DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

There's nothing like speaking to customers and nearly customers about what works for them and what doesn't when it comes to your products or services. Often it's the least obvious thing that has put someone off, or an unclear explanation that failed to get a key benefit across.

There's a great post on this by Adele Revella on her Buyer Persona blog here: http://ow.ly/gY5J. The piece shows how to go beyond categorising people into marketing groups and personas. It shows how to delve behind sales knock-backs to gain great insight that could substantially benefit your business.

It reinforces what David Meerman Scott says in his seminal book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, about conversations with customers being crucial to doing good business.

I think Adele's post gives some great examples of how to do just that

I'm grateful to fellow PR Boutiques International member, Wendy Marx http://www.wendymarxpr.com for pointing me towards a link posted by Stephanie Tilton http://twitter.com/stephanietilton which led me to the Buyer Persona blog piece.

Labels: Adele Revella, Buyer Persona, David Meerman Scott, marketing, PR Boutiques International, Stephanie Tilton, The New Rules of Marketing and PR

One of the best explanations of how online PR and marketing works is "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" by David Meerman Scott. Having been online and in PR for a long time, I'd pieced together a lot of the points he makes. But he was the one that pulled it all together and made sense of it - and a fair number of folk agree judging by the popularity of his book.

Online PR lets you to build a brand through making great connections: with bloggers and key influencers, which can include online media. Meerman Scott notes that online is where marketing and PR meet, and in my book DIY PR, I made a point of highlighting that small businesses don't separate PR, marketing and sales. It's all publicity or promotion.

That's why most small business owners will 'get' online PR and marketing. They are unencumbered by the separate training routes for PR and marketing and can happily get stuck into results-driven online promotion. Meerman Scott shows it's not rocket science. But it does need application and effort. With every major purchasing decision involving a Google search, it's worth getting your online PR and marketing right.

I keep seeing a lot of search engine optimisation people claiming to do PR, and some of the text examples are so optimized they are a really clunky read.The whole point about being online is to establish conversations and relationships directly with customers and anyone else you want to talk to.

You don't do that by throwing optimised content at them.

You do write brilliantly interesting or useful material that compels people to recommend you and you place it very well. Then wait for the comments.

PR folk have been identifying audiences to speak to and adapting content for them for years, so have a head start, but anyone with a passion for the subject will give them a close run for their money if they crack the placement angles.

Labels: budgeting for PR, David Meerman Scott, online PR, small businesses, The New Rules of Marketing and PR

As Simon Allen here at Shopfitter says, "Google loves blogs" and certainly the posts on blogs appear a lot faster online than many website updates. That means you'll get results much faster with blogs if you want more web traffic on your site.

If you want to know how to blog really effectively, online PR guru, *David Meerman Scott's Twitter page put up a link yesterday to a great set of tips about professional blogging. It's written by a professional blogger and self-confessed geek called Yehuda Berlinger. I reckon he outlines a pretty clear road from start-up to star of the blogosphere and I will be working to apply a lot of his tips, including having a massive cringe at all the blogs I set up in my initial experimental phase ("not professional" says Berlinger. I'm just glad he refers to a defunct blog himself, so I can stop beating myself up, but you don't have to fall into the same trap!).

You can track the effect of all your efforts on your website visitor statistics with the excellent free Google Analytics tools. You can even get free Google lessons and qualifications in all of this wizard stuff to enable you to boost your web traffic and increase your confidence at handling it all. Good on Google! And Berlinger for sharing his blogging tips.

David is the author of the excellent "New Rules of Marketing and PR" book which outlines how to reach buyers online directly. Highly recommended (and no, I don't get anything for that!).

Labels: blogging, David Meerman Scott, Google Analytics, online marketing, online PR, SEO, Yehuda Berlinger