Try PR to Get Your Audience’s Attention—On the Cheap

Times are tough and likely to get tougher for creative marketers who toil for major brands. As advertisers continue to adjust (read slash) their budgets in the face of client cutbacks, creative vendors of all stripes will face pass-along cutbacks…unless they can make themselves indispensable.

So if you count yourself among Richard Florida’s “creative class,” and your firm provides creative marketing services to brands, it’s time to amp up your own marketing program. While your competition is in disarray it is the perfect time to enhance your thought leadership position and provide that compelling reason for your clients to retain, or maintain, your services.

Public relations offers the perfect solution, and for something less than 10-cents on the dollar of typical marketing efforts.

How so, you say? Public relations can be the most efficient marketing solution for creative businesses that can’t afford or find it ineffective to advertise their wares. A carefully designed PR campaign will deliver key message points to prospects with editorial credibility, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing/advertising campaigns.

After defining your companies’ distinctive point of view (read: competitive advantage), PR can deliver valuable editorial content for both emerging companies as well as established firms. The key to success lies in effectively mining one’s intellectual property, finding the gems that make your voice distinctive, then packaging that content in a newsworthy manner and presenting it to the “right” journalists. Packaging in the PR sense means wrapping your insights around timely, topical issues that have the media’s attention. So what might be timely now…?

Suppose you are a corporate strategist who specializes in tracking and predicting consumer trends, whose impact spells life or death for client brands? In this climate of consumer shutdown, marketers eagerly seek every ounce of intelligence available as they seek to devise ways to maintain consumer loyalty and attract new customers. In this client’s case, understanding the culture of recession, how changing consumer behavior impacts brands and what marketers might do to attract customers, becomes central to the public relations message. Define and package that message and the media should respond.

If your PR firm does their homework, organizes the message and locates the appropriate journalists and editors, they will respond. In this case, the trend forecaster was quoted in a BusinessWeek cover story entitled, “Surviving the Storm,” in a U.S. News & World Report column, “With Economy Down, Consumers Nest,” in The Wall Street Journal column, “Marketers Take a Softer Tack to Reach Uneasy Consumers,” in the Street.com,” Vigilante Consumerism Emerges,” in Women’s Wear Daily, “Where in the World are the Luxury Shoppers,” reaching a total audience of 7,536,199 in the span of 30 days. And, beyond the direct reach of these publications, coverage in nearly 100 related blogs extended the message reach significantly. No client could hope to advertise in these media in a single month, let alone a year, and all for the monthly retainer of less than 10 cents on the dollar value.

Certainly, not every business can integrate itself so directly into today’s headlines. But playing upon the major trends of the day provides an working perspective and effective approach to making PR work in the creative services arena.

Len Stein ([email protected]) is president of Visibility Public Relations.