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 Francis Moran
Francis’s favourite fictions is a continuing series of posts on common myths surrounding the practice of public relations. When I give this as a presentation, I subtitle it, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” Today’s fiction comes courtesy of a chief financial officer at such a venture who nixed her marketing vice president’s intention to hire us, saying, “I can’t measure marketing so I won’t fund it.”
Too bad; the company she used to work for is now out of business, taking a genuinely valuable technology advance and more than $30-million in investors’ money with it. Maybe now, she at least has a yardstick with which to measure the cost of not marketing.
It is an enduring myth, though, that marketing in general, and maybe public relations in particular, evades measurement, that there’s no way to calculate the return on investment for such an inexact science. As with many of my other favourite fictions, it is a myth perpetuated in large part because it serves many in the PR industry itself to do so. Theirs is a black box science, they tell gullible clients, dependant on things like “relationships,” and intended to “build buzz” and a bunch of other ambiguous terms deliberately employed expressly because they do evade objective definition.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
I can’t imagine that any client today will sign on to a program that doesn’t at least define a scope of work in clear and unambiguous terms. In other words, a critical path of activities that at least tells the client how much PR stuff they’re buying, how many news releases, analyst briefings, story pitches, trade shows supported, that sort of thing. We call that measuring outputs, and it’s as far as many agencies are prepared to go. We think it’s a good, but woefully inadequate, starting point.
Any agency worth its retainer should be willing to describe the results its efforts will produce in similarly unambiguous terms. If you invest in our exerting this much effort, dear client, you will see this much media and analyst coverage over the term of the program. We call this measuring outcomes, and we define it very clearly in terms of specific objectives for the program. We tell you which media outlets and analyst firms we’re targeting. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that we will then tell you exactly in what percentage of them we expect to generate coverage over the term of the program, what type of coverage that will be, and what sorts of stories, key messages and so on that coverage will contain. We break down our objectives by category of activity, setting success objectives for individual news releases, product launches, analyst tours, trade show briefings, speaking programs, and so on.
We like this approach because we’re not asking our clients to buy a bunch of PR stuff from us. Rather, we’re asking them to invest in a given level of effort, the outcome of which we have clearly defined. Now they only need to ask themselves whether those results are a good return on the investment we’re asking them to make. At the end of the program, our clients don’t need us to tell them whether we have achieved the objectives or not. They can tell, without a trace of uncertainty or ambiguity, for themselves.
If your agency or internal PR department won’t commit to setting those kinds of objectives, it’s time to find a new one.
But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, don’t call yet, there’s more.
Even if we achieve the outcomes we projected, is it worth anything if that media and analyst coverage hasn’t advanced our clients’ business objectives? Here’s where the wheat really gets separated from the chaff. I’ll write more about this in a future post.
By Jill Pyle
Over the past few days, news of Om Malik’s heart attack has been spreading throughout the blogosphere. Inspired by the story, the New York Times published a piece about blogging as a source of stress.
I have to agree, blogging can be stressful. During the weeks when deadlines are looming and inspiration is lacking, it can be a challenge to come up with unique ideas. I can’t imagine how stressful it must be to have to write several unique posts per day and worry about being the first to break news.
Let this be a warning to all of us. Bloggers, take care of yourselves. Readers, don’t be shy. Your comments and recognition make it all worth it.
By Jill Pyle
More often than not, influential trade media represent the majority of our clients’ top tier media targets. However, in recent months there have been several occasions where I was asked to track down contact information for editors at relatively small newspapers, as well as international newspapers.
We all know that media databases are less then perfect. When using them to search for newspapers that are distributed within a particular area, problems can arise if outlets are tagged with the wrong location or omitted entirely. As means to avoid handing your client an incomplete media list, it’s always best to double check your work and make sure you’ve gathered accurate and complete media contact information.
I’ve found the following sites to be quite helpful when compiling local media lists for areas I’m unfamiliar with.
US
USNPL.com
50states.com
Canada
List of Canadian newspapers on Wikipedia
JournalismNet
Global
Newspapers24
List of newspapers on Wikipedia
Newspapers by region at Yahoo
Newspaperindex.com
World Newspapers
Online
Onlinenewspapers.com
The Internet Public Library
NewspaperDirect.com
If you have any additional resources, I encourage you to share them with me so I can expand the list.
By inmedia
O&P Edge, an independent media company that covers the clinical, business, regulatory, and human aspects of the orthotic and prosthetic community, is featuring an article about marketing O&P practices. The article is a Q&A with our managing partner, Francis Moran. He provides insight into why marketing is important for this group and shares easy-to-follow marketing strategies. To read the article, click here.
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‘You have no privacy. Get over it.’
January 03, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran The line above is a statement by former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy that was quoted by Canadian novelist Guy Gavriel Kaye in an article in the Globe and Mail‘s Books section just before Christmas. Kaye wrote about how technology, and especially the everyone’s-a-publisher-now phenomenon of the internet and its pervasive blogs, […]
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Happy holidays
December 21, 2007 by inmedia
By inmedia We are going on hiatus for the holidays. We will be back in the New Year.
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May your New Year be crisis-free
December 20, 2007 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan After reading the recently unveiled 101 Dumbest Moments in Business of 2007, assembled by the recently defunct Business 2.0 Magazine, I was struck by the thought that most of the events likely resulted in extensive hair loss for the PR folk involved. Crisis management is a core competency of any decent PR […]
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30 years of technology
December 19, 2007 by Linda Forrest
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 […]
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Making the most of downtime
December 18, 2007 by Jill Pyle
By Jill Pyle As work starts to wind down for the year, you may find yourself with more spare time than usual. Rather than aimlessly surfing the Internet, consider catching up on some of the things you pushed to the side when deadlines were looming. Revisit your bookmarks If you don’t use a social bookmarking […]
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Fiction: It’s all about relationships – Take 2
December 17, 2007 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Francis’s Favourite PR Fictions started out as a presentation I used to give to technology company executives who always reacted strongly, and, surprisingly, usually positively, to the subtitle of the presentation, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” This fiction, that successful public relations relies mainly […]
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What are trade magazines and why do they matter?
December 13, 2007 by Jill Pyle
By Jill Pyle Every business has a story to tell and every story has some level of news value. Some stories are of interest to a large number of media, while others appeal only to a limited group. Determining which set of media should be interested in your story is a job best handled by […]
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Time for an SR&ED tune up
December 12, 2007 by Peter Kemball
By Peter Kemball For a quarter of a century, the Canadian government has operated a popular program that puts cash in the pockets of innovative firms and reduces taxes for others, the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program, popularly called “SHRED.” It’s now time for a tune-up and recently the feds invited submissions from any […]
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Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]