Clear Thought’s Top 10 Blogs of 2009

Taking a look at our stats, and based on unique views of these posts, the Top 10 Clear Thought Blog posts of this year goes like this…

1. 10 things to include in a marketing brief

Handy tips on writing a brief for marketing that sells – what to include to make sure that your supplier is most likely to get the project right first time. Read blog »

2. What to say when, managing marketing content through the sales funnel

A quick look at the right emotional tone and volume of information people respond to at different stages in the buying process, and how to tailor your marketing material to hit the right note at each stage. Read blog »

3. What shape is your marketing budget

An approach to setting your marketing budget that makes sure that you maintain an integrated mix of activity that supports every stage in your sales funnel. Read blog »

4. How to create powerful sales tools from your desk

A seven step guide to creating compelling and professional sales and marketing materials using Microsoft Office. Includes two case studies. Read blog »

5. B2B Social Media; Be There, Be Relevant, Be Proven

Practical advice that any B2B marketer, business owner or sales person can put into practice to generate leads through social media. Read blog »

6. A typical thought leadership campaign

A quick run-down and checklist of the things to include in a thought leadership campaign. Particularly powerful in B2B or complex sales processes. Read blog »

7. Treat your website like a member of your team

Practical advise for anyone in laying the ground rules for how to approach your website as a function in your business, rather than as a one-off project. Read blog »

8. One piece of content, 20 ways to use it

20 ideas for things you can do with just one piece of content, like a presentation or a paper – giving you ways to squeeze more from your marketing budget. Read blog »

9. What are your social media rules?

In this blog, Bryony shared her own rules to managing the way she interacts with friends, colleagues and acquaintances on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Read blog »

10. The Jamie Oliver approach to marketing

Reflections from attending the B2B Lead Nurturing event in September, looking at how marketing wants to feed sales with health food, when they are likely to have a taste for junk food. Read blog »

One piece of content, 20 ways to use it

If you’ve created a piece of marketing material, here are 20 ideas for squeezing every last drop of value from it. Most of which take time and energy, rather than money, so that you can make your marketing budget go further.

With a nod to John Watton, recently named B2B Marketing Magazine’s ‘B2B Marketer of the Year’, this is a quick blog on what he affectionately calls “pimping your content”.

First off, what do we mean by content and content marketing?

We all produce powerful content all of the time, for example a presentation you put together for a client, a talk you gave at a networking event, some training material you’ve produced for staff or clients. All a great starting point for a bit of market-facing content. You can, of course, generate content especially for marketing purposes. For example, commissioning some research to prepare a paper, or writing a How-to guide or checklist.

So, let’s say you’ve gone to the trouble of collating some compelling and relevant thoughts that your target market might find interesting, here are…

20 ideas for things you can do with your marketing content:

1. Turn it into a paper that can be downloaded from your site as a PDF in return for data capture.
2. Knock up some slides and put it on SlideShare, even better add a little voiceover.
3. Video yourself giving an abridged version and pop it on You-Tube.
4. Embed your SlideShare or You-Tube content on your website.
5. Post your SlideShare or You-Tube content on your company Facebook page.
6. Use the content to write a 500 word article and submit it to the free article sites, or use a professional to help you. We like NikkiPilkington.com
7. Sell it in as an opinion piece to a relevant press title.
8. Use the content to host an online event, like a live web seminar. Check out EventBrite for ways to do this really cost-effectively.
9. Contact local networking groups, like Business Link or FSB and offer to give a talk on the subject.
10. Tweet a link to your download, SlideShare, You-Tube, press article, etc.
11. Post a link on your LinkedIn status.
12. Add a link to your email footer.
13. Post your content to content sharing sites, like Business Week’s Business Exchange or UTalkMarketing
14. Write it up as a Blog in your company Blog (what do you mean you don’t have one? Ridiculous!)
15. Offer it as a guest Blog on relevant other blog sites.
16. Use it as the basis for intelligent comments on Blogs and Forums, ideally with a link back to your download, presso, etc.
17. Add to a library of comment that you have available when responding to press features.
18. Turn the content into a short training session and offer it as value-add to existing clients.
19. Use the same content to run a paid-for training event for your market.
20. Run an internal ’show & tell’ to get your team up-to-date on the subject.

