practice.

JS: I’m a psychotherapist, consultant, and trainer. I have about 20 years in the field. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. My business is its peak when I’m seeing individuals, adults, adolescents, kids, couples, and families. I do specialize in some scary things: substance abuse, mental health, and domestic violence.

I believe people can change. I believe they have to want to. And I am good helping people want to change.

I also love to sit with people who are having trouble keeping connections. That’s it in a nutshell.

KS: You described yourself to me in an e-mail as the referral queen. How did you come by that title?

JS: I like to see everybody prosper. I do believe that if we work together, there’s enough for all of us, so I’m always thinking about who’s a good partner. Maybe it started in my Yenta days. I wanted to help people find love.

KS: What makes a good referral?

JS: In the past five weeks I’ve made three connections for Mike, a friend in BNI. I started by sitting down with Mike and getting to learn about him. He brought his daughter, and I got to see the human side of him.

I introduced Mike to my creative guy, Todd, and they’ve already started doing business together.

As the referral or relationship queen, I just wanted them to meet and connect. I know that if I put my name behind somebody that means something.

KS: I’ve always hesitated to join a BNI group, because it feels like you will be forced to make referrals to everyone in the group.

JS: You don’t have to refer, which is important for me.

Who I have my name behind matters. People don’t have to be perfect, but I want to know if people do something wrong, do they get it? Do they want to change? If they want to really change, that’s ok. If they don’t. My name.

KS: You are currently looking for new members for your BNI group. What kind of members are you seeking?

JS: There’s a list of what makes BNI groups successful. What makes it successful is how much money we move through the group. Some professions are critical to have. We need lawyers, mortgage brokers, construction, handyperson, creatives, a marketing guy, bankers, and a CPA.

This group really fits for me, so I want it to fit for people who enter it. I want them to get it that I buy that I can be a sales and marketing force for you if I like who you are and what you do. I’m happy to do that.

I really do believe that there’s enough and that having a group of people that you feel really good about that you can refer is what helps my clients grow. And it’s community. In a city it’s hard to have community.

I really think there’s enough for everyone.

Small Businesses Beware Daily-Deals Offers (like Groupon)

The San Francisco Chronicle today reported that Yelp is backing away from a daily-deal service like Groupon.

“Rather than offer more and more deals of inherently declining quality to more and more folks over time, we want to make sure we’re only providing good, quality opportunities,” Vince Sollitto, vice president of corporate communications, said. “While we think the deals business is a good one, it has never been a core focus of our offering.”

Facebook made a similar decision last week, and according to Bloomberg, “the online daily-deals industry revenue dropped 7 percent in July from the month before.”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: these deals are often bad for small businesses.

Beware the spin.

Unfortunately, the offer of “valuable new customers guaranteed” and is hard for many small business owners to resist.

I met with a very successful business owner yesterday who is being inundated by promotions from daily-deal marketing companies. The business owner is frustrated. He’s been told by many people in his industry to avoid these offers, but the idea of becoming “the talk of the town,” is still tempting.

Even restaurants, one of the key targets of these daily deal strategies, don’t always benefit. One restaurateur from San Francisco’s Japantown told me that people who responded to his Groupon offer would calculate to the penny the amount of food they could order to take full advantage of the deal. And these people were not big tippers.

What’s the problem?

First of all, all new customers are not your “valuable customers.” The valuable customers Groupon is talking about are Groupon’s target customers. If they seem to match up with your target customers, well then you might consider trying a daily-deal promotion. Otherwise, tread very carefully.

Second, you’ve worked for years to establish your reputation and build your clientele. You’ve carefully planned and defended your price point. I’m not sure if you want to risk alienating your clientele by cutting your prices for brand new customers who don’t care about or honor your brand reputation.

Third, Groupon claims that “we get them to your business, and you bring them back again and again.”

Easier said than done.

The Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) holds that a small number of customers accounts for the majority of your income. Do you really want to risk alienating the 20% of your customers who patronize your business year after year through good times and bad for a short-term boost?

That said, daily-deals offers do work for many businesses. Daily deals can help drive traffic to new businesses, they can give struggling businesses a much-needed boost, and they are well-suited for asset-based businesses with lower variable costs, like Mission Cliffs, that have the capacity to manage the traffic and don’t incur extra expenses from a drastic increase in business.

Do the math.

Yipit, a company that “aggregates and recommends the best daily deals in your city” (seriously?), provides a calculator to help businesses determine whether Groupon-like deals are good for them.

Win over your new customers.

There’s an article on TechCrunch with great advice for winning over daily-deal customers if you do decide to take the plunge. The author, Vinicius Vacanti, recommends that you:

• Surprise and delight-daily deal customers.
• Offer an incentive for them to come back.
• Collect their contact information.
• Discount just the first session.

Remember, daily deals are just another marketing tactic.

The bottom line is that daily-deals specials are just another marketing tactic, and they should be considered in the context of your overall marketing plan.

Contact us today of you need help with your overall marketing plan that may or may not include daily-deals offers. We can help.