I haven’t blogged about PR for a couple of months now – but I figured it would be a good idea to just give you some more information. Many people have been asking me about what to actually write to the papers about? Especially those of use who work in ‘boring’ fields of work (if such a thing exists?). Really, to answer your questions about creating press releases and so on – you need to ask yourself this:

What knowledge, information or fascinating facts do you have? What’s your business doing that’s going to be of real interest to the public?

One of my favourite PR strategies is not to hunt around for a great story, but instead to position yourself as an expert in your area. I don’t care what you do or what business you’re in, you are an expert on something! You wouldn’t be in the position of running a business in the first place if this was un-true.  You know stuff that I don’t!  You have knowledge or an experience that the public all want to know about, or at least a portion of them will.

Let me give you some quick examples and I think you’ll see what I mean.  Let’s start with businesses that target consumers rather than other businesses.  For example: If you sell or repair cars for a living you know things like;

• How to look after a car
• How to protect a car in the winter
• How to avoid getting ripped off when buying a car
• Which cars keep their value and which don’t?
• The list goes on…

Do you think all of these questions might make an interesting feature in a newspaper?  Absolutely! If you’re a dentist you know how to look after your teeth, you know what parents should do to help them look after their kids’s teeth.  If you’re a coach or a consultant or a therapist or you sell vitamins or you’re in any of the caring professions, then your brain is packed with information on how to improve peoples lives and the media, as I said, are sitting there trying to fill newspapers, magazines, radio, TV shows with the kind of information that you can rattle off of the top of your head!  If you sell chairs you know how people should sit to ease back pain and the types of chairs they should be buying.  Do you get the picture?

What about business to business?  Well, if you’re a store fitter you know the best styles and colours for store owners to increase their chance of selling more products.  You could go to the trade press for any particular trade that involves having a shop and come up with 5 top tips for kitting out a new store.  If you sell computers or computer repair services you know how to deal with those infuriating spywares and viruses that keep cropping up on everyones computers.  You could get on the radio with that, in newspapers with that, on the telly with that, on the internet with that.  If you’re involved in marketing or advertising, then  hopefully you know a thing or two about how to grow a business?  Again great material for PR coverage.

Extreme Case Study Alert!

What about if you make *the worlds most boring industrial screw* and you have a factory of 50 people making them? How on earth do you get PR if you’re doing that?  Well step outside the box.  If you successfully employ 50 people you know more about how to manage people and deal with stress and conflicts at work than many business owners don’t.  We could turn that into a very interesting piece either for your trade press or perhaps for the business section of one of the national or even local newspapers.  What I’m getting at here is thinking outside the box is very important to find what it is that you have of interest to those end viewers, the readers, and the listeners.

Hopefully thats proved useful to you! Now, get out there and start generating some free publicity for your business right away.

I’m really ‘reverse engineering’ my previous blog posts here. This is because although I’ve already talked about how to get publicity and how to create an effective press release, I never really covered the core strategies and principles behind doing so. Following your questions and comments, I have written a short article about why you should actually use PR and the ideas and concepts behind press releases and getting articles written in newspapers & appearing on Radio or TV.

So firstly, let’s be clear on why PR is so powerful! Think of a national newspaper and what someone like a car manufacturer would pay for, let’s say, a half page advertisement for their new car model in that national paper.  It could easily be ten or twenty thousand or more.

They are willing to pay that amount because hopefully (if they know what they’re doing) the number of people seeing it will bring them a profit.  If you compare that to a half page article in the same publication, where a journalist has written a half page review of the new car and they are absolutely raving about it -  not only is this coverage free, it’s also far more valuable than the advertising. This is because people believe what they read in the editorial far more than what they read in an ad, in the same way people will be more inclined to believe what they hear on a radio talk show than they will in a radio advertisement.  They will pay more attention to what they see on the TV news, or segment of a lifestyle show – such as GMTV or Oprah rather than the TV ads in the breaks and so on.  So you get this double whammy!  You don’t just get media coverage that’s totally free, you get media coverage that’s actually far more valuable than the advertising that normally would cost you a fortune.

