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Grow Your Business with Public Relations 101

This week meet our guest blogger Denny Shleifer, the President & CEO of Shleifer Marketing Communications, Inc. 

A Public Relations 101 Lesson Plan for Business Owners

Why prospect for business? It very seldom works. Instead, you should market your business using the tested and proven methods of public relations and advertising. Every business must consider becoming its own public relations manager and seek help and advice when needed from a marketing consultant. Here are some helpful tips:

Press Releases & Interviews

Develop a list of editors and reporters who cover the business beat. Write a press release with their needs in mind. Email information with your phone number, photo and an explanation of why you think your business is newsworthy.

Magazine & Trade Journal Articles

Contact editors and reporters at the publications that your clients and prospects read. Inquire about writing an article. Suggest some topics, but remain open to editor-requested topics. Never hype yourself in the article, but ask that a one or two sentence biography appear at the conclusion of the article.

Public Speeches & Lectures

Business and civic groups often use outside speakers. Contact program directors to discuss delivering a speech.

Professional & Trade Association Meetings

It’s good to visit as many as you can. A major benefit will come when you become active in one or more at the board level.

Formal & Informal Networking

Get involved in a networking group that strives to communicate with others whose contacts are helpful to you and your company. Sharing information is crucial in developing new leads.

Letters of Referral & Recommendations

Ask a client to write a letter to you that describes what your business achieved for him/her. With the clients’ permission, reproduce and circulate the letter. You can get referrals from clients by asking them to write to or call a prospect. Comments from a satisfied customer will carry clout in the business world.

Social Media

This is a topic that gets a ton of media attention. If your business is not using it to show your expertise, you’re missing a major opportunity. Don’t believe it’s the end-all to be-all solution, but using Facebook, Twitter and other networks will offer other ways to showcase your expertise.

Mass E-Mailings

Non-personalized e-mailing can be somewhat effective. The key is to match an appropriate list to an effective marketing piece. Make sure you include a response device.

Promotion

Gain exposure through joint promotion with another organization. Strategic alliances will benefit in so many ways. Contribute to a non-profit group and reap the benefits of publicity. Offer an appropriate premium or incentive item to remind customers of your presence.

Public Relations/Advertising/Web/SEO counsel

Seek advice. Trained professionals can get you the exposure you need.

 
Denny Shleifer is the President & CEO of Shleifer Marketing Communications, Inc. The Portland based Shleifer is a diverse marketing professional with over 30 years experience specializing in business-to-business marketing communications. The former Emmy award winning journalist also works as a freelance producer for CBS News.



 

 

A Case Study: Cricket Wireless, The Wallet Drop

 “Of our tools, we see radio as the one that is closest to the end of the brand funnel. It can drive people to the store to take action.” - Deborah Jourdan, Sr. Director Consumer Marketing at Cricket Communications

Vision: Cricket Wireless saw an opportunity in social media but knew that motivating large participation in local campaigns using only web-based tools can be difficult. Their idea was to combine the strengths of social media with the activating reach of radio. The starting goal was to build community on the top social media sites: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Idea: Cricket created a campaign called the Wallet Drop. Its purpose was to build the company’s level of social media interaction and drive traffic into retail locations. The two-week promotion focused on a number of Cricket Wireless branded wallets that contained prizes, including a free phone and cash prizes from $1 to a $5,000 grand prize.

During the promotion, the wallets were dropped at secret locations. People who followed social media feeds got clues to the locations. Radio was added to take the “hope” out of participation. Cricket enlisted local radio’s trusted personalities to talk about the giveaways on the air and to post the clues on their own Facebook and Twitter feeds. 

Result: The campaign was a huge success, with increasing followers on Facebook and Twitter and strong foot traffic in retail locations. As a second achievement, they accomplished high levels of online chatter about Cricket, with followers reposting information from Cricket’s pages to their own. Deborah Jourdan, Sr. Director of Consumer Marketing at Cricket says, “We feel the number of people talking about our brand is the most important measure of success.” The Wallet Drop campaign with radio tie-ins was launched in eight markets. According to Jourdan, the campaign has become a local marketing best practice for the company. 

