DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

Sales, marketing and PR are all essential elements in business success, but the price of not running all three promotional disciplines together is losing out on business.

Research shows that PR boosts sales and marketing by up to 50%, but 50% of zero sales and marketing is still zero. You need to get them working together to boost business brilliantly.

PR creates the right conditions for great results by raising your profile and your reputation. Marketing gets the benefits across and ensures your offerings are the right combination of benefits and price, plus availability, for your various markets.
Sales clinches the deal, and produces as few barriers as possible to effective sales, especially online.

Trouble is: sales, marketing and PR have become so complex, they have evolved into different disciplines where the people are all trained and accredited separately by different institutions. Each practitioner knows a little about the others, but often views them as competition for the promotional budget.

The sales man will point out that without sales, there is no income, but few salespeople would relish selling or managing an online sales system that wasn't backed up with good marketing communications materials. And most would find their job a lot easier against a background of reputation-enhancing, profile-raising PR on and ofline to drive traffic to the sales channels on and offline.

Now there's online PR, the distinction between PR/marketing/sales is breaking down. It allows you to create content that actually interests people so you can interact directly with your market. And selling online is the perfect example of this. Instead of reeling off the marketing features & benefits of your service or product, we all are having to become publishers with good stories and content to interest our customers.

The expectations that go along with great press coverage are huge - and so they should be, but I hear almost every day about businesses wasting that opportunity. When you know how much effort and luck goes into great coverage, it is really galling to see all those opportunities slide away.

If you think great press coverage is 'free' advertising and that a few press mentions will perform the sales, marketing and PR miracle all on their own, I have some real news for you.

Great news coverage is just the start: it's what you do with it that counts.
Of course you'll often get some sales enquiries sparked by media coverage. But the real difference between smaller and larger businesses' approach to marketing is never losing an opportunity to exploit great coverage in your marketing and sales efforts. That's how you harness the power of PR, marketing and sales to work together.

Research shows that PR boosts sales and marketing by up to 50%, but 50% of zero sales and marketing is still zero.

Just like winning an award, where you can claim to be an award-winning business for life, getting good media coverage allows you a major claim to fame forever. And getting lots of it, and making sure it's recycled, creates a real buzz that builds business success on and offline, provided that the marketing shapes up to the hype and the sales process is effective.

We always advise people to give their PR coverage 'legs'. Make the most of any coverage you get by using it in all your marketing materials. It's so simple to lift a short attributed quote or phrase from the article (like they do in West End shows - "the solution" Joe Smith, The Times).

Why not:

• Put it up on your website
• Use in your email signatures.
• Add it to your social media profile.
• Blog about it.
• Include it in your newsletter masthead or credentials piece.
• Add it to your sales proposals and letters.
• Pop it on the back of your biz card, on a card at reception: anywhere you can.
• Include a link to the article or programme online and when the link breaks because the piece is archived, take the link off, but keep the quote.
• And don't forget to ensure you have on and offline PR coverage.

Online distribution of your news using the right search terms will ensure that the search engine keep sending you targeted new business enquiries long after the initial buzz has settled.

Media relations is only one of hundreds of PR techniques to enable you to get your key messages across to your key target people, but it is a particularly powerful and lasting medium if used to your advantage.

Labels: budgeting for PR, ecommerce., marketing, media relations, online businesses, PR sales and marketing

Chances are you have already made a fair investment of time and money in some aspect of the golden promotional trio: sales, marketing and PR. But you may be struggling to know what's effective?

The standard advice is to monitor what works, then do more of it! And of course there's a lot of truth in the saying: "you can't manage what you haven't measured". But it's easier said than done.

If you ask customers at the point of sale how they heard of you, most people will stop after one answer: probably the most recent thing that brought them to you. Now that is an important clue, but would they have bought if you hadn't come recommended (word of mouth, or in the media, or online)?

Would they have bought if your website was out-of date or the branding wasn't attractive and the brand values consistent?

In most cases the 'buy' decision is a complex balance between:

• Your profile and reputation (PR), plus
• A clear understanding and attraction to what you are selling (marketing and branding) plus
• A good sales process to ensure lots of referrals and to clinch the deal efficiently.

Plenty of people will offer clever tools to monitor what works for you, but you'll only really find out by talking to customers and getting their feedback on all aspects of your sales, marketing and PR.

Plus you'll pick up invaluable feedback and ideas for developing your products and services in response to demand and for new markets.

Labels: marketing, on and offline PR, PR, PR sales and marketing, PR sales and marketing synergy, sales

We work with businesses of all sizes. Over the last 22 years. I've noticed the main difference between the smaller and the larger business is that many small to medium businesses don't think they have a marketing budget, but they always turn out to have spent a fair amount: they just aren't tracking it effectively. Some will flatly deny having a sales or PR budget.

If you're one of them, try adding up all the money and the time you spent in the last 12 months on any of these, you have the makings of your time/money budget:

• the website,
• taking a 'special deal' in a directory or an advertising feature,
• your membership subs & meeting fees plus time for attending networking events, the online directory listings and forums, plus social networking sites,
• writing sales proposals,
• PowerPoint presentations,
• responding to sales enquiries
• encouraging referrals from customers or complementary businesses
• signage for a building and/or vehicle
• maybe some Pay Per Click experiments?
• or a promo item?
• marketing materials - folders, leaflets, brochures?
• a mailing list?
• email fliers
• a newsletter?
• a blog?
• photos,
• videos or pod casts
• local sponsorship in kind?
• stalls at trade fairs
• other sales, marketing, PR promotional activity?

Chances are you have already made a fair investment of time and money in some aspect of the golden promotional trio: sales, marketing and PR. Use that as the baseline, and think how you could improve that spend of time and money in the next financial year.

One of the most valuable things you can do to further your business is to think about how you can find out more about your customers and how they found you, so you can concentrate resources on the things that are proven to work. It's much better to record feedback rather than rely on memory because we often remember more about encounters with emotional content.

Years ago, local shopkeepers in my high street said they had mainly elderly customers and were worried about their reliance on a dying breed of customer. But when they were asked to tick age groups of customers and record comments, it turned out there were at least as many busy mums, who actually spent more, but they hadn't talked as much so they failed to make much impression and weren't remembered.

Labels: budgeting for PR, marketing, on and offline PR, PR, PR sales and marketing, PR sales and marketing synergy, sales