I think it’s this ‘too good to be true’ aspect that steers some people clear of PR, in the same way that some people never bother sending out emails because it’s just all ‘too free and easy’ and life couldn’t possibly be that straightforward!?  I’m fairly sure you’re smarter than that, which is probably why you’re reading this in the first place!  So just get your head around the fact that most of what you’ve heard about good marketing and good PR being a struggle is absolute nonsense!  Another myth about PR is that it only works for certain types of business, that you have to have a particularly ‘sexy’ or ‘interesting’ business to get PR coverage or perhaps already have had some media exposure (Dragons Den etc).  It’s certainly true that if you invented a miracle  weight loss method, it’s going to be easier to get you onto national television than perhaps if you make a new type of vegan bread.  But, if you do make vegan bread – we’ll still get you on the TV! For example, when interest rates go up or down we’ll call all the news programmes and put you forward as an example of how vegan bakery’s are affected by interest rates too.  Suddenly there you are on the TV.  With PR there is always a way.  It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, what you sell or how large or small your business is.

The message I have for you here is simple and I’m going to keep this brief!

Do not be dependent on one or two forms of marketing to grow your business, but instead turn your business into a multi-level marketing machine.

This is the key strategy I used to grow my businesses by a hundred, two hundred, three hundred percent and more. It’s so simple and straight forward yet so few people do it. I’d say probably 9/10 businesses use just one or two forms of marketing to grow promote products and/or services.

Does same may apply to you? Do you rely on just one form of marketing? Advertising is the most common, or perhaps referrals and recommendations. Or perhaps you’re using the phones to make appointments. Or perhaps you rely on direct mail.

The top 1% of businesses, those that are exceptionally successful + profitable, do things differently to everyone else and one of the things they do differently is they’re not dependent on just one form of marketing. The best businesses have six to ten prime forms of marketing and that’s my goal for you. Not in some mad overnight dash but by carefully testing new marketing methods over time there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to build your business into just a stronger force.

There are dozens of different ways to promote and grow your business. People seem to focus on and be vaguely obsessesed by advertising, because there’s so much pressure from various publications to advertise in them. I can’t tell you the number of people I meet whose entire business is dependent, for example, on an single ad in the yellow pages. This is so dangerous! What if one year, your phone number is printed wrong or a competitor comes along with a better ad? I want you to get the mindset that frees you up from just being dependent on one form of marketing, whether it’s advertising or whatever. As I say the goal is to turn your business into an operation that’s supported by six or ten or perhaps more pillars of marketing.  This can include direct mail, the internet, the use of emails, telephone marketing, perhaps direct ‘foot in the door’ sales, public relations (PR), perhaps some joint ventures, risk reversal and guarantees, affiliate programs and so on.

That’s how you achieve really remarkable growth in any business, by not being dependent on one or two forms of marketing but instead building a business thats supported by these multiple pillars and it’s really not unusual to see businesses that do this grow very rapidly.

Understanding how to communicate benefits is an absolute bedrock of marketing and of all your business success. Really, today I want to illustrate some of the fundamentals here and just help you out with some great information and techniques I have picked up to help you do this effectively.

Now, you can spend all the money you want on advertising or brochures or web sites but if you don’t continually and forcefully communicate precisely how your prospective customer is going to actually benefit from what you’ve got to offer, then you’re almost certainly wasting huge amounts of time and money.

Let me give you a sense of why this is so important. First you need to get clear on the difference between features and benefits. If you’re buying a hi-fi for example. The watts coming out of each speaker is a feature. Now the fact of those speakers will deliver sound that will make me feel like I’m in an amazing concert hall is the benefit. The memory on your computer is a feature. The fact that it’s high enough to let you surf the web faster is the benefit. If you hire a gardener who’s been gardening for 35 years, that 35 years experience is a feature. The fact that he can make your garden look beautiful and have you feel really proud is the benefit.

The benefit is what’s in it for you as opposed to the actual feature of the product and the services.

One of the biggest marketing mistakes that people make is they focus on the features instead of the benefits. Now you need to know that people generally do not buy on features. They buy the benefits. By all means tell the people the features of your product or service it may well help establish credibility and is often required to some extent, but it’s not enough to make it real for people. To convince them of why they should part with their money to get those features you have to translate those features into clear benefits.