Download Full Case Study Here

Source: Arbitron 2012 Dive Deeper Series 

 

 

Using Radio Ads Bring Direct Results to Your Online Traffic

Jamie O'Donnell interviews Jeff Pollack, Media Strategist for Radioactive Media, on the exhibitor floor at SES San Francisco 2010. Jeff emphasizes how a Radio Ad can bring Direct Results to the doorstep of any website.

 

Ad Blocks and Page Blocks Rising, but You Can't Block Radio

The revenue model for the internet is trembling. New blocking softwares are being installed  voluntarily by consumers to keep them away from social media sites. People have found that blocking access to certain sites like Facebook, YouTube, and My Space makes their life more productive and improves their ability to focus.  Progams such as: Leechblock, Freedom and Anti-Social are just three of the new applications that allow computer users to voluntarily block social media sites that are sucking the time and life right out of them.

Granted, good old fashioned self control should be enough, but in an age of constant distraction social media sites have become a physical addiciton. We are literally wiring our brains with the addictive pattern of distracting ourselves. Sites such as Facebook has also been linked to anxiety and depression.

In addition to blocking social media sites, specific programs like Ad Blocker  and Ad Block Plus   are also getting popular. These platforms block any ads that appear on any webpage, including social media pages. Advertising on social media platforms may not render the results or have the sustainability their proponets think.

On the other hand, Radio has never been blocked. Sure, you can turn the switch off or change station but studies reveal that people listen and accept advertiser messages. Radio doesn't cause depression or nurture obsessive patterns.  As a matter of fact, it actually builds skills like active listening, focus and imagnination.

Connection with today's customer is more than just a media strategy is it a wholesome approach to engagement in everything you do.

 

 

Superpower. Turbo Charged. Word-of-Mouth.

"Word of Mouth is the sound of new ideas - conversations, stories and shared experiences that sort passing fads from lasting trends." - DJ Virginia Prescott, NHPR

The human being, behind the radio mic, is an authentic force of superpower word of mouth: from one to many. The one-to-many ratio doesn't lessen the personal impact, it just magnifies the shared experience. Businesses and advertisers get lazy when they start thinking that word-of-facebook and word-of-twitter is more powerful than word-of-personality. It's the difference between a live person, versus a screen of words. Take for instance Target's campaign with DJ's across the United States. It took an otherwise stagnant flyer and animated it into a part of life, and a part of the community. Radio is the local superpower of word-of-mouth. Get creative. Think beyond the screen.

Radio Creative Plus Internet Drives Traffic Galore!

 

 

 

Volvo Drives Traffic to their Website with Radio.
Full Article at http://www.scba.com

“Everybody has done that – clicked ‘send’ and realized they sent an email to someone who shouldn’t see it.  It’s real life and we can all relate to it. We used real stories to relate to people and to drive them to our website.” John Maloney, Vice President of Communications for Volvo North America,  talked about the Southern California Volvo Dealers’ radio campaign which was selected “Best Campaign of the Month” for October 2006 by the SCBA GSM Council.

“We really wanted something that would tie our radio to the dealer association websites and get people more engaged in the product, in the brand, in the programs, in the events," said Linda Gangeri, Manager of National Advertising for Volvo. "We wanted to drive people to the website. We challenged the agency’s creative team to find stories that were most relevant to people’s lives and they could relate to. Then we pause in the middle of the story. People have to go to the website to hear the end of it

The result was powerful creative that married radio and the Internet so successfully that it not only sold the company’s toughest dealer groups on doing the campaign, but, Gangeri noted, “We’re able to monitor those stats so we knew traffic to those websites went up.”

The Volvo spots feature suspenseful real life stories, told in the front end of a one-minute spot. They hook the listener because the narrator fades out just before the resolution of a problem, and an announcer observes that, “the thing about a good story, especially a life story … you want it to keep going. Drive the safest car you can – Volvo, for life.” He then invites the listener to hear the rest of the story at the dealers’ website and completes the spot with current offers on Volvo’s XC 90, S 40 and V 50 models.

