Marketing Series Article Doing the Blitz Help the news media build your market presence! by Dick Barnes, Principal, The Freeland Group Managers put a lot of emphasis on advertising as a means of letting potential customers know about their firms and what they have to offer. Advertising is a great way to make connections with other business people who are shopping for the services and products you have available, and it has considerably more advantages then disadvantages over other communications methods. But print advertising is not the only way to reach your publics. If you aren’t using your local print news media to help reach your market, it’s like you’re staying in the shallow end of the pool. Of course the shallow end always seems to be the safest…but there’s a lot to be gained by diving into the murky depths at the opposite side. In business communications and promotion what we’re talking about here is the concept of building publicity for your firm. Like advertising, publicity has serious advantages. But its disadvantages often dissuade managers from using this approach. With a print advertisement, you have complete control. You control the message, text, and illustrations. You control when and where the ad will appear. You can tell customers what you can do for them, what your products and prices are, and make a sales pitch. You pay for ads in order to do these things and maintain this control. Publicity, on the other hand, is basically free. But we can’t control if, when, or where the publicity event will occur. We can’t use it to directly sell our company or our products. We don’t even have control over the message or text…but can we at least have influence? Most business people don’t realize how much influence they could exert if they would learn to “help” the media instead of simply trying to create publicity for their firm’s sake. This is where the “art” of publicity plays the starring role, and where a manager who learns this art can reap the rewards. Learning to help your local media in exchange for publicity begins with having an understanding of what media needs from local business people. A good way to start this process is to pick up a selection of the local newspapers in your community. These should include daily papers, business journals, and weekly or monthly papers. Most metropolitan areas have a good number of each of these. Browse through these publications and pull the pages with stories about businesses and business people. Now lay them all out and study them. Some obvious patterns should emerge from this exercise. The first thing you may note is that “glamour” businesses get the most media attention. In the recent past these have included high tech firms, dotcoms, and cutting edge healthcare or healthcare research. This is simply a result of the public’s preoccupation with such issues. You may also note that firms get a lot of publicity when they're in trouble. An obvious example is the Enron scandal, and just as obviously that’s not the type of publicity we seek for our companies. But it does account for a good number of articles and stories. The third category of business articles generally includes stories about companies that have done something relating to current events or impacting the society around them. These are normally positive news stories, as opposed to negative stories about firms who have done wrong. Reporters and editors are always on the lookout for these types of stories…and no others. They really have no interest in any story that doesn’t peak the interest of their readers. The same goes for reporters at your local TV and Radio stations. This category of story, however, is the hardest for reporters to find. They need the assistance of business people to bring such stories to light. This has created a system of mutual benefit that business people should make an effort to become involved in. To get involved we have to seek out the stories that will impact our communities and interest readers. Then we look carefully at what is happening in our company and figure out how to tie that into those stories. And not just any story will do…we need to find what reporters call “the story behind the story.” Here's an example. Let’s imagine the XYZ company, a local wholesaler, is expanding and opening their second location in a major metropolitan area. Wholesale distributors don’t normally fit into the “glamour” category, and hopefully XYZ doesn’t fit into the “troubled” category. So how do they get noticed? One angle, or story, would be simply that they are expanding and opening a new location. This is news, but let’s be honest…it’s boring news. A well-written Press Release might get them a one column, three paragraph story buried on page six of the business section. The manager of this firm needs to find the “story behind the story.” He needs to help his local newspapers bring this event to life. He goes out and takes a good look at the area where the new warehouse is going in. He finds it’s on the edge of a region suffering from urban blight. The area’s rundown, businesses have moved out, and rents have hit rock bottom. As it turns out, that accounts for why his company chose their location…low rents nearby have made their new digs more affordable. He decides to have Press Releases written that tell about the need to bring business into the region. The Release should talk about past events and how the locale has suffered. Then the storywriter will talk about the manager’s firm and his commitment to resurrecting this neighborhood by bringing in business and creating employment. This manager can be quoted as to how he hopes his company will be only the first of many to make a difference. Now he has created the “story behind the story” and might grab the interest of the reporters and editors who review the Press Releases coming across their desks. This is the type of thing they want to write about. A number of them will contact the manager and want an in-depth interview. This is how a company becomes featured on the front page of the business section. But it doesn’t stop there. Next this manager needs to expand on the story until he is interviewed on a Radio or TV business news program. The more this story is repeated, the greater the number of new clients who might be waiting for the firm to open their doors. But how does he prepare for the interview with the newspaper reporters? How does he get onto local Radio or TV and make certain he's ready for that event? Next month we’ll try and answer these questions. Until then, think about how your firm fits into your community and what your “story behind the story” might be? It’s there…you just have to look for it through the eyes of a reporter. (next article in series) |
