Let’s Clarify What the Job is….

While there are many talented, smart and creative people and firms out there for PR, Advertising and Marketing I have found that many have deviated off course from what the job truly is, what the goals really are and what the clients really need.

Creative ideas and bright ideas are absolutely vital however, they must push forward the end goal – sales and revenue. In this day and age this is not a nice thing to have, it’s a must. That sounds like a simple thing to say and a common and basic knowledge but I see examples everyday that are clearly off-course and not forwarding client goals.

Here’s an examples:

A Facebook widget or video game – look, I like to have fun as much as the next guy and I am guilty of downloading a game or two on my iPhone for sure but here’s the thing… what is the clear goal for the Facebook Game? How are you measuring it? Are you getting reach, interest, sales? There were many many many bright ideas during the 1995-97 period for dot com companies and ideas that sounded cool which distracted millions from the actual goals of what a company must do – which is produce sales of their product or service and generate revenue. It’s not a negotiable point.

The job of any PR agency, marketing firm or advertising agency is simple – create an idea, execute a strategy and communicate with the clients target public audience in order to make the client known to them, create interest and generate actual reach that can be used to assist the sales team and further the company growth and revenue. That’s it! If you have been sold on something other than this, well then they probably are creative geniuses but they are not serving your best interest.

Now is the time to get back to basics while the shift of traditional media continues to become less effective and new media is the vital way to communicate with the massive audiecne that is online using the interest that is now intertwined into every aspect of their lives from laptops to iphones. We must focus on people, relationships, what they need and want and how to communciate with them, service them better and build, cultivate and nurture those relationships in order to generate long term clients.

If you focus on the audience and the clear goals of your company to drive sales and revenue your PR, Marketing or Advetrising efforts will be dramatically improved. Don’t lose sight of the goal. Every tweet should have the goal in mind. Every facebook post should reflect the goal. Every blog article, press release, banner ad, video, photo gallery etc should have the goal clearly in mind and being systematically executed.

-Robert Cornish

Richter10.2 Media Group

http://www.richter10point2.com

Attention is Income

The concept of attention is a drastically underestimated element in most companies, CEO’s and business people’s mind. While gauging ROI for a given promotional strategy be it marketing, advertising or PR, many people fail to take into account the power of attention and what that means to the company and why it is absolutely an intrinsic value item that must be looked at to calculate ROI.

The amount of attention a company can attract will directly relate to how well that company does. To the degree that you have “heard of” a company will dictate how well they are doing.
Have you ever heard of GE? How about Virgin? Geico? BMW? They all get a huge amount of attention for their brands. They are all a “heard of” quantity. Yet I speak to companies daily that won’t allocate funds to their brand and attention in order to become a “heard of” quantity because they can’t figure out the ROI. The fact is that their target public audience may need or want their products or services right this second but – they have never “heard of them”. These companies are failing to get a sufficient amount of attention in order to become a known quantity.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/crystalflickr/190713106/

Get attention and you will gain clients, customers and revenue, period.
You can never get enough attention. It’s something that must be pushed and expanded week after week. Your public audience needs to know about you. They need to “hear about you”. If they don’t, it will be rather difficult to cultivate new business.

The amount of attention you are attracting will affect your bottom-line. Get the word out! Put your company in the spotlight.
The ways to do this are unlimited with the internet these days. Her

e are a few ideas:

- Social Media
- Blogs
- Videos- Press Releases- Photos
- Events- Twitter
- Status Updates
- Comments
- Websites
- Bookmarking
- RSS Feeds
- Advertisements- Recommendations- Mobile Apps
- Communities
To the degree that you are failing to fully utilize the above, you are missing or losing business and hurting your bottom-line revenue.

Make a point to expand the attention you get week after week and watch your sales and revenue grow

http://richter10point2.com

Social Media FAQ

As a company, we recently gathered and combined all of the frequently asked questions about new media PR and social media we are commonly asked and composed the answers.

We have found there is a lot of confusion among companies on the use of social media, what the ROI is and how a company can effectively leverage these tools as a strategy to improve their bottom-line.

Here are the answers to the questions - http://www.richter10point2.com/faq/

If you have any questions or would like to discuss how we can help develop a new media PR strategy for your company, please get in touch anytime.

Now is the time to step up the attention your company is getting and attract interest to build reach and sales. A comprehensive new media PR strategy that is well coordinated and executed will out-perform any other option out there. We look forward to hearing from you.

 

-Richter10.2 Media Group

Personal Contact

The value of personal contact in this day and age is incredibly high. So many businesses have automated processes and have lost touch with people, relationships and what clients, consumers and customers really want or need.

