Read Never Get a ”Real„ Job Online
Authors: Scott Gerber
Pay off referrers
. For the right price, anyone’s time and energy can be bought—even if that person isn’t someone who would directly benefit from using your product or service.
If you only market with members of your niche marketplace in mind, you’ll be missing out on the millions of others who are acquainted with those in your target market. The person who sees your marketing message might not need your products—but there’s a pretty good chance she either knows or will meet several people along the way who fit the bill.
Buy people off to get your brand message to the right leads, and not just your already-happy customers—everyone and anyone. Although offering a potential business referrer a gift certificate to use your services might be a lost cause, a more generic proposal—such as referral gift cards for popular consumer products or services—just might do the trick.
Sizzle It! offers a free breakfast for a person’s entire office in exchange for any referral that converts into a successful sale. This spreads the word about our company even further.
Find generic, brand-appropriate incentives to turn regular Janes and Joes into salespeople and brand ambassadors. Feed their impulses for your gain. Remember to have a signed agreement or money in the bank to show for the free stuff you’re giving away before you express your gratitude.
You’re the worst person to say you’re the best
. As I mentioned earlier, claiming to be the best will give you slightly more credibility than a prison inmate. Scrap the self-aggrandizing garbage in favor of a better approach: mainly, employing the services of the best sales team available to you to attract new customers: your current customers.
After every successful transaction, ask your happy clients for a testimonial detailing their experiences and recommending your service to others. Get these accounts in both video and audio whenever possible, because this media will play a vital role in your offline and online marketing efforts. Place these testimonials everywhere you can post them—from your Web site to your social media profiles.
Turn your customers into mouthpieces and offer prospects someone with whom they can relate. Use your clients’ images, titles, and words to sell new clients on your value.
It’s not personal; it’s business marketing
. Publicly challenging your competition by flaunting their weaknesses is a great way to overtly differentiate your business and tout its strengths.
React to competitor missteps, broken promises, or underperformance with impunity. If a competitor raises prices, you might push out a series of marketing messages that show customers how much they could save by choosing your company instead. If they have a record of poor customer service, you might decide to build a series of marketing messages around one of their former customer’s testimonials. For every big story in the press about a competitor’s mistake, celebrate by providing a special offer to their disenfranchised customers.
Flex some marketplace muscle. Latch on to your competitor’s brand recognition to elevate your own.
However, remember to use discretion when taking your competitors to task. Don’t just decide to knock the competition without rhyme or reason. Take a strong stand, but make sure to base that stand on something valid. The intention of this exercise shouldn’t be to come off as a whining baby who’s bitter because his company is in second place. It’s a power move with the sole purpose of pointing out to customers why their dollar is better spent with you than the other guy. Focus on facts, not opinions, and maintain a high level of professionalism. Keep your efforts focused on taking market share away from competitors based on their actions and inactions with respect to their customers. Say why you’re a better option—don’t just proclaim that they suck.
Under no circumstance should you be libelous or untruthful when referring to your competitors. There are real legal ramifications for making fraudulent statements.
However, give competitors a reason to notice and respond to you, and don’t let up on your assault. Should they make the mistake of acknowledging your existence, they’ll be doing you a big favor by putting you on the map to a whole new world of consumers—and openly recognizing you as an equal. Doing so will provide your business with legitimacy and lend you credibility—ammunition you can use to continue your conquest of more market share.
Most importantly, back up
everything
you say with action and pristine service. If you mess up by overpromising or underdelivering, your competitors will be happy to never let you or your prospects forget it.
Know how to react so you can attract
. If you’re a proficient reaction marketer, you’re able to link your brand and marketing messages to any current event or pop culture trend—no matter how absurd the connection—and make it work. Many businesses have used recession, weather, and even home runs hit by major league ball players to market special offers to customers and generate sales.
Reaction marketing also helps your business get noticed in the press, because many publications—print and online—often seek out quirky stories for holidays and special occasions. For example, one of my clients—a bar and restaurant in New York City—jumped onboard the hoopla over Mattel’s celebration of Barbie’s 50th Anniversary by creating and hosting an event called, Barbie’s Birthday Beauty Pageant Blow Out. Barbie enthusiasts from all over NYC came out to compete in a runway-style competition as their favorite Barbie. Not only did this event generate revenue on an off-night, it also garnered weeks’ worth of press and media coverage—from blogs to local television coverage to national newspaper stories.
Put yourself in a position to tie your brand and marketing messages to the right big stories. Take advantage of mood shifts and attention grabbers in the market as they come. Don’t try to start trends—that’s way too expensive an endeavor. Instead, hop aboard preexisting ones or those on the break. Know what’s going on in the news and popular culture. Larger competitors might be slower to act due to their by-committee decision-making style, but you can react to the outside world instantly. Always adhere to your brand message, but make sure that you remain fresh, creative, and fun to take advantage of what’s hot and keep your brand relevant.
How to Be Your Own PR Firm without Spending $10k a Month
PR firms charge ridiculous fees—sometimes as high as tens of thousands of dollars per month. Clearly, your start-up can’t afford that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do the same thing they do. In fact, many PR firms use their junior account managers and entry-level employees to handle actual press outreach—many of whom are no more qualified to handle PR campaigns than you are!
Here are 12 tips on how to engage the media, get your story in journalists’ hands, and gain notoriety for your business.
