Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 23—February 28th, 2006)

A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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Public Relations (Part 1):  Keys to Making PR Serve Sales InYour B2B Marketing Program

I can hardly count the number of B2B companies I’ve encountered who know they are wasting the $5K monthly retainer they’re paying some fluffy PR firm to hype their business every month, and not getting anything back from it in measurable sales response.

And the first thing I do when I bring on a new client is fire the PR firm who’s been drilling the company for this needless expense. This gives us an immediate $5K a month we can use for honest marketing, like a direct mail test, or a sales support activity.

It’s a shame that so many companies waste money on PR programs that don’t get results that translate to bigger sales, but it doesn’t have to be this way. PR efforts to tap the “free media” of favorable coverage in trade publications and business media can be a valuable addition to your marketing program, if you handle each PR project appropriately and effectively, and if you place PR into its proper role in your marketing program.

This week, I’ll talk about the role of PR in your B2B marketing program, how trade and industry news is made, what kinds of PR announcements contribute to increasing your sales, and how thinking like a trade publication editor helps you increase your chances of getting exposure in trade publications, Web sites, and other “free media.”

What’s Wrong With PR

Irrelevancy to sales, and lack of control are two big reasons why I think PR is one of the most mis-used, and least effective, forms of marketing for B2B companies. Yes, it is true that favorable product reviews and trade media coverage can lead to sales and profitable new business contacts, but what really happens is that because of bad PR practices, companies are spending good money with PR firms and ad agencies and getting very little back from it.

The problem of ineffective public relations programs is also caused by inexperienced marketing managers, who mistakenly believe that paying a PR firm to hype their company is running a marketing program. I saw this happen frequently in start-ups during the dot-com bubble. PR is also a marketing money sinkhole when it becomes an ego stroke for the company’s senior management, who think that getting their names in print somehow improves their company’s sales response.

What’s Good About PR

This is not to say that PR shouldn’t be a part of your marketing program, or that it can’t generate sales and new business for your company. The issue is that PR has been given far too much weight and credit for its actual contribution to sales in most B2B marketing programs.

The right way to view PR is to think of it as a continuous, low-level effort aimed at getting your new products announced and reviewed, and getting your company’s product or service in front of the relevant issues and topics in your industry. If you do it right, you’ll get coverage, and some of this coverage may help your company—but don’t expect too much.

As a marketing method, PR plays a secondary role to sales support, direct mail, Internet marketing, trade shows, and other methods that are more effective at generating sales response—i.e., sales leads and inquiries. Your company’s PR program should operate in support of these other, primary marketing efforts.

Control is the main reason why ads, mailings and other methods should be the primary focus of your marketing program, not PR. This is a very important point: As a marketing professional, you can control the content, timing, and execution of an ad placement, a mailing, or a trade show. With PR, you’re at the mercy of trade publication editors and writers, who may or may not decide to cover your company or product. Even if they do, you also have no control over what they’ll say about you.

Your company will get PR whether you want it or not: Despite its drawbacks, and even if your company has decided not to have an ongoing PR program, one day an event will occur that affects your company, and the media will come knocking on your door: A product recall, a lawsuit or adverse court decision affecting your company, or any other major event involving your company, either negative or positive, will spark media inquiries. You will then have no choice but to respond, and the truth and clarity of your initial response may mean the difference between a crisis that can be defused, or one that spirals out of control. A company that knows how to manage its media exposure through an effective PR response can neutralize a potentially negative publicity situation, or exploit a favorable PR opportunity.

How Trade and Industry News is Made: Three Scenarios

Let’s talk first about the three ways news gets made in your industry:

1.) By press release: Editors and writers at trade publications pick out stories to write from the daily torrent of press releases they receive from companies in your industry;

2.) By story pitch: Editors and writers write articles from “story pitches:” Ideas that are pitched to them by PR firm reps, and marketing people like you and me;

3.) By the writer’s initiative: Editors and writers (usually) write stories based on the issues and trends they see other writers writing about, and (sometimes) they write articles based on original ideas they came up with on their own.