For you to understand how important it is to communicate the benefits it’s useful to understand some of the psychology that leads people to actually buying something that will lead your potential customers to becoming actual customers. People reach the point where they make a decision to buy. You know what that’s like… You read a brochure about something, maybe you make a quick decision to buy or maybe you need to make a phone call to ask some questions. Either way at some point there is a moment, an instant where you make the decision right there to buy. Now your entire goal as a good marketer is to help people get to the point where they make that decision. People won’t get to that point in their heads until they’ve understood how they’re going to benefit from what you’re offering to them. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is, all that matters is getting people to the point where they understand how they’re going to benefit.

Sadly it’s not enough to have the best product or offer the best service. You have to be the best at getting people to intrinsically understand how they’re going to benefit from what you’re offering.

This applies to every element of your marketing. Your letters, your brochures, your advertising, everything. If you want an example of where so many businesses fail in communicating the benefits, it’s with their websites. Now suppose we’re looking for a solicitor to work on our house sale. You look at a few websites and they all say the same thing. They all talk about how long the solicitor has been in business and they list all the areas they can help you on. Now these lists of services are not the benefits, they’re the features and they’re probably identical to virtually every other solicitor in town. To stand out from the rest our solicitor wants to explain the benefits that they offer that set them apart from the rest. For example the website could say when you choose us to look after your house sale you’ll get the peace of mind of knowing that we’ll always reply to your messages or emails within three hours. Our combined 99 years in conveyancing (that’s a feature) means that we have the legal knowledge and negotiating skills to do everything possible to stop the sale falling through during those tricky periods (that’s the benefit). While our commitment to incredible customer service (feature) means our clients complete their sales 30% faster than the national average (benefit). That’s going to convince a good proportion of people at least to get in touch and find out more! And so the list goes on.

You can increase the response rate by turning a standard website, that goes on and on about the company and its history, into a website that’s driven to communicating how visitors will benefit from what’s on offer.

Here is the steps of action you can take to work with all of this stuff…

First sit down and come up with the three main benefits that your customers experience from doing business with you. If you find this hard to do, get excited! If you haven’t got a clue what those benefits are then nor will your customers, which means your business is massively underperforming!!

Your next action step is to really look ruthlessly at all of your marketing material. Your website, your brochures, letters and the advertising you do. Even your personal communications to customers on the phone, via email or in meetings. Now if at any point in the material, you go for more than two or three lines without conveying how your customer is going to benefit, then rip it up and start again! It’s harsh, but they’re facts that will make you oodles of money. Nobody cares how long you’ve been in business. Nobody cares what university you went to. Nobody cares if your business just moved premises. Nobody cares how long it takes you to manufacture your widgets. All customers care about is what’s in it for them!

Writing a good press release is the key to getting free media coverage. Here are my 4 golden rules and a blueprint, if you like that you can follow to ensure your press releases have every chance of being successful.

First of all when doing your press release don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ve got to hire a PR agency to write your press release for you and to target the media for you.  Do it by all means if you’ve got the budget but this is not rocket science and you can do it by yourself if you want to.  Here are the golden rules for writing your press release:-