In small business marketing, every penny counts – so if you have some content make sure it works really hard for you.

Also don’t be shy in using it, re-using it and re-using it again. At the B2B Marketing Lead Nurturing event (30 Sept 2009), John sagely reminded us that if, as marketers, we’re totally bored by a piece of content, then the market has probably only just noticed it. If the material is relevant, interesting, and not date-defined, you can probably dine out on it for six months to a year, at the very least. Probably longer. I mean, for each new follower on Twitter, for example, it is effectively a brand new piece… don’t be shy in showing them your best stuff.

You might also be interested in:

• Bryony’s 30 minute webcast on generating online word of mouth on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/clearthoughtconsulting/online-word-of-mouth
• Case study of integrated campaign including social media: http://www.clear-thought.co.uk/life_cycle_campaign/
• Understanding which content to use when in the sales funnel: http://www.clear-thought.co.uk/in_thought/art/1/
• A typical thought leadership campaign: http://www.clear-thought.co.uk/in_thought/art/12

By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

How to write a brief for marketing that sells

“If you don’t say what you want, you won’t want what you get”.

There’s a skill to writing a marketing brief. If you get it right your supplier will deliver first time – no surprises. If you get it wrong (or worse still don’t provide one at all), it costs time and money to put it right.

At Clear Thought we love writing briefs. It’s an integral part of our service. And we take extra care to make them engaging, relevant and factual, because a boring brief makes for an unmotivated supplier. And, ultimately a disappointing end result.

Even when a customer provides us with a good brief, we talk it through with them and make sure we all agree with the requirements. And if we disagree with an objective or output, we don’t mind adding our penneth and making specific recommendations to help get it spot-on. We can also work with you to re-write it if necessary.

TOP TIPS: When preparing a brief avoid jargon, lingo and acronyms. Include facts (no assumptions or embellishments). Use plain speaking English and include as much detail as possible. It’s easier and quicker for your supplier to cut out the superfluous rather than have to fill in some gaps. Whether you need a creative brief, web brief, copy brief or even an event brief – here’s a useful checklist to help make sure nothing gets missed:

1. YOUR PRODUCT/BACKGROUND: Include a brief summary about your company, its products and its services. Set the scene a little and try and include something about your brand, its personality and philosophy. Pricing and sales processes should also be mentioned. Will there need to be any initial research, or do you already have some research that findings that will help?

2. COMPETITION: Talk about competitor products and services. What marketing activity are they doing and are they doing it better? Include examples and/or weblinks.

3. WHAT: What is your required output? I.E. what type of activity are you looking for (an ad, a DM campaign a new website, a conference)? Think about how the deliverable will be used – in print, on a website, in a salesperson’s briefcase, etc.

4. WHY: Why are you doing this activity? What objectives are you trying to achieve (raise awareness, collect data, increase sales, get someone to do something…)?

5. WHO: Describe your target audience – who you want to talk to. Are they businesses or consumers? Describe why you think they need your product or service, and why you think they might not be buying (barriers). Try and describe the role of this person in their organisation, or what type of consumer they are. What do they read? What do they listen to?

6. WHEN: Is there as seasonal reason for undertaking this piece of activity? Are there any key milestones or deadlines that need to be met?

7. HOW: How are you going to measure the effectiveness of this activity? What will success look like? Can it be piloted or tested first?

8. LIKES & DISLIKES: It’s always useful to list some activities or brands that you have already seen and liked. Even if just website (competitor or otherwise).

9. MANDATORIES: It’s essential to provide a ‘call to action’ plus any brand/tone of voice guidelines, or list any assets that must be used or avoided. Ts & Cs or legal requirements too.

