Does Advertising Work?

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It is said that advertising is the last refuge of those who are not creative. That seems odd since advertising solutions: iconic images and catchphrase strap lines are surely the pinnacle of promotional creativity?

But small budgets can't stretch to that level of advertising. Even when you have strong design and creativity, you need heavily repeated inserts or screenings to gain attention. Even the best ads are hard to predict in terms of effects. They say most people don't even register the first three times an advert runs in most publications. Most small businesses stop at one insertion, thereby guaranteeing failure unless they are very lucky.

But there are some situations that are resistant to clever PR alternatives. For example, the need to shift a pile of beds to make way for new stock or generate a very fast cash-flow injection. Unless Mary Queen of Scots really did sleep in them all, this cries out for advertising in the local media on and offline. Plus some freebie posts on suitable online sites.

Don't forget to use those vouchers Google gives away for £30 of free AdWords. I got mine when I registered my business on Google Maps, but I've seen the offer fall out of business magazines. Every little helps as long as you have a good landing page on your website to convert interest from the ad into sales. And a well-written and optimised site that anticipates the information a buyer might need, and delivers that with a clear call to action on every page. It's always worth testing the form of words that works for your business online. By then, you'll be well beyond Google's £30 freebie, but at least they offer free analytic tools and helpful hints.

I always find that going back to the basics keeps me focussed. You'll save a lot of money and effort if you think about who you need to reach and whether you can reach them any other way before getting out the advertising chequebook.

The most powerful question you can ask yourself is: How do I.....? Then go for a walk, or have a shower - whatever activity is good for you when you need a great idea.

Would special offer leaflet drops be most effective? What about an in-store event with treats and discounts for existing customers? If they are suitable beds, what about ringing guest houses and hotels with a bulk buy deal to renew all their beds (and take away the old ones to minimise the hassle factor). A deal on matching bedside tables and wardrobes might clinch it?

This is the fourth in a series of posts re-visiting the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's founder's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity by Penny Haywood. The 30 techniques are a mix of digital and offline sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines (sales, marketing and PR) to effectively boost a business. As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months. The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

Your feedback is most welcome and may be included (with proper attribution) in the forthcoming revised edition of DIY PR.

Brochures - do you need them?

This is the third in a series of posts re-visiting the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's founder's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity. The 30 techniques are a mix of sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines to effectively boost a business. As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months. The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

Your feedback is most welcome and may be included (with proper attribution) in the forthcoming revised edition of DIY PR.

Despite the flexibility and immediacy of websites and PDF files, there comes a time when many a business owner wonders if it's about time they produced a brochure, or some other sort of impressive printed output, to make the enterprise appear more established. The thought usually hits them when they have just seen a competitors' particularly impressive publication.

There's no doubt that a beautifully printed job is an impressive object, especially if is exquisitely designed and produced on heavy duty coated paper, with a cover finished with a seductively silky surface coating, possibly highlighted with gloss spot varnish.

However, no matter how impressive, you need to think long and hard about your intended recipients. The chances are that your top potential clients are trying to run a paperless office and your work of art will go straight into the bin. Or worse: they will take one look and wonder how much of their fees are going towards fancy brochures. Or be shocked at how little care you are displaying for the environment.

There are practical issues. You often need to specify a lot of brochures before the unit cost comes down, but printed materials go out of date so quickly: sometimes before they come back from the printer.

Are brochures just expensive sops to the business owner's ego? Surely luxury brands are an exception?

I would suggest that nowdays, there are cleverer ways for luxury brands to spend their promotional budget. Especially when posh brochures risk trashing the company's environmental credentials. Maybe a bigger spend on design, branding or packaging? An interactive website? Or a really amazing and memorable business card? I don't think people see a business card as a massive waste of resources and the humble card is often the most immediate and frequently used tool.

If you really feel you must leave something decent sitting on prospective clients' desks, consider a good looking pre-printed folder to take well-designed loose-leaf inserts that you can update and run off onto good quality paper. Then you can select a range of product or service information sheets plus relevant case studies and licensed media coverage reprints to impress that particular client. Effectively, every folder becomes a bespoke brochure, with minimal waste. If you use sustainable paper and inks then the environmental impact is reduced and you can add a claim to that effect to collect a small green plus point.

