Do Your Own PR: Pin-point Your Market
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Edited by Peter Horn U.K.-based Paula Gardner works with small businesses, teaching them how to do their own PR. She shows them how to understand the secrets of getting publicity - and how raising their profile can boost profits, prestige and visibility. - A decade ago I led a glamorous showbiz life. I worked for a number of PR agencies that handled musicians and groups like George Michael and Bananarama, restaurants like Bill Wyman's Sticky Fingers, along with video and Film companies. It was in that glam world that I cut my teeth in PR, Paula Gardner explains. - Then I decided to go it alone and start Paula Gardner Public Relations. Funnily enough, the glamour side decreased rapidly and I learnt, over the years what it means to work hard to build up a company working on long term press and publicity goals. Paula Gardner publishes a weekly newsletter about doing ones own PR, and this is one of them: You can waste a huge amount of time, effort and money on both PR and marketing if you don't know your market. Anyone who has ever done a business plan will have sighed a "Do I really have to?" when it came to the market research part, but this sort of investment can really repay dividends. |
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After all, why spend your precious time, effort and money getting great publicity in a magazine or newspaper that none of your customers and potential customers read?
Targeting past and present clients is a great way to both find out about their media preferences, and to remind them that you are still here.
Make your survey short and very focused. Multiple choice questions have a much higher chance of actually ever getting filled. If you can offer a little carrot as a reward for taking the time and effort to fill it in then your chances of a successful survey are even higher.
You can deliver the survey via post, email, or even as a pop up on your website, but if you possibly can, conducting a telephone survey, will help produce the best results and allow for the possibility of new leads and information you would never have obtained on paper or computer screen alone.
So, what do you need to know? For a PR survey then you'll need to know some or a combination of the following, depending on your business:
Their age group * What magazines and newspapers they read, (differentiate between fun and work, but you want both). If you can ask about sections, all the better. After all one person reading the Sunday Times might read completely different sections to another person reading the same paper. * What websites they look at (again, both fun and work) * What radio stations they listen to -and then what programmes? * How did they hear about you in the first place? - so simple, and yet frequently unasked!
Once you've found the publications and types of media that makes your customers tick you'll be able to concentrate on these and only these, saving you time, effort and lots of money!
Remember target the person who will be paying your bill, which is not necessarily the person who will be using your services.
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Read more here:
http://www.doyourownpr.com/