10. BUDGET: It’s much easier for a supplier to respond to a brief if they know how much you would like to spend.

There are some simple equations you can use to work out how much you should invest, but saying there is ‘no budget’ either means you expect it for free, or the sky’s the limit! Wouldn’t that be great?

If you are not 100% comfortable in briefing marketing suppliers, we can help. Clear Thought has hands-on experience both sides of the desk and can help both parties work together for a great result. We’re experienced in talking their language, and we have a number of briefing templates that mean you’re never starting from a blank sheet of paper.

Alternatively, if you already have a brief you would like us to look at, we’d be happy to come along and talk to you face-to-face. A bit of clear thinking usually improves the results you get.

There’s nothing worse than paying for a piece of work that just doesn’t do the trick. Agencies want to meet the brief… so if you get the brief right there should never be a wasted penny spent with marketing suppliers. And, in small business marketing, every penny counts.

By Cheryl Crichton | Associate Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

B2B Social Media: Be There, Be Relevant, Be Proven

Our clients, and most people we’ve met and talks and events recently, have asked the same question: Is social media appropriate for business-to-business marketing? Unequivocally, the answer is YES.

In the last year, 40% of Clear Thought’s revenue can be tracked back to a social media source, and 100% has been enhanced or aided by it in some way. In the last six weeks alone, here are some things that Clear Thinkers have achieved through social media:

• Hooked up two people met through Twitter with paying B2B clients.
• Received two good quality new business enquiries, both of which are now at proposal stage.
• Sourced experts willing to talk to us about their business as part of market research projects.
• Enhanced relationships with prospective businesses using online nurturing techniques.

In B2B decision-making or considered purchases, social media has most impact in the top half of the sales funnel

From a new business perspective, social media has critical impact in the first three stages of the sales funnel. That is, Awareness, Interest and Evaluation. From a social media perspective, you need to do the following:

To generate awareness: ‘Be There’ find out where your prospects hang out online and have a presence there.

To convert awareness into interest: ‘Be Relevant’ provide information that is useful or controversial to pull people into your content.

To make it through evaluation: ‘Be Proven’ provide case studies and testimonials at every turn online, ideally with other people talking on your behalf.

To really make the most of the channel, it makes sense to get some expert support – particularly in measuring and enhancing your activity. But, here are some really simple things to get you started.

10 FREE things you can do to generate awareness online:

1. Ensure your company & all employees have a LinkedIn profiles.
2. Join or set-up an interest group on LinkedIn.
3. Set-up a SlideShare space, link it to your LinkedIn profile.
4. Set-up a You-Tube Channel or Facebook page (if appropriate).
5. Set-up a company Twitter Feed.
6. Bookmark your content (StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, etc).
7. Set up a BT Tradespace profile.
8. Set-up Google, BlogSpot and WordPress identities.
9. Comment on, or become a contributor to, blogs and forums.
10. Regularly update email signatures with new content.

10 FREE things you can do to generate interest online:

1. Post snappy links to content via Twitter, Status, Email footer, etc.
2. Post regular interesting short blogs (10 mins).
3. Prepare deeper content like pressos, papers and articles (20 mins).
4. Give each of your team an area of expertise to track and comment.
5. Post details of other people’s content relevant to your audience.
6. Comment on industry news and happenings… in real time.
7. Make sure all employees regularly update online statuses.
8. Follow-up traditional touch-points with online contact.
9. Gather permissions to send email updates.
10. Ask intelligent questions in online forums.

10 (nearly) FREE ways to prove your credentials online:

1. Provide written case studies on your site, Blog, etc.
2. 140 character lines to link back to your case studies, articles, etc.
3. Post case study videos on your site, You-Tube channel, etc.
4. Post webcasts and presentations on your site, SlideShare, etc.
5. Post product demos on You-Tube, SlideShare, etc.
6. Re-use the words of others about your products and services.
7. Provide intelligent answers to questions posted in Forums, Groups
8. Run live Q&A sessions via Twitter.
9. Add a customer feedback / rating system (like Kampyle) to your site, blog, etc and re-use the positive feedback.
10. Ask LinkedIn contacts for endorsements.

