By Linda Forrest
At inmedia, we work within a pretty specific niche – we do media and analyst relations for business-to-business technology companies. Period. This does cover a wide spectrum of technologies working in a variety of sectors, but most of our clients have a very well defined business and tend to be focused propositions targeting a very particular customer, be it a voice application developer or a purchaser of x-ray sensor equipment for the veterinary market.
The challenge? How do we reach these niche audiences and get through to the tastemakers and influencers that help our clients’ customers make purchasing decisions?
The good news is that there is a media channel for everyone and everything. If you can imagine it as subject matter, it is almost guaranteed that there is a trade publication, web site, blog, newsletter, magazine, television show, radio show or other media channel that covers the topic, if not exclusively, then at the very least, on a sporadic basis. It has been our experience that more often than not, there is at least one media channel devoted to whatever specialized audience you must reach in order to sell your product or service.
Just as companies develop products for a known customer-base, so too do media develop channels for particular audiences. It’s safe to assume that if there’s a market for your product or service (and you had better hope that there is), there is a media channel that speaks directly to that market. Using our range of monitoring tools and directories, we ensure that we’re targeting those media outlets that truly have the potential to move your market, no matter how focused your offering is.
When it comes to speaking to your media marketplace, it’s quality, not quantity that matters. The readership of a niche publication may be only 3,000 people, but if those 3,000 readers are purchasing decision-makers in your market, then this is likely to be a very high-value media target for you. Do more people read the New York Times? Absolutely, but it’s unlikely that coverage in that publication will influence the purchasing decisions of your niche audience as much as these more focused publications are likely to.
By Linda Forrest
I’ll be turning 30 years old later this week and it has me reflecting on the technological advancements that have been made in the last three decades. It sure seems like we’ve come a long way, just in my lifetime.
I don’t remember a time before computers. We had a TRS80 from about the time I was born and cassette tapes containing the data were strewn throughout the den. Apparently we were ahead of the technology curve at my house. Dad had a Zenith laptop in the 1980s. It weighed a tonne and I’m pretty sure it had a whopping 640K of RAM.
I vaguely remember renting a VCR when I was a kid. Later, we got our own VCR – a top loader with a “remote control” that was actually attached to the VCR making it less “remote” than the name suggests. Entertainment mediums changed from vinyl LPs to cassettes to CDs to MiniDiscs to MP3s; from VHS or Beta to LaserDiscs to DVDs to Blue-Ray or HD-DVDs.
You could cook things really fast in this new fangled device called a microwave. It seems to work well for heating things up but doesn’t cook as well as a stove.
Some of my friends had the Atari or ColecoVision to meet their videogaming needs, but I got a Nintendo Entertainment System from Consumers Distributing in 1986. Hours and hours of fun.
Phones went from rotary dial to push button, from pulse to tone, from fixed to portable and to cellular and beyond.
It’s easy to feel nostalgic for one’s youth and I fall prey to that as well – remembering summers spent outside, reading on the swing set, biking to a friend’s house, summer camp where roasting marshmallows was the most technically advanced activity, snowmen made, forts erected and toppled… Despite all of the technological advancements taking place while I was growing up, it really felt that technology was a minor part of my daily existence.
Now, as I sit in front of a computer all day, talking on the telephone, emailing, reading online, technology is a huge part of my life. With younger people, technology is even more pervasive in their lives and advancements continue to be made every single day. One can only ponder where will we be 30 years from now. I’m willing to bet Alvin Toffler has some ideas…
By Linda Forrest
A recent study shows that more than one in four Canadians have a Facebook profile. Though I haven’t managed to find any Canadian statistics, in the U.S., as popular as it is, Facebook is not the fastest growing social network. Instead, it’s LinkedIn, the professional networking site that enables you to connect with prospects through people that are already in your network, that boasts the largest growth. Nielsen ratings shows that LinkedIn experienced 189% growth rate over the past year and its membership is at 17 million and climbing.
