PR, marketing and social media for small businesses

Small Businesses and Start-ups
Do-it-yourself marketing, PR and advertising in the social media era: The Roadmap
(C) Planet Content Ltd 2010
www.planetcontent.co.uk – www.runmarketing.co.uk

Index
Overview
PR, marketing, advertising, social media – making sense of it all...
Basic principles
Getting ready for PR
Do-it-yourself media relations
Marketing via social networks
Social media – where to begin?
Multi-channel marketing
Advertising on the Web
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The marketing mix map
When to call in the experts
(C) Planet Content Ltd 2010 www.planetcontent.co.uk

Overview
The social media era has democratised PR, marketing and advertising. Once upon a not-so-long-ago firms would need to buy expensive print space or pay for pricy media consultants to help them to develop and promote their brand. Not any more!
Small businesses and start-ups can now outperform big brands online – where most customers are now active – with a little innovation, patience, creativity, dedication and time. But, thankfully, very little money. In this presentation we plan to show you how your small business can flourish with your own on- and offline PR, marketing and advertising.
Throughout this presentation you’ll see links to relevant podcasts, articles and white papers on the subjects in question.

PR and Advertising
Before we talk messaging, strategy and tactics, we need to be clear on what the difference is between ‘PR’ and ‘Advertising’ as part of the overall marketing mix In a nutshell:
Public Relations (PR): the establishment and maintenance of your reputation – trying to ensure that people are talking about you, that those comments are positive and where they’re not, working hard to change that perception. Sometimes not being talked about is also important!
Advertising: with advertising you purchase online space, column inches or airtime, which is not the same as managing your reputation (PR). Advertising is perceived by the public as one-sided and less trustworthy, and should only really be used as a brand-building exercise rather than a trust-building one

Basic Principles
A poorly thought-out PR strategy is unlikely to succeed. Small business managers have precious little time on their hands to dedicate to marketing, so getting it right first time is crucial in the long-run. There are some very simple questions small businesses should be asking before they start managing their own PR:
What are the objectives of your PR strategy in the short, medium and long term, and how are you measuring effectiveness?
Who are your customers and what media do they access that you can use to reach them?
What makes your company different from your competitors and how do you communicate and articulate that in a way that’s palatable to press, potential customers and search engines? This forms part of your ‘messaging’, maybe even deploy a witty strapline (e.g. Beanz Meanz Heinz etc)
What do you want the public to say and think about you?

Getting ready for PR
To pluck an over-used cliché from marketing parlance, you really need to “get your ducks in a row” before kicking off your marketing and PR programme. This includes the below:
Messaging: How are you going to pitch your product or service and who’s it aimed at? What do they want to hear about it? Remove yourself from the product and service here and see it as the lay member would
Set up your PR process: You need a media kit on your website, select a company spokesperson to act as a figurehead for the company, agree which platforms and tactics you’re going to use to target your audiences and get your content together prior to “going live”
Get media trained: How will you handle the media once they get interested?
Will you handle PR in-house or outsource?
Listen to our podcast on forming a PR plan from scratch

DIY media relations
With the right skills on board and a little research, any company can do their own PR to at least a rudimentary level without having to hire an agency or freelancer. You just need to be equipped with the following:
Press releases: Have you got news you’d like to issue to target trade, consumer, local or national media? Press releases are tried and trusted ways to do just that. Listen to our podcast on writing and distributing press releases and check out our press release white paper and template. These cover advanced topics, such as “social media news releases” and how to seed your releases online
A press page: Make your press page easy to find from the home page with all relevant contacts and content. Read more on creating a media kit here
Media lists: You’ll need to know who to target with your releases once you’ve created your press releases and content. There are ways to get hold of these without your own time-consuming research, but they’ll cost you money. Have a look at media list services like Gorkanaor FeaturesExec
Distribution: You can pay for services such as RealWireto distribute your release and save you the hassle, although a personal call ahead of emailing to a journalist helps forge relationships [Podcast on pitching to journalists]

Marketing via Social Media
The latest development in the evolution of marketing and PR is social media. This helps small businesses to really punch above their weight and reach carefully targeted audiences cost-effectively. These platforms include:
Social networks: these are networks by which people communicate on a personal level, such as Facebook and other more business-focussed networks like LinkedIn. You can build your own using Ning [Podcast on social media best practice and LinkedIn]
Blogging and Blogger relations: A blog is essentially an opinion or diary piece outlining an issue of your choice. Some blogs have become incredibly influential, so it’s worth commenting on those relevant to your business [Podcast]
Microblogging: Twitter is the most famous – try it out and build up a following, interact with some people in your sector [Best practice guide]
Multimedia: Have you thought about creating podcasts? Or distributing video content over YouTube or Vimeo, for example?