To print or not to print is a good example of 'big picture' PR thinking designed to keep an eye out for all the behaviors and decisions that can impact on a company's reputation.

Ambassadors in Business Boost Brand and Referrals

This is the start of a series of posts, re-visiting the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's MD's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity by Penny Haywood (pub: Batsford 1998). They are a mix of sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines to effectively boost a business.

As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months. The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

The techniques can be used for most sizes of business and organisations.

At PHPR, we mainly work with business-to-business clients. We need to ensure that clients get the best possible PR, sales and marketing advice, so we have evolved a list of several hundred techniques to ensure we can cover most bases in most industry sectors.

These 30 techniques are more than enough to get started on. We are kicking off with one of the least used: Ambassadors.

Ambassadors - some people call them brand ambassadors - have the potential to bring great benefits to any business that thrives on recommendations: and that is most of them!

1) Ambassadors

Ambassadors are common for countries and NGOs, but companies rarely use them.

I believe ambassadors can particularly benefit small businesses and they should be a more widespread phenomenon. Why?
Being asked to be an ambassador is flattering to the most influential people in your field, which is rarely a bad thing.

Having a good ambassador aligns your business with the best people.

Ambassadors are eminently quotable and add kudos to your business

An ambassador programme leverages word of mouth recommendations from people whose opinion is respected.

Having ambassadors gets you closer to people who matter.

What's not to like about ambassadors?

If you have good contacts with prominent individuals associated with your field, could they become your ambassadors? Whether they are from business, industry, commerce, professional bodies, societies, associations or universities, local councils or governing bodies, potential ambassadors are people who are in a position to make influential recommendations. They might be customers, old colleagues, friends, fellow committee members in professional bodies or contacts from the past. Or a former mentor

Even if you can't immediately think of anyone, just remember that most people like helping others and hold the thought in the back of your mind that you are seeking an ambassador. Once you acknowledge that you are looking for one, a suitable person is much more likely to appear. That's because we tend to see what we are looking for.

Most successful people work hard, but also admit to being lucky. But you can give your luck a helping hand

If you visualise being successful and attracting a helpful ambassador, your subconscious doesn't know the difference between imagining and reality, so it will start drawing you towards things that help you achieve your goals. You won't find an ambassador just by imagining one, but visualising having an ambassador will make you feel more hopeful and energised and boost your chances of finding one.

Why not list finding ambassadors on your PR plan?

Ambassadors lend an air of credibility to your organisation. They are not colleagues or contacts on referral programmes, recommending you for some sort of reward or quid pro quo.

Referrals are more likely to be generated by equals. Ambassadors will actively promote your business because they believe in you and what you are trying to do. They like to see younger up and coming business people develop. And it's a two-way street. You will keep them fresh and up-to-date with new technology and the latest thinking in your sphere. And take them to interesting places to swap notes on the industry and your latest ideas.

I would also suggest that you periodically give your ambassador something that money can't buy easily.

Maybe you know a skilled artist whose style reflects your ambassador's own taste?

Or you have written a book you can dedicate to them?

Something special hand-crafted with their name that you have carefully judged is to their taste?

Or a bottle of their favourite and difficult to obtain single malt or wine?

Hard to obtain tickets to something they will love?

All of these things are worth more than a more expensive present and they force you to really pay attention to your ambassador's preferences: something that will make them feel special and appreciated.

Ambassadors may also be regarded by many as opinion formers and they may in fact be both. The difference is, opinion formers are useful, but are more remote than ambassadors. You may seek to influence opinion-formers, but it is unlikely that an opinion-former will actively promote your business in the way an ambassador does.

If they do make excellent comments about you or your business, your opinion-former has just re-classified him or herself as a potential ambassador.




The word-art for this post was created at www.wordle.net.

Blogging or lifestreaming for business?

There’s been a bit of a stushi over the last month with a key figure in the blogosphere, Steve Rubel, announcing he was quitting blogging for lifestreaming (posting snippets on micro media like Twitter).