Yes – it’s a little time consuming to add a personal touch. I can’t tell you how many “out of the office” email replies I get, automated phone messages and thank you for contacting our company auto messages. It seems most businesses have lost sight of what PR, relationships and ultimately sales is all about – people and personal contact with those people

If you are looking to grab someone’s attention, take the time to find out a little about them and make your message personal. As an example, I went to San Francisco this past week and went to a small niche cupcake boutique called “Kara’s Cupcakes”, it is a fantastic cupcake shop and so I grabbed a business card. When I came home I made a point to send them a simple introduction message to introduce our agency to them and in the message the first line read something like this – “I spent the last week in San Francisco and stopped by your store in Ghiradelli Square, I loved your cupcakes and wanted to introduce our agency to you…..

Personal attention and contact gets’s noticed and stands out more than anything else. It also get’s a far better response!

This requires someone who understands PR and how to make relations with companies and people. PR and relationships are the powerful foundations that can dramatically improve your sales. Try this the next time you are prospecting another company or person and figure out how to add a level of personal touch to make your communication authentic.

-Robert Cornish

Find out what we do … http://richter10point2.com

Relations Sales

This week I was interviewed for a press release that is going out about our agency and while I was being interviewed I thought of the fundamental difference between successful use of a new media PR strategy using social media and every other approach such as traditional media, web marketing, banner ads and on and on which I will go over in a second.

First I wanted to discuss sales. I deal with companies both large and small every single day and have found uniformly that sales is a weak area for those companies. Many companies have been trying to create sales using tricky marketing, smartly targeted advertisements, funny or witty campaigns to hopefully grab attention etc. However, sales is and always has been and will always be about relationships. You have to reach out to the target public (audience) that you want to sell to, make yourself and company known to them and build a relationship somehow to then develop into a sale once you have authentically discovered what that person or company truly needs.

I see time and time again that companies and people are being sold on widgets, marketing ploys etc to hopefully stay fresh in their prospective clients minds and then hopefully that will do the trick and they will magically buy from them. While some of these methods may work to grab attention, there is no avoiding the fact that if you want to sell any person or company, you must 1. truly understand that company or person to understand how revenue flows, what the problems are and how to solve them and 2. you must build a relationship with the person or company that is authentic and built around trust.

Sales happens to be one of our strong suits as a company and I can attest that I follow these actions:

1. Seek the target market I am going after to make a connection somehow

2. Make some kind of introduction to work toward creating a relationship and starting a conversation

3. Really address the prospects needs and wants and work to learn about the prospects company to understand how they make income, what works, what doesn’t etc. Typically by the time I am done this step I feel the prospects company could hire me for sales the next day and I would smoothly start selling for them. Know them that well and you will close them.

4. Build the relationship – be authentic (in other words, be yourself) and work to maintain a very open communication with the prospect. Don’t just jam your ideas down their throat, listen and engage in a lot of back and forth conversation.

5. Address the problems accurately and propose the solution to work toward agreement both ways. Once you can come to an agreement based on what is being proposed, you can then comfortably ask for the sale.

Our agency works on these points everyday and because of this we can deliver our services to our clients far better than most creative agencies due to the fundamental difference that we don’t just create smart campaigns or pretty graphics for our clients, we intimately understand their companies, how the revenue flows, how they make sales and what the key problems are. From there we can cater entirely to them using new media as a platform to attain their goals and objectives with a clearly laid out strategy that is built around real world practicality – sales. We know that the reason any company invests in any PR, marketing or advertising strategy is to boost sales and revenue which would be impossible to attain unless their was a crystal clear understanding of how they sell and how revenue is created for that company.

But the secret behind sales is relationships. You can’t make a sale if you haven’t first made relations with a target public. It’s not an overnight thing, building relations is authentic, it’s transparent and it takes time. Go and try this out to fine tune your sales strategy and you will see for yourself that if you 1. identify a target public you would like to go after and 2. make relations with them and build your pipeline making relations with people and companies developing these relationships into sales one by one, you will see your income dramatically improve.

If you have any questions about how to build relations with a target public, feel welcome to contact me directly http://whywebpr.com/robertcornish

Client Acquisition…..

There are many many ways to acquire new clients as a company, some difficult that require a lot of effort and persistence and some methods can be very effortless if done smartly and strategically.

I wanted to mention a few of the latter….

Here is a first thought, if you are trying to acquire new clients, the first step in doing so is name out who your target public actually is. In other words, who typically buys your product or service. This will be your easiest sale and most likely to buy. This is an important step if you want to make your life easier as it applies to sales. So here are few items to think about and use…

People like to do business with who they know, which means if they know you because you are neighbors or you went to high school together then the chances of them using you for a service or to buy product that they actually need are much greater. Just think about every time you purchased something, if you know a dentist and you need your teeth cleaned, chances are you are going to call the person you know. So with that said, there are ways to use this strategy online to become someone your target public “knows”. How about the many social media sites, by having your bio, picture and info about yourself etc, once you make connections, people feel they know you and will be more inclined to go to you for what they need.

