I often get public relations proposals from my clients to review with requests to put my two cents in and make a recommendation.  Having worked with pr firms for the last 15 years gave me a great deal of respect for this profession and as I said in my last post I encourage all entrepreneurs  to seek them out.  So if you’re a small business or entrepreneur in start-up phase looking to get press here are some tips to help you figure out which pr firm is best for you:

• Of most importance other than public relations experience, is industry media relationships.  Who do they know and how can they leverage that relationship on your behalf. Do they already know the media professionals in your market?
• For me, this makes location irrelevant.  I’ve worked with pr firms around the world. Phone and email work perfectly fine, face-to-face is much less important especially in today’s technologically connected world.
• You get what you pay for.  Pay less and you get less. PR professionals are like lawyers, they have billable hours so your monthly retainer only gets you what their hourly rate covers.   When hiring a larger firm this can be the difference between getting the A Team or getting the B team (less experience). While this may be fine just be sure you know who will be working on your account, what experience level they have and get a clear understanding of what to expect.
• It’s always better to be the big fish in the little pond versus the little fish in the big pond.  That doesn’t mean you always have to pick the smallest firm, it just means the firm has to make you feel like a big fish and give you quality service. This means you have to work at building the relationship as well.
• Chemistry is very important.  If everything else is equal pick the one you feel most comfortable working with.
• Be sure the firm you choose is up-to speed on the latest pr tactics, today that means social media.

Once you’ve selected your pr firm be sure to help them learn your business, develop relevant story topics and set regular goals.  The good pr firms always supply activity and results reports.  Use these to refine your pr strategy and reset goals throughout the year.  Always make sure your pr firm is the first to know about any changes in the business – both good and bad.  Many a media opportunity is missed simply because the PR firm just didn’t know enough in time to manage the news appropriately.

PR is a top priority for building a business and the first line of defense when something goes wrong so make sure you do your homework when selecting the right firm for your business.

Susan Frederick,  Managing Director

From my experience a marketing budget is often an after thought.  The last thing entrepreneurs think about or plan for.  While it’s fine to make compromises,(all early growth stage companies usually have to) it’s where you decide to make those compromises that can affect your revenue growth.  Too often I am asked for marketing help and then reminded that there is only a shoe string budget. While there are of course always marketing tactics that cost little money they aren’t necessarily the ones that will help you grow your business the fastest.

Any one reading my blog knows I am a huge proponent of planning and that includes marketing.  If you are getting investment funding be sure part of it is put aside for marketing and do your homework so it’s an adequate amount.

When planning the marketing budget on my list of top marketing spends are the company’s web site and public relations.  I encourage everyone to seek professional help for both activities.  Web sites and public relations are key to building brand awareness in your market so unless you’re an experienced web designer or PR professional don’t do this alone or on the cheap.  Based on the functionality needed to run the business web sites can run from as low as a few thousand dollars for a few pages (think teaser site) to $15,000 and upwards for a more fully functional site (think shopping carts and email applications, etc.).  But even if you’re doing a simple web site without a lot of functionality plan to have it professionally designed.

Ninety percent of all the web sites I audit fail and generally the failure can be traced back to one of two things; the entrepreneur did it on his/her own or hired soemone without a lot of expertise in the field. This is how you get one page sites with copy that scrolls on for pages and dayglo font colors.  Nothing screams “warning, warning this is not a professional business” like an ill designed web site.  Your web site is often the first impression of your business so why would you not invest in making it a good impression?

Also, because most entrepreneurs don’t plan for public relations there are no marketing dollars to invest.  Or, there is one successful media pick-up and they decide they can do it on their own.  A true public relations effort takes advantage of not only market knowledge but existing media relationships built up over an extended period of time.  People working in media, like everyone else, are busy folks with deadlines so they are much more likely to speak to folks they already know and trust.  While a simple monthly campaign run by a professional can go for a few thousand dollars a full blown company or product launch can run $10,000 or more per month depending on how much outreach needs to be done.

Bottom line is that the bottom line fairs much better and grows more quickly when you plan to spend adequate dollars and use professionals for the top two marketing activities that build brand awareness and prospect knowledge.

