Your Marketing Magnet

You’re anxious to see your name in print, and to appear on radio and television. But before you put your publicity plan in motion or pick-up the phone and pitch an editor, broadcaster or producer, you should know a few more things about the PR process.

Doing your homework, understanding the basics and thinking creatively, is where it all begins.  In addition to being packaged and compiling a current list of media contacts and sources, you must come up with a list of clever ideas — themes or angles that convey your marketing message and also relate to the needs of your target audiences, as well as to the needs of the publication’s readers, radio station’s listeners and TV show’s viewers you’re going after.

Make no mistake this process requires a great deal of time, effort and patience, but it doesn’t require any special training.  Sure some of us are naturally more inclined towards creative marketing and promotion, but the truth is anyone who tries to generate good PR ideas for his or her business can.  You just have to get your creative juices flowing.

If you’re finding that to be a difficult task, consider employing these measures:

1. Spot the problem – know exactly what your problem is before you attempt to solve or articulate it.  Be upfront – state your marketing objective in a single sentence.  For example, if you’re a business or life coach promoting a seminar on goal-setting, convince your target audience right off why they should attend it (as opposed to reading an article on the same subject or buying a self-help book).

1. Present the facts – Like a detective who requires clues and can’t rely on clever thinking alone to solve a case, you too must have all the facts to solve a problem.  Professionals in every field recognize the importance of gathering specific and useful information. When I take on clients, I conduct extensive research on their company.  I interview them and review their website along with their other promotional materials to get a deeper understanding of what it is they have to say and offer.  You have to do the same.  Keep organized files of the background material you gather and review them several times before formulating your solution. Familiarize yourself with this information by using word processing programs to write-up and tweak your research. Summarize and condense your most hard-hitting facts into a few neat pages that can be viewed at a glance.

1. Collect general knowledge – Deal only with the facts that pertain to the project at hand. Such facts include: budget, schedule, available resources, the customer’s specifications, product knowledge and techniques. Draw upon your own experience and expertise and refer to your storehouses of information concerning events, people, media, culture, science, technology, management, and the world at large.  Advance and accelerate your education by becoming a student of the areas that correspond to your profession, and make it a priority to subscribe to the various journals that relate to your field.  Clip and save articles that contain useful information, read books about your area of expertise, search on-line, and develop a reference library.   Become a compulsive information collector by taking courses, attending seminars, conferences and trade shows.  Make friends with your colleagues and share your stories, case histories, and other technical tips.  

1. Look for groupings - many ideas are simply new variations of existing concepts. By looking for new relationships between old ideas, you can come up with a fresh approach.  When you examine the facts, look for common links. This will help you determine a clever angle or promotion that fits your marketing objectives and conveys your message in a unique way.  The Earl of Sandwich, who invented the sandwich because he wanted to hold his meat in one hand while being free to play poker with the other made use of this approach.  So too did the engineer of the clock radio, when he combined two existing technologies into one.

1. Sleep on it – after gathering your information and reviewing it a million times over, you’ll reach a point where you’ll begin rehashing the same thoughts over and over again.  That’s when you need to stop, take a break, sleep on it, and let your unconscious mind take over. Renew your idea-producing powers by placing the problem aside for a while, then returning to it with a fresh perspective.  This will help gain clarity and improve upon ideas and writings you initially deemed brilliant.  And since your big bang idea or solution can come to you in your sleep, while you’re showering or walking the dog, always have a pad and pen handy to jot down your thoughts.  Otherwise, you risk losing them!  Place your ideas in a central paper or computer file, so you can easily refer to them.  

1. Use a checklist – checklists are tools geared towards problems that come up in your daily routines.  They can be used to stimulate creative thinking and are also a starting point for new ideas.  The following case study illustrates my point.  Jane is a retailer who’s well versed in the technical aspects of her business, yet sometimes she has trouble selling her garments. She could overcome this weakness by making a checklist of typical customer objections and how to respond to them.  Over a period of several weeks, she wages different tactics for overcoming these objections and discusses them with her fellow salespeople.  She also reads books on selling, and engages her own trail-and-error attempts.

The result -   now familiar with her checklist, she won’t have to reinvent the

wheel every time a tough customer comes her way.

1. Get feedback – Even if you’re accustomed to working alone, bouncing ideas off your partner or another expert you admire and getting their professional opinion of your work can really help you stream line your thoughts and produce others you hadn’t considered. Be open to feedback and take it for what it’s worth.  If you feel you’re right and the other person’s criticisms are off base, just ignore them.  However, more often than not, the feedback they’ll provide you with can then be translated into the greatest and most profitable ideas.

1. Pair up – as an inventor, you may develop a better microchip.  But if you want to make a fortune selling it, you should pair up with someone who’s demonstrated strong sales and marketing abilities. One of the best ways to think more creatively is to work in pairs. The person you team up with should have skills and thought processes that balance and compliment your own.  For example, in advertising agencies, the copywriters (or word people) team up with the artistic directors (the visual people).   

Still having trouble thinking creatively? Good PR ideas can also be generated by:

• Going shopping – enter a toy store and take a look around. Perhaps you can devise a game to promote your message.
• Keeping a “swipe file” full of promotions that catch your eye or that you especially like. Use them as examples for planning your own PR.
• Asking your associates or employees for their input and rewarding the person who provides you with a winning idea. Suitable rewards include: cash, gift certificates, gift baskets, dinner or tickets to a theater or sporting event.
• Spending an afternoon at the library, in a bookstore like Chapters or Indigo, or at a museum. The best way to feel inspired is to surround your self with ideas.
• Stepping outside your comfort zone. A successful promotion in one industry may be creatively reproduced and applied to your own.

The creative process works in two ways: The first is the idea-producing stage where ideas flow freely.  The second is the critical or “editing” stage where each idea is scrutinized for its practicality.     Too many people make the mistake of mixing these stages and are too quick to criticize or shoot down an idea they should be encouraging. A typical idea killer is, “We did that already and it didn’t work”.   Given the rapid pace of change, it’s possible that in today’s world an idea that once failed can be resurrected or refined and made effective in a new marketplace.

Another frequently voiced objection is “We don’t do things like that around here”.      As a PR professional, I can assure it is very dangerous to make statements like that.  Remember when you do the same old thing you get the same old results.

So don’t let yourself fall into the same trap lots of businesspeople, especially managerial types, who tend to develop their critical faculties over their creative ones, fall into.  For if every creative person listened to these people and was afraid to try something new, we would not have telephones, cars, airplanes, personal computers, the Internet, light bulbs, or even electricity!