Another item to think about is the fact of how many people there are in the world that most likely need your product or service but never buy from you simply on the basis that they don’t know about you and have never heard about you. There is millions of potential clients out there for your product or service yet they will never buy from you because you are unknown to them. So how can you make yourself known to this huge pool of potential buyers? Well, for starters I am guessing that every person you know has a computer and has an internet connection which means they are all online. With that said, all you have to do is figure out how to harness the vast reach of the internet to be able to make yourself known and to get in front or introduced to these people. That’s it!! Just make your product or service known to your potential public using the huge reach and easy access of the internet and drive sales through the roof.

The key objective for any company is to make relations with your target public in order to control and increase revenue growth. Don’t waste time on people who are never going to need or buy your service or product, make relations with your target public to introduce yourself and create huge amounts of sales opportunities. 

Now, you can go about it in a passive manner (ads, keywords etc) and hope that someone types in the correct keyword or clicks on your ad that hopefully caught their attention so they can land on your site and hopefully call you. Or you can take an ACTIVE approach to prospecting and go out and find your target public demographic online, make an introduction, build relations and create reaches that results in sales for your company. Go and find the business, make your product or service known and get reaches to sell. Simple. 

In order to execute the above steps, it is vitally important to use all of the tools and methods available today to broadly get attention, make yourself known and be visible online as well as actively using the tools to find your target public to make relations with. 

Go out and get the business and take an active approach to boosting your sales!

Robert Cornish

Managing Director

Richter10.2 Media Group

www.richter10point2.com

Want more business….become known and generate interest

 

If you are struggling to figure out how you can create more business for your company in this economy and your finding that your old or existing efforts are not as effective as they once were, my recommendation is to look at your promotional methods and dollars spent. Are you using direct mail? Newspaper ads? Cold Calls? How much time and money is going into these efforts?

If your efforts are not resulting in the revenue needed for your company, it may be time to look at new ways to promote, become innovative and make your company known on a much larger scale.

We are all well aware of the internet and how utilizing the leverage expansive communication can do for a company but how can you harness this tool to work to your benefit and get your company “in front” of your prospective clients?

Let’s take a look at first making your company known. The key here is that in order to sell anything at all, your potential client has to know about your company. Once they actually know about you then they need to be able to easily access information about your company to understand clearly what you do and how it will fit what they need and at that point you will want to make sure your company stands out from the ocean of competition online.

Seem like a tough task? It can be. Here are the actions that you must be able to achieve in order to make your company known, get your public’s interest and get them to reach for your company to become a lead, sale and become revenue to your company.

• Massively make your company known online which includes controlling the entire first page of Google for the search results for your company and no, it’s not good enough to just have your site come up in first position.

• Reach areas of the web to “get in front” of new prospects which you normally would not be able to access

• Allow people to easily access you and clearly understand who you are and what you do

• Continually keep your company name in front of all of your prospective clients to keep your company name fresh in their minds

• Make new contacts daily, weekly, monthly using the internet to create new opportunities

• Write interesting blogs and articles to provide your potential clients with useful information which sparks interest in your company

• Personal messages (not bulk mail) to all connections made which will introduce you or your company so you can have the opportunity to sell them your product or service

• A complete overall web presence to be utilizing all that the internet has to offer that will help you or your company become known, gain attention and generate leads which can create sales and revenue.

If the above seems a little daunting and you happen to have the thought that there is no way that you will have time to do all of this, I would recommend a full Web PR solution which includes the entire Web PR campaign and management of the campaign to do all of these actions on your behalf so you can focus on running your business.

A Web PR campaign is a full solutions to truly make your company known on a large scale, generate attention, attract interest to strategically result in revenue. Web PR management is an on-going action to handle every possible aspect of your companies online promotion and to make your company known consistently to generate interest, leads, sales and improve your bottom-line.

The best thing you could be spending your time on right now is selling your product or service to qualified prospects not spending hours upon hours trying to figure out where the prospects are, who the prospects are and why they don’t respond to your direct mail. 

The thing that will keep your company afloat and expanding in this economy is sales which means you will need a flurry of people to sell to which means you will need to find ways to promote and make your company known so you have people to sell to.

This is precisely what a Web PR campaign and Web PR management is for and what it handles.

It’s time to use the world wide web to make your company known on that level. The prospects are out there waiting to hear about you and they actually want what you sell, they just don’t know about you.

For more information on this article or Web PR campaigns please visit www.whywebpr.com