1.
Never
just
pitch your company
. Pitch a reporter about the launch of your homemade ice-cream, and you’ll be lucky to even get a rejection e-mail. Pitch the launch of your business
along with
a branded promotion attached—say, a “Free Ice Cream Day” that offers everyone in the community a free scoop—then you might have a shot. Members of the media won’t care about your business unless they see a story angle that benefits their readers or viewers. Do your homework and focus your pitch on the amazing, unique things they care about. And
always
support your pitch with your expertise and credentials.2.
Insert yourself into big stories
. The media will only care about writing a feature exclusively about your start-up if it’s acquired for billions, hits an incredible milestone directly relevant to their audiences, or is sued by a conglomerate. However, you don’t need to
be
the big story to find ways to insert yourself into one as an expert source. Use Google Trends to find out what’s popular and determine creative ways to tie your brand into trending topics.3.
If it bleeds it leads
. In most cases, editorial and advertising divisions of publications and media outlets are similar to church and state. But without advertising, there can be no press outlet. In order to get advertising, a publication needs to attract an audience, which they often do by leading with stories to grab the eyeballs—that is, brutal murders or Lindsay Lohan on page one. Whether they admit it or not, most press outlets are about ratings first and
important
content second. You must spin your pitches to stir genuine emotional responses. If you don’t spin a story aiming for page one, you probably won’t end up on page 40.4.
Find the right media outlets
. Visit book stores and newspaper stands and search free Web sites and online news aggregators like
Blogpulse.com
,
Technorati.com
,
MondoTimes.com
,
Technorati.com
,
Alltop.com
, and
World-Newspapers.com
. Use your brand language, keywords, and competitors’ names to find the names and URLs of relevant media outlets covering your niche marketplace.5.
Build a press list
. Many writers include their e-mail addresses in their social media profiles or in the bylines or footers of their articles or blogs. Most local news stations have a tip line and a news desk e-mail address readily accessible. For those that don’t, consider using these free and low-cost services to find the contact information for the appropriate reporters and journalists covering your niche marketplace’s beat:
Mastheads.org
(Cost: Varies),
EasyMediaList.org
(Cost: Varies), and
MediaonTwitter.com
(Cost: Free).6.
Fit the pitch to the outlet
. If your niche marketplace reads a certain magazine with content that doesn’t quite fit with your brand message, find a way to give it the right spin. A junk removal service might benefit tremendously from a woman’s fashion magazine if they find that their main customers are women. Perhaps the company could pitch a story about how to “turn junk into chic.” Obviously, that’s an extreme example, but you get the point. Originality has a funny way of turning pitches that shouldn’t be stories into featured articles and news material.7.
Tailor pitches to the right person
. Sending generic, boilerplate e-mails with press release attachments is how amateurs who
don’t get it
pitch reporters. This method shows absolutely no respect for the person you are pitching. It just lets them know that you didn’t put any thought into pitching them. I assure you they’ll “return the favor” by adding your e-mail address to their spam filter. Read their columns and make your pitch relevant to that writer or editor and their publications.8.
Know the publication schedule
. Different media outlets have different calendars. Blogs and local TV are likely daily, whereas certain magazines and newspaper features may be planned weeks or months in advance. In many cases, you’ll be able to search online or contact your targeted outlet’s advertising department to get their editorial calendar. This will help you see what types of stories the outlet will be publishing, and help you determine how far in advance you need to begin pitching.9.
Write a killer subject line
. Whatever you do, do not write generic subject lines such as “hey” or “interesting story about a local business.” Understand that most journalists and editors get hundreds—sometimes thousands—of e-mail pitches every day. To a local newspaper, a subject line such as “Joe’s Catering Co. to host a BBQ competition to raise $100,000 for cancer research” will have a much better chance of getting attention than “Local company to host fund-raiser.” “Hey.” Put as much, if not more, time into your e-mail’s subject line than the pitch itself.10.
Timing is everything
. In my experience, the best days to send out pitches are Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday between the hours of 7:30 am and 11 am, or between 2 pm and 4 pm. I’ve found that most journalists consider Mondays as catch-up days, Fridays as “I can’t wait for the weekend” days—and weekends as, well, weekends!11.
Follow up
without
being a pain in the ass
. Every PR person has his or her own version of this routine, but I have found the most success in this follow-up schedule: After sending my initial inquiry, I wait two days. If I don’t hear anything, I re-forward my previous e-mail with the words “Follow Up” in the beginning of the subject line instead of the “Fwd” and add a quick two liner about following up within the body of the e-mail. If still I don’t hear anything after another 24 hours, I call once and leave a message. If I still don’t hear anything, I call a few more times over the course of the following week without leaving a message until I get someone on the phone or I’m told I’m dead in the water. Whenever you leave messages, leave your phone number twice and your e-mail address twice—once spelled out—so that whoever’s checking his or her messages quickly doesn’t miss anything.12.
Be ready to monetize your press mentions
. Your company’s name in print or on local TV will mean nothing without an associated promotion to drive lead generation and, ultimately, sales. Make sure that your pitch includes a tailored offer and action message that turns eyeballs into cash. Keep your press links and clippings on your Web site, social media profiles, and applicable sales and marketing materials to elongate your press’s revenue-generation potential.