Social Media – where to begin?
Marketing has moved on from the monologue days when a company would push its messages to its target audiences and hope they would swallow it. Thanks to the Internet, marketing is now a conversation. People are blogging, tweeting, commenting on forums and Facebooking about brands, talking about their experiences.
It is estimated that one in every five ‘tweets’ – posts on social network Twitter – contains a brand name. If you’re that brand, you want to know what people are saying and establish how to make sure as much of that ‘buzz’ as possible is positive.
Your social media plan should therefore be two-fold – how you market to your target audience and how you respond to buzz, both negative and positive.
Read our social media how-to guide, listen to our social media podcast and read here on how to measure your social media campaigns.

Multi-channel marketing
Social media relations is not restricted to merely social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Have you thought about getting a little more creative with your content and seeding it across the Internet?
Podcasting: Podcasting is a great way to get your message across to your audiences. You can build your reputation as a thought leader and give useful, engaging information and both host on your website and distribute on iTunes. [Podcast]
Video: Creating visual content is a great way to demonstrate your product or give advice. You can then seed this across the Internet using sites like YouTube, VimeoorTubeMogul
Slideshare: Slideshare.net is a great way to showcase your product or service via the medium of PowerPoint presentation, like this one! Here’s our how-to guide

Advertising on the Web
Social media helps marketers create incredibly targeted campaigns according to location, gender, demographic – you name it! Also, you have greater control over your budget and results are easy to manage thanks to tools such as Google Analytics.
Common advertising includes:
Pay per click: Your ad is placed according to keywords selected in search engines and relevant websites. Prominence is decided on an auction system and you can manage your ad outlay [Podcast]
Affiliate marketing: This is a great way to seed your product or service subtly throughout the Web, where you only pay when a sale is made [Podcast]
Placed ads: Classic ads (banner etc) can help generate awareness through placement. Adverts on social networks, such as Facebook, can help get your ads in front of the right people

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
As most people use the Web as the first port of call to search for products and services it’s essential to be on page one of search engines for a number of ‘keywords’ relevant to your business.
A simple rewording of your website text that leads you up the search engine rankings could in effect achieve more than any expensive PR or advertising campaign, purely due to the number of people who will be finding your site who previously couldn’t locate you online. And remember, these people will have entered relevant keywords which means they could be looking for your product or service. For more read our SEO Frequently Asked Questions, get blogging to increase your inbound traffic and start seeding articles around the Web.
You’ll also need to consider link building to increase the visibility of your website. Listen to our link building podcast and this podcast on building effective websites.

The marketing mix map
Most marketers will probably say, “OK, there’s plenty to know, just show me the roadmap” – we try to summarise the 2010 marketing mix map below, you can pick and choose which elements work best for your company.

When to call in the experts
When doing your own PR, marketing and social media engagement you may find you’re pretty good at it and want to keep going. You may, however, not feel you’ve either got the time to commit to it – time is the key component – or it’s not generated the results you’d like.
If this is the case, you may wish to outsource to a specialist. Read our guide on whether a PR freelancer or an agency is best for you and listen to our podcast on how to brief, hire and fire PR agencies. You could always drop us a line...
About Us
Planet Content is a London-based virtual PR network providing expertly crafted PR and social media campaigns for emerging technology companies. Planet Content provides PR consultancy, content creation, SEO copywriting, podcasting, training, videocasting, blogging, in-house and in-agency strategic consultancy services.
Planet Content also publishes RunMarketing, the do-it-yourself PR, marketing and social media blog for small businesses and start-ups.

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PR, marketing and social media for small businesses

by Planet Content Ltd on Apr 09, 2010

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PR, marketing and social media for small businesses — Presentation Transcript