Note: In this blog, we’re focusing specifically on lead generation. It is worth noting (and blogging in the future) that social media can be powerfully used in market research, recruitment, lead nurturing and much more.

You might also be interested in:

• Bryony’s 30 minute webcast on generating online word of mouth on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/clearthoughtconsulting/online-word-of-mouth
• Case study of integrated campaign including social media: http://www.clear-thought.co.uk/life_cycle_campaign/
• Understanding which content to use when in the sales funnel: http://www.clear-thought.co.uk/in_thought/art/1/

By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

So, if you’re not an agency… what are you?

We’ve been getting a few puzzled looks when we say that Clear Thought Consulting isn’t a marketing agency, so we thought we’d clarify the business model a little for those who might be interested.

So, we work with smaller businesses, from about 12 employees to about 200. If the company is still small enough to feasibly remember everyone’s names, then so much the better. So, big corporates are out. Within this, we work with businesses whose products or services are bought through a process of careful consideration – so, impulse buying isn’t our thing. Complicated, expensive or high-risk purchases are.

We work directly with clients to get them up and running on the marketing front. Typically, a business may have dabbled in marketing or have a reception-come-marketing approach. The point of pain that we’re there to address, is the company that knows they want to grow, but that doesn’t have the skills to get the message out (if indeed they know what the message is). In this situation, going straight to an agency or recruiting can be extremely frustrating. Without the basics in place, it is unlikely that a business will know exactly what to brief, or what to look for in a marketing employee. So, we work with companies in this situation, over six to twelve months to lay the foundations of a marketing operation, and to make sure that the business leaders know the purpose and function of marketing for their business.

A three phase Clear Thought project will position, enable and then act to allow clients to grow their businesses

Our approach is firmly centred on configuring free-flowing sales funnels for our clients – to generate both new business and new-from-existing business. Often, people think that what they need from marketing is to turn the tap on – i.e. get more leads in. This is sometimes true. But, more often than not, the tap is flowing into a leaky bucket. We first fix the bucket (sort out brand, messaging, websites, sales tools, databases, etc) and then help them to work with various marketing suppliers to turn the tap on. But only when their marketing operation is configured to make the most of it. In set-up phases, we spot gaps and problems and hook the client up with the right experts to resolve these issues. Once the funnel is fixed, we set them sail with a decent set of marketing providers, and we might also assist with recruiting a marketing team.

So, you work on commission..

No. Clear Thought is paid by the client for a programme over six months to a year. Introductions to third party suppliers is totally focused on what is best for the client, so we never take kick-backs from suppliers. This ensures that our judgement is never clouded by potential remuneration. Where an agency account director might want to tie a client in to a semi-dependent relationship to ensure an ongoing income, we want to get the client to a point of independence where they can run their marketing without us – hopefully recommending us to others along the way.

So, Clear Thought competes with agency planners…

There’s a little bit of overlap with planners, but not much. The clients we work with probably wouldn’t have the budget to get where they needed to get through using an agency planning team. Because we work over a longer term and from within a client’s business, we can get them to the stage where they can brief an agency properly without wasting time, money and goodwill on mis-briefing. In fact, we can work with agency to help them with problematic clients – by skilling-up the client in how to get the most from marketing suppliers and undertaking infrastructure projects (like CRM set-up) – so that the relationship is more fruitful all round.

Do you just do the thinking?

We believe that action creates clarity. So, although smart thinking is our key differentiator – thought without elbow grease is pretty useless. Our programmes are highly active and involve lots of input and energy from clients in putting plans into action to see if they work, learn from doing them and refine for future improvements. The key thing here is that we never just ‘do’ – we will always find out why something needs doing, and if its being done in the best possible way.

Hope that answers a few questions. If you want to know more, please do drop us a line.

By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

What shape is your marketing budget?