1. Keep it simple and keep it to one page.
   Remember the purpose of your release is not to tell your entire life story, it’s to entice the journalist to get in touch with you to find out more and one page should be more than enough for that. Its a bit like a sales letter.
2. You must have a great headline on your press release.
   Remember about journalists sifting through hundreds of these releases, well this means you’ve got about 3 seconds to grab their attention and you do this through the headline.  Generally they’ll glance at the headline of the press release and they’ll only read the rest of it if they find the headline of interest.  The good news is you haven’t got much in the way of competition because most press releases and most headlines are really dull and dreadfully boring, so how do you come up with a good headline?  Well, it’s the same as when you’re writing a headline for an advertisement.  The only purpose of the headline is to grab the reader’s attention and get them to read the rest of the press release.  So be creative, be imaginative.  One of my favourite forms of headline is this, if you’re going to do the thing of putting yourself forward as an expert do a headline that says “5 top tips for …” then you fill in the gap.  “Leading expert on xyz reveals the secrets of …”  So if you’re, lets say, the computer repair person your headline could be “5 top tips for saving your computer from a killer attack” “Leading expert on computer security reveals the secrets of effective computer protection”. Basically, our headline has got two lines to it.  It’s got a top line which is “5 top tips for ….” whatever your expertise is in and then a sub heading, if you like, “leading expert on xyz reveals the secrets of effective …” and you can tailor make this.  Its great, you can tailor make this to any business.  I’ve done this dozens of times for all sorts of peoples from all sorts of fields and journalists love this kind of thing because they can immediately see how they can turn this into a nice article or feature.  If you’re a car retailer “5 top tips for saving money on your new car” “Leading expert on car pricing reveals the secrets of saving thousands”.  Now if you send those sort of press releases to 10 or 20 newspapers, magazines or radio stations do you think 1 or 2 or 3 will respond and want to talk to you?  Absolutely.  Now these aren’t news stories specifically.  They’re more feature ideas but the reality that PR is about news is actually another myth.  Most news in the media is already covered.  It’s the top national or local stories of that day.  Most of the PR you’re going to be doing is really targeting feature material to the newspapers, to the magazines, to the media.
3. The third golden rule of great PR is to write a few paragraphs of simple copy that tells your story or talks about what you’re offering simply and succinctly.
   Simplicity is the key and you could see an example of how to do that in the feature that I mentioned. Avoid industry specific language, technical terms etc that ‘outsiders’ may not understand.
4. Finally, your press release must have a strong, clear call to action which tells the person reading it what to do next.
   So in big, bold letters at the bottom of the release put “For more information or to arrange an interview with… call this number, email this email address” and it’s really that simple.  One of the biggest mistakes you can make in PR is to make it more complicated than it really is. With great long convoluted press releases and PR is like all forms of marketing, it’s a numbers game.  You can send the greatest press release in the world to 20 people but you’re very unlikely to get 20 good responses but even if you get one response think about what that costs you.  Virtually nothing. And what that could be worth to you in terms of free PR coverage?

The aim here is to have PR as part of your mix each month so its an ongoing part of your overall business success strategy so, for example, you could decide now to target just 20 media outlets each month for a fairly small amount of effort that’s going to give you an ongoing stream of coverage.  Be very careful about planning PR based on normal everyday business events. You’re probably a lot more interested in the fact that you’re moving office than your local media might be, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use your imagination and turn a fairly straightforward event or piece of news into a good media event.  The key here is to remember that a good deal of the media particularly local newspapers and television are visually led.  What that means is your local newspaper will decide whether to cover some stories not just based on the newsworthiness of the actual story but also on whether they’re going to get any good pictures out of it and the same applies to local television.

The classic example of someone who understands the visual power of PR is Richard Branson, head of the Virgin empire.  PR was one of the key marketing strategies that Branson used to build his business.  You can not put a value on the PR he’s generated over the years.  Its going to be worth hundreds of millions.  Richard Branson understands the power of a great picture.  Here’s an example.  There are hundreds of men around the world who own wedding related businesses, but how many of them launched their business by dressing up in a wedding dress and inviting the press to come and take their photo?  That is precisely what Richard Branson did when he launched Virgin’s wedding business and as you can imagine the coverage he generated was phenomenal.  So one of the ways to get good PR is to look at what your business does and anything happening in your business and see if there’s what journalists call a photo opportunity there and if there isn’t create one.

Today, you’re going to find out how you can improve the amount of value you can offer to your customers. This applies in both consumer and business situations. Lets start with a little case study:

I once met a guy who made chairs & he had a shop selling chairs in one of the upmarket areas of London, his chairs were extremely expensive and he is somewhat of a traditionalist. When I first asked him why he chose the trade, a big smile came over his face and he said “I make people comfortable”. His highest purpose for being in business wasn’t just to flog a few chairs, it was to make people comfortable and he really meant it. When he described the process people went through in his store his sole focus was to find them a chair they felt really comfortable in, I was amazed… He’d ask them questions. He’d get them to try different chairs. He’d make suggestions to them and he didn’t let customers buy a chair from him until he was absolutely convinced that this is exactly what they needed. Now this had several consequences…

Firstly, this man’s working life was just a joy – he took pride in what he did and people just loved him! Secondly, what effect do you think this had on his profits? Well this guy made a heap of money because without realizing it he become the world’s greatest chair salesman not because he was using slick sales tricks, but more because he was driven by a desire to find out people’s needs and meet them which is what great selling is all about anyway.