Scenarios 1.) and 2.) above rely upon your execution: Your ability to target these trade publication editors and writers with press releases and story pitches. Scenario 3.)—the writer’s initiative—is beyond your control. However, if you execute well in the first two cases, you’ll develop a good enough reputation with your media contacts to become one of their go-to people, which helps you get favorable publicity for your company.

First Principles of Successful PR for Your Company

Execution of your company’s (or client’s) ongoing PR program should be guided by three principles:

• To send out press releases and announcements only when your company has something to talk about;

• To think of how your press release or announcement will be received by the writers or editors on the other side of the exchange;

• To make a press announcement only if the announcement sells your product, or if it can contribute to sales

As simple and obvious as this advice may seem, the first two points above are the two biggest complaints of editors at trade publications, magazines, newspapers, and other media sources concerning company PR efforts: Nothing travels from an editor’s desk to their wastebasket faster than an irrelevant press release that shouldn’t have been sent to them in the first place.

Will Your News Contribute to Sales? Deciding What Makes News in Your Company

It’s your job as a marketing manager or agency pro to decide what company developments are newsworthy enough to turn into press releases and story idea pitches for the business and trade media contacts in your industry. Inept public relations programs happen whenever this decision is delegated to your ad agency, PR firm, or marketing consultant, and where anything then becomes news to justify the PR firm’s monthly retainer.

The key is to discriminate between the company events that are worthy of aggressive PR promotion as news in your industry, those that should be treated in a more routine way, and those that shouldn’t be announced at all.

The mistake is treating every event  in your company as an event that requires your PR reps to hit the phones, to press your media contacts for coverage. This is a waste of your marketing dollars, and worse yet, it wears out your welcome with trade editors and writers.

An event should only be announced as news by your company if the final article that’s written from your release could plausibly lead to sales of your product. This means inquiries from readers of the article, contacts from potential corporate accounts or business partners, or, in some cases, direct sales.

Once you’ve made this initial newsworthiness decision, you should then consider whether your PR announcement should be handled as a major announcement, or as a less-important, secondary announcement.

Major News Events

If you can envision that your announcement for an event, after being written up in a trade magazine, business publication, broadcast outlet, Web site, or newspaper, would be compelling enough to sell your company’s product or service directly from the article, you’ve got a major news event that deserves a strong, dedicated PR effort.

Examples of news events that can lead to sales directly from media coverage are:

Major new product launches: Favorable reviews of new products in trade publications can generate many sales directly from the article;

Major product upgrades and improvements: Likewise, a major upgrade to a product line can generate sales from trade and business media coverage;

New market entries: After initial market testing has been done, a PR program that runs parallel to the launch of your product or service in a new market can also lead to sales and prospect inquiries from readers who hear about your product for the first time.

Secondary (Minor) News Events

Other events in your company may be newsworthy, but, when covered by the media, may not lead to sales in and of themselves. For example, if you judge that a news announcement, when run in connection with other marketing activities—print advertising, direct mailings, and direct selling—would have a positive, indirect influence only when your prospect sees it running alongside any of these paid marketing efforts, this is an announcement that should be made in a more routine way, with less intensity and cost than a major news event.

Examples of secondary news announcements, where media coverage would only influence sales when helped along by your paid marketing efforts, include:

New promotions, price changes, and minor product updates: Many of the press releases announcing these kinds of secondary news events wind up as two and three-column inch blurbs in the “New Product News” sections at the back of trade and industry publications, and may spark readers to contact your company for further information. Because they usually happen more frequently in your company than major news events, they may well account for the majority of your day-to-day PR efforts. If your promotion, price change, or update is significant, or is noteworthy in some other way, your PR rep can also follow up with a phone call to the publication to jog the editor’s attention;

Noteworthy new product applications: New, novel, or unique uses of your product in your industry make interesting stories in trade publications. Make sure your press release has some good quotes from this new application’s users, along with product photos and other information helpful to editors writing the story;

Major new account sales: Issuing a press release whenever your company closes a major sale, or lands a big, well-known customer, is another secondary PR opportunity, because news of your company landing a big new account with a major company in your field may attract notice from other large prospects in your industry. You can sometimes get the larger, more well-known company to issue their own press release on this announcement to their media contacts. If the other company is big and famous enough, this may lead to even wider media coverage for your company in general business publications;

New survey, report, or white paper: If it addresses a hot industry issue or market trend, a news release reporting on the results of a market survey conducted by your company (or research by an outside industry research firm paid for by your company) can be a sure-fire news opportunity. For example, information obtained by surveying your customers for their opinions on an important industry trend, or polling them on their major applications for your product, can be turned into a press release if it generates interesting and newsworthy results. If you’re working in a technology-related field, intriguing reports or white papers written by your company’s research staff on the technology or processes underlying your company’s products are always well-received by the trade media, and help to position your company as a thought leader and innovator in its field.