The questions I most often get asked about marketing budgets are:

• How much should I spend as a percentage of turnover?
• Should I benchmark against competitors?
• How much shall I spend on each discipline (PR, DM, Events, Ads, etc.)?

All totally reasonable questions… but what you should be asking is: what shape should my marketing budget be? Seriously, it is the most important question there is on the budgeting front. So, let me tell you what I mean.

A decent marketing programme is centred on a sales funnel, onto which you’ve mapped the decision making process for your target audience. (see previous posts Making Marketing Pay, and What to Say When).

FIGURE 1: Chart to show the influence of marketing spend across the sales funnel

From this you can put together a programme of activity that moves a person from awareness to a sale. Each marketing technique has a different level of influence at each stage of this process. You need to determine the level of influence at each stage, then apportion this across the funnel.

There are a few ways to decide the amount of influence each technique has:

• Workshop with the sales and marketing team to agree the apportionment
• Surveys or focus groups amongst new customers to get them to assess what they saw at each stage (this can be tricky, as people often post-rationalise decision-making, meaning that emotional triggers are downplayed)
• A best guess (hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere)
• A combination of all of the above

From this exercise you now have a powerful tool for designing programmes and allocating budget. Now analyse your budget in the same way:

• Split your spend into each technique
• Apportion this spend as per the influence amount you’ve worked out for that technique (for example, if you worked out that PR has 40% influence at awareness, 10% at interest, etc. your spend on PR should be tabulated to reflect that)
• You now have an actual shape for your budget

Compare your actual budget shape to the ideal budget shape you’ve established to maintain a free-flowing sales funnel. This allows you assess where you’re spending too much or too little, and to adjust your spend according to the funnel requirements.

Now, if you have a budget cut, or find a pot of cash, you again have a powerful tool to decide how to adjust your spending. The crucial factor here is to maintain the shape. So, rather than cutting a project that happens to be the right level of spend, you can cut evenly across the funnel ensuring that you’re not leaving any gaps.

By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

A typical thought leadership campaign

One of the key strengths at Clear Thought Consulting is in conceiving and running thought leadership programmes. I’m often asked what these entail, so here’s a quick run-down of the basics.

Thought leadership is about being front of mind in regard of a certain subject or market. A thought leader will always make it onto a ‘long list’ when people are making buying decisions – and often become the benchmark against which others are measured.

Timescales:

• Thought leadership programmes are not a quick fix, you cannot expect immediate results.
• A thought leadership marketing programme is only effective in the medium term, and then only when it forms part of a funneled sales approach. That is, a planned process that uses specific tools and techniques to move people from one stage to the next through the buying decision. The thought leadership programme typically acts as a top and tail to this process.
• In the longer term, thought leadership programmes also serve to create a bank of ‘good will’ in more junior members of the target audience, which translates into awareness and leads when they move into more senior positions later in their careers.

Typical thought leadership tools:

First off you’ll need to think of subject matter that is interesting, engaging and useful. Then, create a campaign that has a mix of tools that can be used to influence people along hierarchical and vertical planes.

Typical thought leadership campaign checklist:

• Get your best brains in a room, or even better some customers, and think about subjects that are interesting, engaging and useful.
• See if you can find a respected industry partner, if not then use your own research and expertise to prepare a ‘future trends’ report that can be downloaded online in return for data capture.
• Prepare an accompanying 1/2 hour presentation and use the content to host a live web seminar.
• Prepare press and direct mail to generate report downloads and webinar registrations (these can be tailored to sectors, and as customer and non-customer versions).
• Track report downloads and invite anyone who has downloaded, but not registered for webinar an invitation.
• Practice your webinar with the technology, slides, hosts in the room you will be using for the live session.
• Host the webinar and record the session.
• You can often boost attendance with an offer to attendees of something like a free book or other useful offer for people who attend – we’ve previously managed to get signed copies of business books by talking to the publishers.
• Review the people who attended and downloaded and get your best sales people to follow-up the hottest leads, keep the others for future or your junior team.
• Anyone who registered, but didn’t attend can now be invited to watch the recording.
• The recorded version now goes up on your website, where it can be viewed in return for data capture – this can form the next level of the campaign (where perhaps Director level people were invited to the live event and more junior people are now invited to view online).
• Alternatively snippets form your web video can be placed on You-Tube, Twitter, or other document sharing sites to drive people to the original download.
• All data captured builds your database for future relevant, timely, engaging and useful thought leadership material.
• New techniques allow you to publicise your materials at little cost, with simple things like Tweets, LinkedIn updates & news items, contributions to discussions, blogs, etc. For example, we’ve seen great traffic by posting content on Business Exchange.

