“We don’t need to advertise, we know all the people we need to communicate with”. Phil Turtle of Turtle Consulting looks at using PR to win new business in the recession
As a management and marketing consultant, I guess I hear this from directors of companies on a weekly basis. Either that or: “We can’t afford to advertise.” Nearly always, they’re directors of averagely performing companies. The funny thing is that they know and they know that I know they are talking rubbish!
What we both know that they’re actually saying is: “Look, we’re sort of managing at the moment. OK so the order book’s down, margins are low and advertising is really expensive so we couldn’t afford it even if we wanted to.” And of course they’re quite right – so why didn’t they just say so?
Well to be fair, and anyone who has run a company will recognise this, when your nose is hard to the grindstone, you don’t really have the luxury of the time and energy to stop and spend time thinking laterally. And of course believing your own defence statement gives you one less thing to worry about.
But it doesn’t really give you less to worry about because the order book’s still very thin and margins are tight and there are many active competitors, which may not be too bad when the economy’s reasonably buoyant. But when the pendulum swings the other way as it has now, either you’re the supplier of choice in your marketplace (and you suffer a bit of margin erosion), or you’re much lower down the pecking order and your margins get decimated.
You don’t know everyone
Even though you and your sales people may know the most relevant decision makers in your customer and ‘some’ key prospects, they aren’t the only people who need to know about your company. And I’ll guarantee that most of them don’t know half of what your company does or is capable of.
Even in existing long term customer relationships, people move and retire and new people come in. If they don’t know your company, they’ll tend to favour familiar suppliers and many new brooms want to make their mark and sweep clean. And it doesn’t have to be your direct contact that changes. It only takes a customer’s MD to query a lack of competitive reviews. “Why aren’t we using so and so?” he’ll ask, mentioning the name of a higher profile competitor. Of course he doesn’t know that even though they’re always splattered across the pages of the trade magazines, they can’t do left handed gimbal plates as well as you. But why should he – you’ve never tried to tell him and the competition obviously has. So all of a sudden, your long term relationship is no longer secure and you find yourself being asked to re-bid for work.
It happens to big companies too
A classic example of a company being caught out by believing their own ‘we know everyone’ mantra was former international car and truck brake manufacturer Ferodo. They did indeed know many of the right people. Unfortunately, that didn’t help when several of their major customers decided, almost all at once, to relocate their R&D functions to Germany. Suddenly, the Ferodo people knew no-one. Even worse, the new decision makers didn’t know anything about Ferodo. I was brought in to very rapidly implement an aggressive advertising, PR, direct marketing and high level sales operation. In this case, the damage was successfully limited but it was an expensive exercise that could have been avoided by ongoing low key, low cost business to business promotion centred on PR.
Who needs to know you?
There are various groups of people or ‘audiences’ who it is in your best interest to make and keep aware of your company.
They vary from the ‘must know a lot about us’ specifiers and decision makers to the ‘must think we’re a decent company’ directors, who sign off the purchase requisition. But all of these people need to know, how good your company is, the breadth of products/ services you offer, which of their peers you also work for, how working with you rather than ACME helps them make better profits…and so forth.
The people who ought to know about you
• The purchasing decision maker(s).
• Specifiers
• The purchasing officer
• The board.
• Other influencers – Think about all the people up and down the supply chain from suppliers to installers who could say, “I’m not sure about Bloggs & Co – but I’ve used ACME in the past and they’re fine.” You need these people knifing you like a hole in the head.• Your competitors – The more they know about your good points, the harder it is for them to knock you. Also, their people are more likely to want to jump ship and join you if have good press coverage.
• How about people in the account you think you’ll never break into because ACME have it all sewn up. The chances are at some point a key player will move from there to one of your own customers and if they don’t know and respect you pretty soon, you’ll find that ACME are in and you are out.
• Your suppliers – The better they perceive you to be in the marketplace, the more attractive a customer you’ll be which will help you to negotiate better supply deals.
Your staff – Reading about the company they work for makes them feel a part of something important. It can have an almost evangelical effect. It is highly motivating.
But we still can’t afford to advertise..
Advertising is not the only way to gain awareness and it certainly can be an expensive way to communicate with all of the people you need to reach. It certainly has its place in the marketing communications mix, but there is another way for businesses to communicate with other businesses and that is PR (public or press relations)
Business to business PR
Sometimes called B2B PR is 100% different to the sort of PR you hear about with celebrities, paparazzi and champagne. It’s even legal, decent and truthful! There’s a total culture difference and thankfully, editors of trade magazines are not out to sell copies based on sensationalism, they’re in the business of providing high quality, relevant information to their readers about their market sector. Your market sector.
In fact, because many trade journals actually have an editorial staff of one, they often welcome material submitted by companies. So if you’re providing a flow of high quality press releases and feature articles, or case studies, they may well use it. If you don’t, they’ll use your competitors’ material instead.
Running, as I do, a PR division, you’d probably expect me to tell you at this point that PR is a really difficult black art. But it’s not. Granted, we at Turtle Consulting have learned a trick or two over the years which help, but the core skill is simple hard work and gentle sales technique.
The B2B PR game plan is:
• Analyse the journals in the sector (remember many are also online magazines these days) and understand what the editors want.
• Brainstorm the subjects on which your company has something to say and then speak to the relevant editors.
• Write and distribute press releases on any real news stories you have – but don’t send rubbish. This way, editors will come to know that your releases will be worth reading and they won’t get binned along with the hundreds of dreadful non-stories they receive every week.
• Keep a steady flow of material heading towards the editors. Properly done, you should be able to feature in the key titles 10 months out of 12 – maybe even 12/12!
• Use a cutting service to make sure you pick up on all the coverage you obtain. And don’t just file it; you can reprint into a direct mail, put it on your website or hand out items, which makes excellent and authoritative ammunition for the sales force.
• If you don’t want to do all of this yourself, then consider using a PR agency but only one that specialises in your sector. Ask one of the editors for his/her recommendation.
Cost effective
B2B PR can start from £zero if you do it yourself and as little as £15k a year using an agency. You can achieve editorial coverage valued at many times what you spend.
We regularly calculate the advertising equivalent value for our own clients and frequently achieve return on investment from 1000% and upwards.
Of course, there are also good reasons to advertise – particularly when you need to get over a message which is not ‘news’. And of course if no-one advertises there won’t be any magazines left for PR to work in. So it is a responsibility to support sector magazines with advertising too.
Phil Turtle is managing director of Turtle Consulting Group www.turtleconsulting.com and is happy to answer any marketing related questions: [email protected].