News that Doesn’t Lead to Sales

The following news events inside your company do not generate sales, and should not be a part of your company’s PR program:

Executive promotions: Press releases accompanied by head shots of executives who’ve been recently hired or promoted may make it into the back pages of a trade publication, but these announcements don’t increase your company’s sales;

Charity involvement or sponsorship: Companies often issue press releases touting corporate sponsorship or participation in charity and fund-raising events. Announcements of these events don’t increase sales, and sending press releases out on them is a luxury your company can’t afford.

Judge the importance of every news event in your company and assess whether or not its publication would realistically lead to, or influence, sales for your company. If not, you should kill the announcement and focus on your paid marketing efforts until you can develop a promotable news event.

Think of the Person Who Will Be Reading Your Press Release

One of the quickest ways to lose the attention of trade publication editors and writers in your industry is to do something that wastes their time, slows them down, or otherwise irritates them. Some PR firms are notoriously disrespectful of media people in these ways, and any contact that shows a lack of consideration for an editor, writer, or other media contact makes it difficult to win them back once they’ve turned against your company.

Put yourself in the place of an editor or writer at a major trade publication, magazine, or newspaper: In your average workday, you receive dozens of press releases. It’s clear to you that many of these press releases have been sent to you just because your name is on a PR firm’s media mailing list, not in consideration of any relevance to the areas you cover at your publication. Moreover, as you’re trying to finish a piece for your publication’s deadline this afternoon, you keep getting phone calls and e-mails from PR people asking if you got their press releases.

If you were this editor, wouldn’t you appreciate a company and PR firm that didn’t waste your time by bombarding you with irrelevant press releases? Wouldn’t you want to talk more with PR reps and companies who had press releases and story ideas that would help you in your coverage of the industry?

Much of this boils down to common sense, but you’ll be surprised how looking at your news announcements from the other guy’s perspective can improve your press coverage.

Do You Have a Story?

Here are some useful guidelines for developing and distributing news announcements for your company’s PR programs, as seen from the perspective of writers and editors at trade publications and other media outlets:

Will they be interested? Your first step is deciding who on your media list should get the press release of your news announcement, and who shouldn’t. Look at your press release, then look at each editor or other contact on your list: Would your story be interesting to them? Is it something you think they’d be interested in covering for their readers? If not, then sending your press release to this person is like sending them junk mail—don’t do it;

Have you filled in the context of your story? Editors are always looking for news announcements that key in to important business issues in your field, such as hot new industry trends, emerging technologies, productivity, or government regulation of your industry. Your news announcement always gets more attention if you can tie some aspect of it to a major issue everyone’s talking about in your industry. For example, if there is a proposed EPA air pollution regulation that has your industry up in arms, and if your company’s new product feature can help a manufacturer improve their monitoring or reduce plant emissions, then your new product announcement should be wrapped around this issue. Think of the top issues and trends that everyone’s talking about in your industry, and see if your company’s news announcement could be credibly linked to one of these issues;

Have you given  them all the details they need to write their story? If you’ve met these first two guidelines, think about everything else the editor or writer needs to write their story, and give it to them: Product spec sheets in Adobe Acrobat .PDF format, company history and background, high-resolution product photos on your Web site. Most important, make it easy for the writer or editor to contact you, by putting your personal company contact info on all PR materials.

How to Think Like an Editor

Put yourself in the place of an editor or a writer for a trade or business publication in your field. Every week, they receive hundreds of press releases from companies just like yours, touting new product announcements, minor and major product upgrades, and other corporate and industry news, both large and small.