I’m not ready to stop blogging, but I do love http://Twitter.com. I’ve found some of the more influential (rated by numbers of followers) tweeters on PR using http://wefollow.com and its tag search facility. You can use it to find good tweeters on any subject you want.

Interestingly, the tweeter with most followers (heading for 3 million at the time of writing) http://twitter.com/aplusk is not one of the many celebrity tweeters, but an entrepreneur. Although I guess he’s become a celebrity with that following.

By following the top PR tweeters, I’ve picked up great snippets of information with little effort as the 140 character posts are so succinct. And there’s a lot less spam on the direct messaging than my emails carry. That may change, but I can always turn direct messages off, because they give me control over the information I choose to receive.

Of course, many tweeters punctuate their nuggets of gold with trivia that only their best mate, their mum and partner would be interested in, and even that might be stretching it a bit. But you can stop following them, or hang in there for the odd nugget: the choice is yours. And the best build up a following by being interesting.

Stephen Fry’s tweets are often fascinating. But few can write like that. Or have the magnetic persona to rise above the trivial.

A persona largely forged by offline media.

It’s the interaction of the on and offline that is so powerful because we can make so much more impact by using different channels. Even when PR was largely offline, I wrote the DIY PR book (pub. Batsford 1998, now out of print but second hand copies are on Amazon if you want offline PR info) outlining 30 low cost ways to communicate, encouraging people to use a mix to meet personal information preferences.

The beauty of online media is that you can link them all up (services like tweetdeck (http://tweetdeck.com/beta/) allow you to manage posts to Twitter and Face-book and you can put your twit-stream up on your Face Book for example. Posterous (http://posterous.com/) enables you to post to all your favourite media sites in one go. Their site looks ridiculously cool and I’m starting to play with that.

I’m sure there will be lots of other interesting tools coming down the line and we’ll all be off onto the next big thing. But they are all tools allowing you to connect with people that are interested in your key topics and interests. Hopefully you are working at the things you love. That makes the publicity and communicating that passion very easy. Now you can interact with those people, if they want to, but more importantly, how they want to.

Steve Rubel is probably right in the long run. More people are accessing info via phones with relatively titchy screens so the trend is for succinct comms. Twitter is good training for that.

But meanwhile, there’s plenty of people searching on Google and landing on web sites and blogs because the extended content they carry lends itself to being searched. And most business tweets carry a link to a website of blog anyway.

I think of online media like a menu. A tweet is the starter to whet the appetite, full media sites like websites, blogs and Face Book are the main courses with lots of rich content on the plate. The proof of the pudding is the interaction you stimulate and whether you can translate that into sales for your business without putting people off with hard sell tactics.

That’s why I think PR and journalism skills will be in the online media mix long-term. Because we were trained to get stories past much fiercer gatekeepers than any online registration process. We were trained to make stories interesting enough for editors select for their audience and invest in the paper, ink, or bandwidth to carry the story. Nowadays anyone can be a publisher, but the acid test is whether they build an audience.

See you at http://twitter.com/PennyHaywood

Find Tweeters worth Following on Twitter with wefollow

It's a good idea to keep an eye out on social media when you're in PR. Quite often you can spot trends or potential problems. Early reaction to a trend can catch great media coverage. And early reaction to a problem brewing can often be enough to resolve the issue.

You don't have to spend a fortune on monitoring your business reputation online. Ferret out comment mentioning your business name or key search terms on websites, forums and in the news using Google plus their news alerts service.

But finding the most influential tweeters on Twitter was a bit of a hit or miss using apps like Twollow. Not any longer. Have just discovered wefollow on Twitter and I like it.

It is a directory and you can use it to find entrepreneurs, celebs etc.

But use it on a keyword search and it will dig out the people who are tweeting in your sector. The results come back ranking Tweeters numerically according to the number of followers they have attracted, which gives a fair indication of their influence.

And helps you see where you are in the pecking order too. You do have to register to be placed, so it's not totally comprehensive, but I suspect most people wanting to be seen as a heavyweight in a subject area will be seriously tempted to sign up once their following builds.