Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Absolutely fascinating, I have never truly seen PR used to generate sales leads, in fact, I would argue right now that PR in its own right cannot generate sales leads at all!

What it does do well is raise awareness and generate interest, and doesn't take prospects down that final path of getting a sales lead. I will admit the PR channel should always promote channel delivery (whether it be website, contct telephone number, email etc), and its always possible that people will contact the business based based on good PR, but as a semi-professional PR person, I would be loathed to see the channel targetted on getting sales leads.

Hope that makes sense!

Candureactor, I applaud you, you seem to be a little cynical about others in the PR profession.

So many times they have tried to fob me off with "all you need to measure is column inches!", BULL I say.
I follow a similar approach to yourself and like to measure the favourability of the piece, and measure it in context of the whole page/publication.
Sure I'll do column inches too, but when you take it in context of the rest of the articles around you and the publication itself it makes sense.

I once saw a piece a consultancy I was working with maked as a brilliant story about the profits a company was making, it was a nice piece, well written and in an influential paper, problem was it was next to an article about "fat cat" businesses! They never saw the probem with it!

Sorry for that rant, I was a little off the track there :-)

I have used PR in a B2B setting for over 21 years to generate leads and ostensibly only to generate leads. Yes, the articles give rise to brand awareness and they raise the profile of the company, but the primary aim has always been to make a reader think, “That’s interesting, let’s make an enquiry” The route from an enquiry through to a sale is then down to the sales team which has also been my area of responsibility.

I can see that in financial services, the generation of a lead can be difficult as it is harder to envisage a new product or service which will leave the reader saying “Must know more about that”, but that is probably my lack of knowledge of financial products.

All PR should seek to inform the reader, not educate them (That’s your job when they contact you). It should not overwhelm, but simply interest the reader. They should be interested enough to want to contact you directly in order to learn more. If the article tells them everything they want to know, it is likely that it will be the last you hear from them!

There are few forms of Bad PR. I tend to classify them as stories which contain lies and misinformation or stories which reflect badly on your company or your industry. Beyond that there is really only ineffective PR and effective PR.

Effective PR can itself be broken down into 4 main categories:

New Product Releases
These seek to let your targets know about the salient features of a new product, along with the odd benefit. It has the tendency to be over-wordy in an attempt to cover all the angles in the cause of accuracy. This is undesirable as few publications will publish the thousands of words needed to achieve this. If they do, having read the article, what are they going to enquire about? You’ve already explained everything. It also has the disadvantage in that you can only do such a press release every time you launch a new product.

Existing Product, New Features Release.
The product might have been around for a few months, but few in the target market know what the hell it is. Take the best 6 or so features of the product or service and write a press release for each one, emphasising the novelty and the benefit it confers. Do this month by month, giving you a press campaign covering a year.

Industry Specific Application Story
This is the most common type of PR in many industries. Some business found your financial product so useful that they agreed to have a story written. Vanity on the part of the customer plays a part and the industry specific journals the customer belongs to will take an interest and publish, as will your own industry journals. Well written, it will get published. It saver the editors the cost of commissioning a 2 page article and you will get your leads. The limitations are that it is very industry specific when it comes to generating leads.

Industry Specific New Product or New Features PR
This one is relatively new. It combines the aspects of the first two PR concepts, but you re-write the release as a story to a particular type of business and then circulate it only to the press which covers those industries. This has a terrific novelty value in that the readers of “What’s New in Glue Production” will probably have never come across anything from a financial services company in the pages of their trade magazine. The relevance must be true, the advantages obvious and the PR must provide enough information to make them want to ask for more information.

It can have only a tangential interest to the primary readers of the specific trade magazine, but remember, for every glue factory manager who reads his industry paper, it is read by the same number of executives from the companies which advertise or should advertise in it. They too need your products and will be quick to spot the synergy and make an enquiry.

I’ve seen this done with industry specific trade finance and some pretty complex derivative products to hedge against future raw material price volatility. The latter couldn’t be explained in an article if you gave them the whole damn magazine, but a few well chosen words, references to some basic feed-stocks and an explanation that the company claimed to be able to assist some, but not all manufacturers and suppliers in the sector produced a bucket full of leads.

And at the end of the day, a lead is a lead. It’s what the company does with it that counts!

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions