Small Business Marketing – Startup Phase 2.b : Public Relations (PR)

An article by TheEvilGenius    5 Comments

PR has arguably changed the most in the last 10 years of any marketing vehicle.  When I started, the PR director was the person with all the contacts.  They knew every publisher, editor, and periodical in a given industry.  That requirement, while still helpful, is not absolutely necessary any longer. Thank God, since I hate sucking up to those people.

The advent of the internet as a business tool, and more specifically Web 2.0 and the proliferation of blogs, has changed the marketing landscape pretty dramatically.  With that in mind, the bent of this article will consist of some of the things you can do with regards to PR online.

So why PR?

Well a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, it’s cheap.  If you are just in the introduction stage, you probably don’t have the funds for the blanket marketing you will need to simply create the awareness and buzz around your product.  That means you need to think a little more creatively.

Second, in this phase you will be targeting the innovators, early-adopters, and influencers.  The good news is that these are the people who actually read blogs, review sites, and participate in communities that revolve around an industry.

I will talk about it a bit more in later articles, but a must-read book with relation to this is “The Tipping Point” by Malcom Gladwell.   Gladwell’s premise is that there are certain events and people that can bring your product to a tipping point where momentum and awareness begins to build exponentially.  Equally important, he discusses some strategies to help improve the likeliness of this happening, and to speed up the process – Brilliant guy and a fascinating read.

Targeting the Influencers and Early Adopters

Barak Obama, Esther Dyson, Nicholas Negroponte, Warren Buffet, and unfortunately even Paris Hilton and media pundits.  These are influencers. Through their own success, brilliance, charisma, or plain old fame, the words that come out of these mouths influence a lot of people.

In smaller circles, they are the person who has that “it” factor that makes people follow them. We all know them. The guy that gets everybody to come out for drinks when my attempts bring out 2 people.  The girl with 2000 Facebook friends.  The person everybody calls when their computer breaks (that’s me unfortunately).

What you need to do is to find who these people are in your market, and tap them.  It may take time and you may need to work your way up to them, but the work will be well worth it.  Don’t believe me?  Look up “Howard Stern” + “Sanjaya” on Google.

Finding the players

The proliferation of blogs and blog aggregators are a fantastic place to start.  It will take some digging but I guarantee you there will be plenty of blogs, communities, and review sites dedicated to your industry.  Digg, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Warriors Forum, and Yahoo or Google groups are a great place to start looking.

Many of the participants in the forums and blogs are both influencers and early adopters.  As I stated before, you probably won’t reach the “A” players right away, but starting in the communities is a great place to interactive with the “B,C,D” players who can help spread the good word, and if you are lucky, gain notice of the “A” influencers.

You can also become a regular comment contributor on related blogs. Even the big guys if they have blogs themselves. If you pick a unique and noticeable username (mine is usually either Evil Genius or EvilGeniusTV if the former is taken) people will start to notice. The effect can result in influence-by-association.

Getting the word out

The proliferation of internet-based article submission and PR sites now lets you do a good bit of PR on your very own.  I wrote a few pieces on PR submission sites, and Article submission sites that you might want to check out for reference.

Start writing and submitting press pieces and articles (in tech these are usually called Whitepapers, in Internet Marketing circles they are called e-books and manifestos)  Give away some valuable research or information for free.  Just be sure to keep any explicit marketing on the down-low.  You’ll lose all credibility with the hard pitch in most cases.

Early Adopters love inside information.  A great way to win their love is to “leak” insider details, video clips, photos, or demos to them.  That makes them feel in to loop and they will go to the ends of the earth letting people know about your product if they really feel like they are a VIP with insider access.  After all, they are cool enough to gain your attention, you can bet they will tell everybody they are.

On the penny-pitching front, these are also a great cheap marketing tool.  I regularly submit my articles to 3-4 article submission sites, and 4-5 blog aggregators.  These are all free other than my time (probably about an hour or so to post to all), and at my humble traffic would probably cost me in the ballpark of $20k +  per year in Google adwords for my particular market and keywords.

Well, that’s it for now on PR.  It really feels like I could go on for about 20 pages on each of these topics, but it’s time to move on.

Up next time:  Research and Target market