Marketing Matters

Why hire an outside agency or consultant to do your marketing or at least work with your current internal marketing department? A good question, and one for which I regularly find real world examples. Let me start with one of the most important reasons…objectivity.

Brenner Associates recently redesigned a website for a software/services company. They were flabbergasted that we recommended NOT mentioning the name of their flagship product anywhere on the home page (with limited room for text). Instead, we suggested substituting the product name with important key phrases that clearly explain the benefits and value of this product.

To someone inside the company, the product name is everything. While under development, the product – and its name – was everything to the employees. They lived, breathed and dreamt about it for months if not years on end. So when it came time to market their new widget, it seemed obvious that the company’s website homepage should scream the product name upfront and center.

Too bad the rest of the world did not have the same pre-launch experience. Potential customers never head the product name before and don’t care, at this point, what it’s called. However, what they DO know is that they have a problem that needs solving. And they have a general idea of what terms to use to look for solutions.

For example, say your company has just launched a new product called MoraleCentral, a new online tool that gives users tips on how to solve employee morale issues. 

Chances are, potential customers – those with employee morale problems – would go to the Internet and Google such terms as  “employee moral”, “moral boosting”, “improving employee productivity” or “teamwork tips” But unless they are already familiar with the product itself, chances are zip that they would search for “MoraleCentral”.

More importantly, once they found your website, its important that they instantly know that they’ve came to the right place. If you don’t catch their interest in the first second or two, they are just a click away to the next site.

So, what would be of more value to have highlighted on your homepage? The term MoralCentral or the words “Solve Employee Morale Problems Now”? The product title means diddly to them. But when they see the “solve employee moral” highlighted, they know instantly that they’ve come to the right place.

For the guy who has been working on MoralCentral for the past year and a half, this might seem counter intuitive. For an outside marketing pro, the choice is obvious.

It addition, MoralCentral will certainly have no SEO value whatsoever. The phrase used to highlighting the problem/solution, however, will have been chosen based upon its proven track record for driving viewers to websites. What’s the point of highlighting anything if no one will ever see it?

Another case in point

Several years ago, Brenner Associates was working with a top printer manufacturer. The internal marketing team was quite excited (and anxious) because the company was about to launch a new printer, the XPT 3000 (not the real name). The reason this was such a big deal to the printer company and its employees is because the new XPT3000 was about to replace the company’s best selling printer to date. If this new printer wasn’t a success, it could really hurt sales.

So Brenner Associates looked at the new product and at the competitive landscape and at customer demand and decided that the best thing about this new printer was that fact that it was, by far, the fastest printer under $100. And that is what we led with our press release headline – AJAX Introduces The Fastest Printer Under $100.

The internal marketing manager was upset. Why didn’t we mention the name of the printer or that it was replacing their most popular printer?

He wanted a headline that read AJAX Replaces Popular XPT1000 With New XPT3000.

To you and me (outsiders) it should be obvious. But it wasn’t so clear to the person that had been living and breathing XPT3000 for the past six months.

Then I asked the manager, “what if Frigidaire was about to replace its best selling refrigerator with one that was twice as big for half the price. Should the headline be Frigidaire Replaces Its Best Selling Refrigerator With New One or Frigidaire’s New Refrigerator Gives You More For Less ?

This was easy for him to answer correctly.

He was an outsider looking in.

Objectivity.

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Subtle changes - can you find the arrow?

Did you notice? Earlier this month, Google launched a new redesign of its website and results pages. While I’ve read bits and pieces about technology changes done to the background, from an “experience” viewpoint, many of the changes are fairly minor and perhaps indistinguishable untill someone points them out: the logo is cleaner, small border added between menu links, bright blue color used throughout etc. Ho hum.