• Passion that is reflected as a determination to suceed against all odds
• A positive attitude demonstrated by an entrepreneur’s day-to-day behavior
• Adapability shown by an ability to improvise and overcome obstacles
• Disciplined and focused with an ability for rigorous planning
• Has a hunger to learn, listens and seeks out experts as advisors
• Has a sales orientation and is rigorous about the sales process
• Knows his/her own strengths and weaknesses

If you just took out your pen or pencil to start checking off which ones you think apply, be sure to work the list in reverse, otherwise you might just be kidding yourself.  And what do you do if you find yourself coming up short?  You might just be better off working for someone else. Not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur but sometimes through difficult circumstances like today’s market people feel as if there is no other choice.

According to a recent SBA statistic 1/3 of all start-ups fail in the first 4 years so it’s important that you be honest with yourself about your ability to be a successful entrepreneur.  Once you’re committed to the path pay particular attention to bullets 4 and 5 to get off to a great start.

There are of course two ways to retest.  You can run the exact campaign a second time to confirm results and you can change one variable to test for improvement. Recently using a commercially available software platform that supports email marketing and provides analytics on the campaigns, I’ve been retesting to see if I can lift response rates. We retested lists, added a test for mutiple efforts, and retested the offers.

We got an additional 10% response lift by adding an effort. Now, we’ll retest adding more efforts to see how response rates are affected. Offers also had an impact and we’ve learned what doesn’t work when an offer sent response rates in a downwards spiral. The obvious point is that testing an retesting can have a beneficial impact on your bottom line.  It’s what you don’t know that should have you wondering if your leaving money on the table. Please note that in all our retests we only changed one variable at a time in order to get an accurate read on the outcome.

Retesting can and should be done with any marketing tactic you choose. Be sure your wow moments are repeatable before you commit marketing resources.

Let’s say you’re about to launch an email campaign to announce a new product feature just added that solves a customer problem.  You’ve identfied the target, you’ve written the benefit messages, you’ve filled in your email template and your’re ready to distribute.  But before you press that send key have you clearly defined what outcome you want and established how you will measure for success?  WIll it be the number of opened emails?  Or the number that click through to the web site? Or the number that request a sales call?  Maybe it’s all of these.  Does the software email service you’re about to use measure for the analytics you want to capture and have you created a special web site landing page to ensure you can isolate this email’s response?  In other words, planning ensures you will be able to get measurement results you can use to improve your program. 

If you didn’t plan for and measure accurately, how would you know what to improve or even if you should repeat the campaign? Without good analytics you can effectively be throwing precisous marketing resources away.  If you’ve ever used or heard the phrase, “oh we tried that but it didn’t work,” without an explanation as to why it didn’t work I’m willing to bet there wasn’t any advanced planning done on what and how to measure results. 

Susan Frederick

There are lots of marketing tactics so to whittle down the list be sure that the tactics you choose support your annual goals and are the methods your likely targets will respond to.  After that of course it’s about the message.  But even the message needs to be tailored to the goal.  Are you just after building brand awareness, driving traffic to your web site, building relationships to the point of purchase, etc?

Lastly, don’t bite off more than you can chew in terms of starting too many projects you can’t sustain through the analysis phase.  While occasionally a one time marketing campaign to satisfy a specific sales need is just fine you really should be thinking a longer-term strategy where one program can build off or integrate with another. Such as a newsletter or blog request for sign-up to capture an opt-in email address, then used to offer a specific discount, sending them to a web site landing page that offers companion products.

Susan Frederick

Here’s an example from my personal experience.  We shipped our promotion materials to an out of state upcoming event.  I was even been smart enough to confirm they arrived.  I got to the show a day early to set up and no materials.  They weren’t at our booth location, they weren’t at any one else’s booth location.  Now what?  I thought I was a really prepared marketer as I had shipped  extra copies to my hotel room, my contingency plan. But as I said in the opening of this blog, there was Murphy’s law to deal with. You guessed correctly if you surmised the copies shipped to the hotel couldn’t be found either.  It appears event hotels have cavernous shipping rooms. My point is I wasn’t preparaed for both events to happen.

