Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Instead of focusing on what your product does, focus on how it can help your clients better (save money, save time, get more customers, etc.). If you don't already have them, create case studies that showcase how various customers used your tools and the results they saw.

Jay's right. Focus on the benefit to the end user.

Will they save time?
Save Money?
Work more efficiently?

I read your description above and still did not have any idea of why I would use your product, or what problem it would solve for me. Try to identify the problems your clients have that this solves.

Mike

I would suggest you find one or two serious issues in the marketplace and use those as lead-in to your PR story. Make them relevant for your audience. In terms of data quality, I can see two stories already:
- Economic downturn and how to save money in the marketing department
- Privacy and how better data helps avoid issues here
For there you can then focus on the features/application/benefts. Try to come up with compelling real-life examples (possibly scary stories). I suppose your company hase some, otherwise you would not have created your products.

You are getting conflicting advice here - namely talking of product features and talking of customer benefits. You can’t do benefits in PR!

You won’t get many benefit stories into magazines as PR – that’s a spin too far and verging on advertising. Go for the vertical market journals and do a product and vertical market specific PR splash which at least announces your de-dupe software suit’s features and add the benefits by way of explanation.

If in doubt about the language, or what a PR pack should contain or to whom should be sent, consult a professional as the wording of a PR can affect the publication acceptance rate by a factor of ten and it can effect the number of leads generated by a factor of thirty.

Going for the use of de-duplication and list cleaning in the context of an unrelated vertical market is rarely used, but if you can get the slant right (Benefits of de-duplication for the wood-working industry will bet published in “The Joiner” but the benefits of your software in the frozen food business will net the one which appeals to “The Grocer”

The idea of tangential PR (The software has nothing to do with the core business of the vertical!) is not new but it is rarely used and. because it is rarely used, response rates tend to be high and editors are accepting of a new product which is, after all, used by all the sales people who read their magazine.


Best wishes


Steve Alker
Xspirt