According to Marlowe, part of the stimulus was that “everyone says that radio is a great medium. There you are in a captive spot driving on the 405, reflecting on all kinds of things. Very few people can claim to leverage that.”

Maloney points out that some of the spots have real life humor. “They’re real,” he says. “They’re real people telling their real stories but it doesn’t just have to be humorous. We can do the very serious, dealing with our, ‘safety first’ theme or the more lighthearted, pop culture kind of spots. So it’s a very flexible platform for the kind of stories we want to tell.”

“We’ve been surprised at the durability of the spots,” says Marlowe. “We had a sort of metric whereby if it falls 50% we’d pull it, but even though we have rerun the spots, we haven’t reached that point yet.”

Gangeri says, “Our customers hear the spots and they love to tell us their stories. They love to talk to us. You can’t get somebody that’s in the market and has the propensity to buy a Volvo, or a current Volvo owner who doesn’t want to spend time with you. It’s a therapeutic thing. They want to tell you their stories. Because of the brand equity and the core identity people have with a brand like Volvo, they feel safer. They feel better,” she adds.

According to Maloney, “There are a lot of other car brands out there, good car brands and the differentiation between Volvo and others – beside just the safety thing, you could argue that buying some of our German competitors cars might be considered selfish. Volvo is a selfless purchase. Yes, it’s about the driver, but also about who’s in the car. It’s a shared experience vs. just a driver going fast in a car. That’s a very singular experience. That’s the other reason people like to tell us those stories and why the campaign resonates. Everyone’s been there. It humanizes the experience.”

Google Audio Ad Award: Goes to RADIO PLUS.

A recent study conducted by Google Audio Ads and online retailer Gifts.com showed that radio had a significant impact on online consumer behavior. The 5 week Audio Ads campaign not only generated greater online awareness and higher website visitation, but it increased engagement and conversion metrics  as well.

Over the course of the campaign, radio markets displayed:

• 12% higher search activity on ad-related keywords
• 23% higher site visitation
• 16% higher page views/visit
• 34% higher conversion rates

Radio supported stronger consumer investment as the campaign progressed.

The percentage growth in engagement and conversion metrics consistently trended upwards in radio markets throughout the course of the 5 week campaign.

Radio PLUS internet = now that's REALLY SMART!

Source: Google.com/adwords/audioads March 20, 2008

Votes are in for Radio: Hearing a Message is Most Effective.

National Campaign leaders use Radio to successfully sway voters to hear their messages effectively. Radio is one of their favorite tools for winning support. Voters can easily be swayed when the right message is aired on the right station. The emotional impact of listening to a message on Radio trumps TV and Internet.

“We got people who gave us verbatim answers right out of our Radio commercials. That tells me without a doubt that our radio message is penetrating, ” said Bonnie Garcia, a California assemblywoman representing Eastern Riverside and all of Imperial County. Bonnie is possibly the only politician in the U.S. to use radio on a 52-week basis for five consecutive years!

In a digital era where people are running to the internet for news, Radio’s auditory component is making more of an impact. Political campaigns, being some of the most emotional news in our system, benefit greatly from Radio’s listener loyalty.

“One of the most overlooked uses of Radio is for public affairs campaigns. Radio is highly effective, and cost effective. For example, for the price of a full page ad in the Los Angeles Times, I could run a radio campaign for two weeks. Yes, you can put the ad up on your wall and look at it, but it isn’t likely to have the truly desired effect of constantly getting to the voter that you get with a targeted radio campaign," said Eric Rose,  a Partner at Englander & Associates, a full service Public Relations agency which provides strategic advocacy, government affairs, and public relations services to a wide range of corporate, government, and non-profit clients.

Radio has been one of Eric’s favorite tools for winning support for his clients’ positions. He believes Radio provides highly effective reach and frequency while it allows clients to put together content that has emotion.

Read more about Radio’s success on political campaigns at Southern California’s Broadcasting Association webpage.