Since I’m the type of person who learns from experience, all future shipments were wrapped in dayglo tape with the company’s logo similar to what the police use in marking off crime scenes. You can see those boxes a mile away and delivery folks have no problem knowing exactly who owns the containers. Now of course I also carry promotion materials in my own suitcase and pdf files on a removable drive along with the location and phone numbers of local printing facilities that can do same day or 24 hour turn around.  My back-up plans have back-up plans.

I use this illustration only as a way to underscore how important it is to have both marketing and business plan contingencies built into your planning process.  No one has a crystal ball if we did we all would have bought the right stocks and winning lottery tickets and I wouldn’t be writing this blog.

Susan Frederick

So now it’s time to write the marketing goals.  I bet you thought you were done with writing goals? The marketing plan needs a solid foundation of measurable, achievable goals to focus the marketing team and your marketing vendors on successful outcomes.

It should be easier at this stage to choose the marketing tactics, assign budget and build campaigns. You need to focus on the target now in terms of what types of communication they respond to for assigning the right tactics. At the same time you’ll need to integrate your brand awareness efforts such as social media and public relations. Obviously resources will determine how much you can accomplish.

Lastly, don’t forget to build in budget and time for testing to ensure you are always working to improve the outcomes. As you can see from the first 3 blogs in this series planning is the foundation for successful activities that lead to successful company growth.

Writing good goals is as much science as art as they should be measurable and have an estimated time frame for accomplishment. Marketing plans should only be written once the business goals are established. Too often entrepreneurs rush into marketing activities without taking this very important step of writing clear measurable goals and then are disappointed when the marketing doesn’t work. 

The typical marketing tactic is to create, test, analyze and roll out or retest.  Without well written goals built off your strategic business plan that drive the marketing tactics there is no way to know how successful your marketing efforts have been.  You can’t tweak or eliminate those that aren’t working and that risk wasting marketing budget, time and possibly business growth.

A good goal has 4 parts:

1. What you want to accomplish
2. How you will accomplish it
3. A quantifiable measurement for success
4. The time you estimate to completion

Here’s an example:

To increase brand awareness by increasing the number of blog subscribers by 25% in 6 months.

By writing clear measurable goals effective marketing activities and tasks can be created to meet expectations.  With an established measurement the selected activities and tasks can be analyzed for success and the outcome used for building the next round of goals.

So before you launch into any marketing activities take a minute or two to write the business goals you’ll need to have a growth year.

Susan Frederick

Managing Director

Market-Train

1. Strategic Planning
2. Business Goal Setting
3. Market Planning
4. Contingency Planning
5. Plan Implementation
6. Program Analysis
7. Retesting

I’m devoting the next series of blogs to short discussions about each step.

Strategic Planning

Recently I had an opportunity to speak with two different entrepreneurs looking to start-up new businesses. Both were experts in their fields and had extensive experience. Both had the passionate drive to commit to the task of growing a business. The biggest difference between them was that one had spent the time to do market research, looking at potential competition, and evaluating strengths, weaknesses and risks of the opportunity. Satisfied that there was real potential this entrepreneur was taking the next steps to further define the business by writing a plan including financial estimates for multiple years.

The other entrepreneur was talking to real estate agents and hadn’t really thought through any of the basic business concepts. When I pointed this out the response was “it’s ok I don’t need to get any financing.” Good news but not the point of planning for success.

I can’t say this too often, “success is driven by focus and focus is driven by planning.” Planning and working the plan keeps your eye on the prize and helps adjust to the long list of unexpected things that will happen as you grow a business.

Whether you decide you need an abbreviated business plan or one to support your need to get investors don’t miss the point that it’s the “plan” stupid.

David Frey (http://www.MarketingBestPractices.com ) another marketing expert, agrees and stated this in a recent email to me:

“* Factoid * Research studies have shown that small businesses with
a marketing plan experience a 24 to 30 percent improvement in
sales over those without.”

“You don’t have to kill a tree to create an effective marketing
plan. In fact, you can create a successful plan for your small
business in just one day. To begin, don’t worry about writing
style or making your plan fancy. “

Successful entrepreneurship begins with planning so to paraphrase David, “Just go get a pencil and paper and get started.”

Susan Frederick

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