What Buzz Word Should You See on Your Business Plan?

Businesses tend to use the buzz word “marketing” for everything. It is a rare occasion in the small to midsize business world when a business owner will say, “I need PR”, and that is not because public relations campaigns are for large businesses only. It is because business owners aren’t always aware of the use of different tools in their toolbox. They just think it’s all marketing.

The first step in identifying your needs is asking yourself one simple question, do you want to increase your business’ exposure? If you said no, you are done and have no further work to do, congrats!If you said yes, do not fret because the steps to increase your business exposure are easy if you take the proper steps to understand what resources are available to you.
So I was sitting with a colleague last week who asked, “What should I be listening for when I’m looking for people to refer to you?”

My response: “Anytime someone says ‘I want to increase my exposure’, that’s a candidate for PR. Direct them our way and from there, we can serve as a resource for whether or not this person is a fit. A lot of people don’t understand what PR actually is and it’s our job to help them identify their exposure goals to see if PR will bring about the desired results.”

First things first, advertising, marketing and public relations are related, but not the same. They can be partnered together to maximize results, but differ in the results each brings. Here are a few notes to understand the differences:

Research is the primary focus with marketing, but you must research a lot of different avenues to build a strong foundation for the next steps in your marketing campaign. You will want to research your current clients to see what strengths and weaknesses each account/client possess to understand what your ideal clients should be like, analyze your client communication practices, research your competition to ensure that your prices, messages, products and services are competitive, evaluate the way that you position yourself in front of prospective clients, and become an expert in your industry to understand where and how you should communicate with your prospective clients.

Advertising is an artistic, smaller form of communication that often uses few, if any words, to convey a message to current and potential customers. This can be an expensive tool, and once an ad is run in a publication once, it retires and never runs again. That is, of course, unless you have a large budget and can pay for multiple runs. Furthermore, advertising is you talking about your business and may not establish your credibility in the public eye since the information is biased and typically very ‘salesy’.

Public relations is the art of communicating with various sources of public information, often media outlets, to see if they would be interested in covering or publicizing your news. The information is then developed by the media outlet to inform the public about a given service, product, person, organization or event. When an unbiased and influential person or media outlet publicizes a story on behalf of an organization, serving as a third party opinion, it lends credibility to the given organization and increases its exposure. The message will never be retired and can be re-positioned and tailored to meet a given audience’s needs. Every article that is published is archived online and can help increase an organization’s visibility on the internet by generating more ‘hits’ when searching for that organization online.

So now that you know a little bit more about the buzz words M, A and PR, you have to assess your exposure goals to identify which resources are the best fit for accomplishing your exposure goals. Once you sit down and develop a list of your organizational exposure needs, you should be able to identify what resources to utilize.

For further input on identifying your exposure needs and goals, contact us at Bolt PR to serve as a resource in your ‘increasing exposure’ mission. And by the way, feel free to contact other PR firms, too. We know you’ll call us back. Our other clients did.

Posted by Monica Kenney, 11/4/2008