While there may be many exciting details about your new product announcement, product upgrade, new joint venture or other company news event, they can’t all be instantaneously understood by an editor, writer, or reporter at the publication contacted by your PR firm.

To enhance the editor’s understanding of your news announcement, distill your announcement into a single fact that is compelling enough for the editor who reads your press release to decide to cover your story, and then give the editor the additional facts that they will need to make the story interesting to their readers.

Questions editors ask: When an editor scans your press release for the first time, they put it through their own mental screening process, asking the following questions:

“Who are these guys? Have I heard of this company before?” Editors are very status-conscious. News announcements from big, high-profile companies grab their eye more than releases from small and mid-sized ones. If you’re running PR for a smaller company, this automatically moves your announcement at the bottom of their stack, unless the editor has been seeing a steady stream of relevant, interesting press releases coming from your company. Of course, you need to be doing this anyway, and this helps get your company noticed more often;

“Does this have anything to do with anything I’m working on right now?” After scanning the headline and lead paragraph of your release, every editor runs it past their own mental list of the stories they’re working on for the next issue of their publication. If they’re writing a story on Web security for the banking industry, and you’re announcing a new Web-based secure account transaction system, you’re in luck. Otherwise, your release goes back to the bottom of the stack, or into the back pages of the publication’s “New Products and Services” section as a three-paragraph filler item. A skilled PR firm with reps who are in constant contact with the top editors and writers in your field will often know who’s working on what, and can figuratively walk a press release right into the staff writer’s story, if it fits;

“Hmmmm. [trend or issue] is a hot topic with my readers. Maybe I’ll look into this some more.” Editors and writers in any industry act like a herd, and always follow the same new trends, issues and developments. For example, if there’s a string of major oil refinery fires, then, one after another, oil industry publications will write stories on refinery fire prevention systems and related safety issues. The high-tech press is also well known for talking up certain technologies, communications protocols, and programming languages in lockstep, and then moving on just as quickly to the next hot new technology. Your press release has an excellent chance of getting the editor’s attention if you know the hot trends in your field, and if you can credibly link your announcement to one of those trends;

For example, if a big issue in your field, like a dramatic increase in foreign manufacturers’ imports putting pressure on domestic companies to upgrade their manufacturing efficiency, leading them to buy systems such as those made by your company, your press release should lead with this issue, instead of a being just another plain-Jane new product announcement. However, this linkage must be credible: Editors and writers have finely-tuned “BS detectors,” and they can always spot a company that is using a trend to push a product that doesn’t belong there;

“_________ handles this. I’ll pass it along to him.” One of the primary functions of editors in a publication is to route press releases to the writers who cover certain technologies, business lines, and markets in the industry covered by the publication. You can save a step here by making sure your press release goes directly to the person at the publication who writes about the area covered by your product. During their follow-up calls or e-mails to the publication, your PR rep can locate the right person at the publication who should be receiving your press releases;

“Everyone knows that ________ . How is what you’re doing any different than this?” Working for a leading trade publication exposes editors and writers to everything that goes on in their industry—good, bad, and ugly. This exposure often causes editors to form cynical opinions on industry issues and trends, based on the new events they’ve already covered up close in the past. If a company recently failed in a major market push with a product or technology somewhat similar to yours, the editor may well write off your product announcement in this light. You must anticipate the common objections, both fair and unfair, that editors and writers may have to your news announcements, and get these responses out there in the press release, and positioned so they can rationally counteract the prejudices of editors and writers at these publications.

If your press release contains an important single fact, or lead, that survives the editor’s mental gauntlet—and especially if you can link your news announcement to a hot trend or issue in your field—you’ll put your press release ahead of the many others that land on the editor’s desk or e-mail every day.

Next week, we’ll cover techniques for outlining and writing effective press releases for your B2B news announcements . . .

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@realmarkets.net

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Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), is president of GAA (www.realmarkets.net), a sales and business development consulting firm, and is the author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, the master study guide for the Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Builder, and Certification (MSA/B/C) programs.

For more information on The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, available to BMA members at a special discount, link to:

http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/book.html

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Test, Train, and Build Your B2B Marketing Skills for Better Sales Success: BMA Announces New Assessment, Training, and Certification for B2B Marketing Managers

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