As said, this needs to form part of a sales funnel, where the aim of the game is to increase hit rate when your sales teams pick up the phone. If people have read something interesting or attended and engaging event, they are much more likely to be warm to the call.

For more on sales funneling, see our 20 minute webcast: http://www.slideshare.net/clearthoughtconsulting/making-marketing-pay-1202609

For an example, you may like to see a recent campaign for Fraudscreen looking at The Life-cycle of a Debtor: www.fraudscreen.co.uk/lifecycle-part-one

By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | www.clear-thought.co.uk

So, you want to be a rule breaker?

I’m currently working on two, very different, business-to-business websites, and have been knee deep in information architecture (IA) and web design for the last six weeks or so. Having come across the same questions time and time again… I thought I’d put pen to paper about rules you should never break online.  For this, I am specifically talking about business main websites, not blogs, twitters, forums, etc.

I see myself as a free thinker. My natural reaction to someone telling me that I can’t do something or shouldn’t do something is to challenge it. So, I find myself in the unusual position of championing convention. When it comes to business websites, function must always take higher priority to form (sorry designer friends). The look and feel is a very close second, but it is second.

So, when warming a client up to IA, I tend to use an analogy of a website as a text book. A business website serves a purpose – people come to it looking for something specific and their time is precious. Your site needs to get them to that info as fast as possible (whilst sign-posting them to relevant other content along the way). Think, if your site was a textbook you’d add a contents page, an index or lay things out alphabetically. Can you imagine trying to find a word in the dictionary if someone had decided to order things according to… say, their favourite words first, or some other such  subjective nonsense…  it would drive me crazy! This is the effect you have on site visitors if you ignore web conventions – so, don’t do it if you want to facilitate that all-important search-to-sale journey.

Web conventions you should not ignore

• Logos go on the top left  and typically link back the homepage, this is the equivilent of flicking back to your contents page in a book.
• Major navigation goes along the top and secondary navigation goes on the left – I didn’t make the rules, it is just what people expect to see, so why mess with it if it helps people find what they are looking for? For me, I think of major navigation as chapter headings and secondary navs as chapter contents.
• Legalese in the footer of every page – it has to be there, but it will never sell your stuff, so just put it at the bottom. For me, this is like the publisher’s page at the front of a book.
• Disabilities Discrimination Act (DDA) and best-practice – get decent advice on this, you don’t want to break the law or alienate potential customers.
• Don’t put text in as an image – Google (other search engines are available) can’t read them and it causes a DDA headache.
• Use system fonts – I know that they are a bit dull, but using anything else is totally impractical, you need to use a font that is installed on every computer so that you can be sure your text will be legible to all.

Hmmm… so, business websites should all look the same?

No way. Just because reference books all have contents pages and indexes, they certainly do not look the same. Hard back, soft back, image style, tone of copy… just walk around a book shop, there is plenty of variety. Online, you add personality in the same way… but by employing a designer who specialises in web – print designers never get this quite right.  The two sites I am working on at the moment could not look more different. Your brand can sing through, but you don’t need to mess with the stuff that makes your site actually work to make this happen.

And of course, there are always exceptions… particularly on very simple sites of fewer than 20 pages, where you can get away with being a bit more maverick.