But by far, the most significant change is on the left hand side of the results. While Google has always had a means to filter your search to include just video, or blogs, or news etc., it is now easier than ever to do so. In fact, if you are doing a search on a topic such as “American Idol” or “digital cameras” its hard not to click on one of the left-hand filters to check out what videos you can find, or what blogs are saying about the topic. These elevated options are clearly a reflection of the growing importance of social networking and other “real time” communications.

To that point, the new Google search also makes it simple to filter news from non-news – and more importantly, select the time period from when the entry was posted – past hour? past 24 hours? past week?

This change highlights the signficant role that strategic PR/communications plays in gaining Internet visibility. Now, more than ever, distributing regular press releases are a must. Participating in relevant social network forums are valuable. Blogging grows in value as well.

And that all requires a communications professional that understands “new writing” rules. As always, content – whether it be a news release, article or blog post – must be interesting and provide value to the reader. But it must also be in a form apporpriate for the media (please: no more mile-long blog posts) and strategically crafted to gain SEO. And that’s what today’s top PR pros are all about.

Now, more than ever, public relations and communications play a vital role in marketing success.

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Reports of PR's death, greatly exaggerated

“REPORTS OF MY death have been greatly exaggerated” – a quote attributed to Mark Twain but apropos for today’s PR industry.

I’ve seen several pieces of late, written by journalists and bloggers who appear rushed to sound the death knell over public relations. “New media and Web 2.0 changed the game,” they say, “and make public relations obsolete.”

Fact is – public relations expertise is more relevant, more important today than ever before. Search engine marketing, social network marketing, Web 2.0 applications and the like have all served to increase – not decrease – the value and demand for high-quality public relations.

Doomsayers don’t get it. They think PR is all about writing a press release or getting a story in a magazine. Now that print media is in decline, they say PR is on it’s way out as well. They never understood that press releases and published articles are just means to an end. The core of PR has always been about communication skills and strategies – the ability to evaluate the competitive landscape, identify the right messages and succinctly and effectively communicate those messages to the right audience -wherever they may be.

The doomsayer would like you to think, for instance, that search engine optimization is all about trickery. Add a meta tag descriptor here, pepper a page with keywords there and Voila!, customers will come flocking to your site to buy your stuff.

As attractive as this might sound, it is of course, hogwash. Any substantive expert on SEO will mention meta tags but will hammer home the biggest point over and over again – effective SEO is really all about content – and content is public relations: who is your audience, what do you want to say and what is the best way to say it for the medium you are using. If you focus on these elements and then augment them with a bit of coding strategy, you will have truly effective SEO results.

The same is true when working within social network sites and blogs. A simple technician can set up links to your blog and FaceBook page, but it takes a highly skilled communicator to effectively manage the customer relationships that these sites create. And that’s what PR is really all about.

Press releases haven’t gone away. They are now more important than ever before (see my earlier blog on this subject). Magazines haven’t gone away either. They’ve just expanded online. Journalists haven’t disappeared. They’re also online, along with a host of bloggers, freelancers and forum writers that are also writing about you and your company.

This means that PR isn’t going away either. It has just become more complex and more important to a strategic communications plan than ever before.

To be sure, the role of PR has evolved and practitioners have had to add new skill sets and adapt traditional expertise to an entirely new set of strategies. But their expertise has become critical.

An SEO technician can write all the backend code he/she wants but it will take expert writing skills to create copy that will not only get you listed high in a Google search but will also convert visitors into customers. An HTML expert might promise you more GoogleAd visibility, but it will take PR expertise to ensure the right people are clicking on your ad, reading your information, judging you to be an industry expert and becoming loyal customers.  

This is hardcore PR, pure and simple. There will always be those who promise a cheap and easy route to success. They were the ones who thought a marketing plan consisted of sending poorly written, ineffectual press releases out over BusinessWire and hoping for the best. Today, they are the ones promising success through cheap technical trickery. 

The fact is, marketing today is more complicated and more multi-faceted than ever before. Creating, managing and maximizing the success of a marketing program in the digital age requires a real pro – and today, more than ever, that pro is a public relations expert.

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