With Facebook gaining momentum in Canada, and with the huge growth of LinkedIn, it’s clear that social networks are becoming more pervasive in people’s lives – both personal and professional. From a business perspective, there is tremendous potential to form introductions to recruits or employers, partners or prospective customers, not to mention keeping in touch with your existing network of contacts, colleagues, classmates and the like.
In terms of prospecting, because users are encouraged to contact others only through contacts that they have already established, there is an implied endorsement from an existing contact of yours and therefore level of trust that wouldn’t exist with a cold call, virtual or otherwise. Recommendations and other features – the site just updated with a slew of new features yesterday – make the site a more experiential destination than it was in its earlier incarnation.
The membership of LinkedIn is quite different from that of Facebook, though the demographics are shifting as more young people enter the business world and expect to integrate their existing online lives with their careers. “A quarter of [young] consumers believe career advancement and jobs-related networking is an important function of social networks.”
“Founded in 2003, LinkedIn is targeting a lucrative market: 225 million white-collar workers worldwide. Its demographic is in the same elite class as the readership of the Wall Street Journal. The average member’s annual income is $106,000 and the average age is 41, [LinkedIn CEO, Dan] Nye said.”
If you’re not already using social networks for business purposes, it’s perhaps time to sign up and add this popular tool to your networking routine.
By Linda Forrest
The truth is that all media channels have original content in the hopes that it will capture and maintain the audience’s attention enough so that they see the paid advertisements. Print publications, including trade magazines, are no different. That’s not to say that the editorial content is not valuable or does not have the potential to move your market, it does, but at its simplest: no advertising revenue, no media channel.
Editorial calendars are an integral part of the media kit for print publications. In addition to the document’s purpose of mapping out what editorial coverage will be happening and when, with what focus and responsible writer or editor, it also provides the advertising sales department with a compelling reason to target specific companies with particular product or service offerings at specific times.
For our purposes, as a company that focuses exclusively on securing earned, as opposed to paid, media coverage for our clients, we are interested only in the editorial aspect of the calendar. That doesn’t stop some sales people from pitching us for advertising dollars, but that’s another story.
Editorial calendars begin to emerge in the autumn and winter for the year ahead. The gathering of these ever-changing calendars is a cumbersome task indeed and as such there are a number of subscription-based aggregators through PRNewswire and other independent providers like MyEdCals. These aggregators can help one find those opportunities that may be less obvious, opportunities in those publications that are not primary targets for the ongoing campaign.
Some editorial calendars have all of the pertinent information one would need to pitch the editor while most have just a phrase or subject and require more intensive follow up with the publication to assess the opportunity. Even if an opportunity seems as though it would be appropriate for your company, it’s important to gather information about the nature of the opportunity – is it a case study? A bylined article? A Q&A? A product review? A ‘bake-off’? – and whether your company has the resources to participate in the article if the editor is interested. If resources are tight, you should be able to turn to your media relations agency to develop content on your behalf, mediate interviews and case studies with your customers or handle the logistics of submitting a product for review.
While certainly not a comprehensive view of all opportunities to spread your message in the marketplace, editorial calendars are another useful tool in the PR practitioner’s toolbox.
By Linda Forrest
Media relations is a collaborative process. The client and the PR agency should clearly define objectives for the program at the outset and a plan should be formulated to reach those goals.
It’s important to consider that one of the predominant reasons for outsourcing the PR function is to gain efficiency. We can ease your workload so that you can better spend your time attending to your other business requirements. We are here to take the content development, pitching, media monitoring and other PR activities off of your plate. We work hard to learn our clients’ full story and best pursue the media coverage that your story deserves.
If this is your first time using an agency instead of doing PR in-house, a transition is to be expected. But soon enough, as our clients can attest, the process has been streamlined and results are achieved. Hopefully, the following few words on content development will help ease the transition.
Read More
