Thank you Kim! I enjoyed our interaction. I can be reached at linda@stratcommunications.com, or via my web site – http://www.stratcommunications.com.
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Linda Pophal
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Linda Pophal
I would say that the best way to manage these efforts is to consider them in alignment with all of their promotional activities. Media development, advertising, community outreach, etc., are all part of the “promotion” piece of marketing. It’s a matter, again, of identifying your target audience and your objectives and then selecting among all of the available options to influence them to pick those that make the most sense from an effectiveness/efficiency standpoint. We all have to deal with limited resources – time/money. The challenge is to leverage those resources most effectively. To me that means developing a plan – however simple – to ensure that you’re making choices that are strategic and not just “reactive.”
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Linda Pophal
Generating media interest can be a great way to increase awareness of your product or service and tends to be more “credible” than the things you say about yourself. The process is really the same as when trying to attract interest from consumers in your product or service. First, you need to identify the media outlets that you believe will most effectively reach the audience you wish to influence. Then you need to develop an understanding of those media outlets and their needs, so that you can appropriately “pitch” your story/information to them. Again, it’s looking “from the outside in” – it’s not what you want to tell them about your product/service. It’s how what you want to tell them will be interesting/compelling enough that they will choose to share it with *their* audiences. That means focusing on “newsworthy” messages, not self-promotion.
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Linda Pophal
Ha! Yes, exactly right. It does depend. My recommendation would be for business persons to first start with the answers to those two questions we discussed earlier and then to consider *all* of the available tools and techniques available to communicate with their specifically defined target audiences and, among these, select those that are likely to provide the “biggest bang for the buck.” It’s a matter of prioritizing, but also of creating the right “mix” of communication tactics so that your message is getting out there multiple times in multiple ways. Those ways, of course, need to be focused on your target audience/objectives and not just on using “new tools.”
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Linda Pophal
Another great question! As business owners we are intimately familiar with our business and its products or services and there is a strong tendency to believe that the world sees us the way we do. They generally don’t! Looking at your business, services and products “from the outside in,” means taking steps to gain external perspectives that can be truly eye-opening. I’ve had experiences with clients who will say things like: “we just can’t get people to understand our value proposition.” Well, the problem with that is, that the value proposition isn’t *yours*, it’s *theirs*. You need to understand what the market wants and how your product/service does or does not meet those needs and then you need to make decisions on what you may need to change. It’s not easy to do. We all view our world from our frame of reference – which can often be far too limited.
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Linda Pophal
Once they have the answers to these questions, they can begin to think about key messages and tactics (or channels of communication) to connect with their target audiences. Knowing as much as possible about who I want to reach helps me determine not only how to develop “key benefit” statements to influence their actions/behaviors, but also the best tactics to use in communicating with them – e.g. are they newspaper readers? what sections of the newspaper? are they involved in social media? which types? The better job you do at answering the first two questions, the more effective you’ll be in generating impactful key messages that connect with your specific target audiences. The challenge for any communicator/marketer is that there are so many things that we *could* do – our objective is to select those tactics that are likely to achieve the greatest results for the least cost (time/money).
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Linda Pophal
I always recommend the following two questions as the starting point for any communication situation:
1) Who is my target audience? (who, specifically am I trying to reach/influence)
2) What are my objectives (again, specifically, what do I want to achieve and at what level?)
Thorough answers to these questions will set the stage for developing strategies and tactics to generate results. -
Linda Pophal
Great question! Marketing is really the “umbrella” for a number of activies, including advertising, that will drive business results. Advertising is “technically” part of the “promotion” piece of marketing which also includes product, price and place (or access). A common mistake that businesses large and small make is to look to advertising, alone, to address their marketing challenges when there are really many other elements that go into product/service success. In fact, advertising prematurely can actually create more problems for your product/service if, for instance, your product’s attributes don’t meet customer needs or you don’t have sufficient supply/access to meet demand.
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Linda Pophal
Hi! I’m Linda Pophal, owner/CEO of Strategic Communications, LLC, a company that helps individuals and organizations apply strategy to solve their communication challenges, whether internal or external. I’ve been working in advertising/PR for more than 20 years both in a corporate environment (health care and energy industries) and as an independent consultant with small to mid-sized companies, and individuals entrepreneurs/consultants.