So let me ask you. What’s your purpose for doing business? If you can make this one shift in your thinking your success is really virtually guaranteed. We’ve all come across people who are driven by a desperate desire to make some more money and we’ve met people who are driven by a desire to make a difference in our lives. Now you know the difference and you know who’s always going to end up being more successful. When you’re driven by this desire to add value to people’s lives it gives you passion in what you do and as I said it affects every single piece of marketing that you do. Why? Well because if you believe your overriding purpose is to make a difference to people’s lives you’re so much more likely to go the extra mile to make that phone call or to send that email or to close that sale because you get to the point where you believe that you owe it to your customers to win their business.

I can only tell you that for me adopting this mindset made a huge difference. It increased my profits by hundreds of percent. But more to the point it made work far more pleasurable. When I started out I was very sensitive to this British thing we seem to have about selling to people but you know what I discovered was if we hold back in this humble British way the people we’re most letting down aren’t actually ourselves it’s our customers. I reached the point where I’d invested years and a great deal of money and energy in discovering how to grow any business by more than 100%.

It’s a classic win-win situation and I urge you to do the same with your customers and clients. Get passionate about what you do. Get in tune with the difference you are making to people. If you sell business to business get in tune with the value you are adding to their business life or perhaps to their working day. You wouldn’t even be in business if you didn’t offer some kind of value but you know something you need to know whatever your product or service if you’re not crystal clear on the value that you offer the chances are that your customers won’t be either.

So let’s translate this into some action. Here’s my first action step for you. Don’t just take my word on this. Try this out for yourself. For the next ten days work from the position that your purpose for doing business is to add massive value to the lives of your customers and clients and that you owe it to your customers to have them experience what you got to offer. If you get this foundation in place and your team members have it in place too. The impact of everything else that you’d like to cover will be immense.

The easiest form of PR is normally your local press.  Depending on where you live they are often so short of good stories they’ll run almost anything, even some of the more boring approaches.

It’s certainly true that if you go to your local press with the approach I’m suggesting here you’ve got a very, very good chance of success.  And if you have a fairly straightforward story about your business like a local office or store opening or a story about your staff it’s certainly worth approaching the local press and giving them a try.  You’ve got nothing to lose.  Beyond the locals the remaining areas to target your PR are going to be national newspapers, national consumer magazines, business to business magazines, radio, TV and the internet.

Now there are a variety of ways for you to access the contact information on these media who you should be contacting.  You can do this a number of ways, you can just source the publications one by one, go through your papers, your magazines, go to websites, or you can also buy media guides and PR planners to assist you in doing this.  Basically you can pay to rent all this data and all this information depending on where you live and where you want to target.  So go do an internet search for media guide or PR planner for the most up to date information.

When it comes to actually contacting the press here is how you do it, it’s very simple…

1. Send them a letter or a press release either by post or by email and you can also fax it
2. Follow it up with a phone call!!

The follow up is really important.

Journalists are bombarded with a lot of stuff and they are normally either overworked or down the pub and it’s all too easy for some of the good information to fall through the gaps so when you follow up with a phone call you can check first of all that they’ve seen what you sent them and, most important of all, you get the chance to sell to them again by showing how what you’ve got is going to be of real interest to their audience.  When you call them show them that you’re thinking of their audience. Use language like “I’m guessing this is of real interest to your readers, is that right?” or “I’ve sent you this material because I know that a good proportion of your listeners are affected by this and I thought this would make a great feature for you”.

Remember that you are selling to them so you want to use all the communication and influencing skills that you would normally use perhaps with customers.  Now here’s another really important point about that follow up phone call.  If you’re targeting radio or TV stations and either you call them or they call you at any point remember that during that call they’ll be testing you out to check that you’re a good speaker.  There’s nothing worse for a producer than booking a guest for a radio or TV show and then discovering they’re really dull and uninteresting.  Not only will the audience not respond but the producer will look bad in front of his or her colleagues too.  So often what they’ll do is they’ll call you up with a couple of questions.  They may or may not be interested in your answers to those questions but what they are definitely interested in is your ability to communicate with them.  They’re not looking for you to be a Shakespearean actor or have perfect diction.  What they are looking for is passion about your subject.  Be passionate about your subject and they won’t just invite you onto their show they’ll have you back again and again and again.

The media is crying out for passionate experts, so go for it.