For me, these are guiding principles. There are bound to be many more detailed tips from IA specialists… but if you start by putting function before form you’ll be better placed to move forward.

By Bryony Thomas, Director at Clear Thought Consulting | www.clear-thought.co.uk

Capitalising on marketing moments

This is what those in the PR trade call an ‘issues jump’. And, with support from a nimble marketing communications team, this is an activity that can be hugely fruitful. You won’t know what they are until they happen, but there are things you can prepare to be ready for when they do.

How to spot a marketing moment

You’re looking for a moment of heightened attention, when something in your space becomes the subject of attention. This happens when PESTLE (political, economic, societal, technological, legal, environmental) matters change and impact your market or when a major paper or programme picks up on an issue.

If you’ve established your market messaging up front, this gets a whole lot easier. With a message matrix in hand (i.e. each audience, the functional layers within that audience, and what you want them to think about your organisation) you can be pretty disciplined about this by dividing up the task. If you’ve established your audience, you can allocate one or more to each of your team for them to scout.

This can be done by:

• Subscribing to the relevant magazines, ebulletins, etc.
• Watching the identified competitors in that space
• Setting up relevant Google alerts (for the messages you’re after and things that audience would be interested in)
• Joining LinkedIn groups, Blog feeds, Forums in that space
• Keeping an ear an eye out

If you’re not that organised, you can of course just keep your ear to the ground. When something comes up that is in your space, a pre-planned process should kick into action.

Planning for an event you’re unaware of

Your annual budget should make some contingency for these un-expected marketing moments – and have a back-up plan for spending that money wisely if none crop up (unspent contingency can always be put towards creative and engaging Christmas campaigns, which really can be more than a card! And can be worth doing).

The first thing to say is that PR needs a net – that is, generating interest when there is no pre-defined funnel to capture that interest is a complete waste of time, energy and cash. A decent website should have a data capture facility, and ideally a campaign hub (somewhere to post downloadable material, in return for marketing permission). If your site doesn’t have this built in, you should either invest in it, or find an agency who can build you campaign microsites quickly… by which I mean 48 hours.

So, assuming you’ve snaffled away a little pot of cash, or for the less organised… convinced someone at short notice to find some money or cut it from somewhere else, then these are the key building block of an action plan:

• Brainstorm session, to include the key decision maker
• A piece of collateral that can be downloaded (discusion paper, briefing note, etc.)
• Loaded to your campaign hub or microsite
• Plan a sales response for downloaders – an offer of some kind
• Draw up a press list and prepare a tailored press release for each one
• Select one key press player to whom you’ll offer an exclusive
• Let your exclusive have the story for a few days
• Then distribute the press release more widely
• Post questions/discussions in LinkedIn Groups and other online forums
• Hand the leads onto sales as they come in to follow-up as planned
• Track through the sales funnel to measure effectiveness and ROI

Writing a report at short notice can be made easier with some preparation too. So, if the press has suddenly become interested in something in your space, you can create high quality material quickly. Again, if you’ve worked out your message matrix up front, it is a fairly simple process to run a 2-hour brainstorm on each one and write up talking points – these are then available to use in forward features and in proactive and reactive campaigns.

You need to talk your decision maker through this process before it happens. So, that when you pick up the phone to tell them you are doing an issue jump – they know what is needed of them and will be able to respond quickly.

Action plan

Are you ready to capitalise on a marketing moment in your space? If not, here’s a to-do list:

• Prepare a microsite or area on main website that can be easily amended, where people can download material in return for data capture
• Prepare a message matrix and brain-storm talking points, identify target titles, groups, blogs and forums
• Set-up a media monitoring system – press scanning, competitor watching, Google alerts, groups, forums, etc.
• Prepare a vanilla execution plan for a responsive campaign
• Walk your decision-makers, execution team and sales team through the plan so they know how it will work when it happens

By doing some pre-planning, you will be able to respond to a changing market at speed. This sets you apart as an organisation with its finger on the pulse, and ahead of its competition.