Convert Customer Ignorance to Evangelism. SPEAK|pr Masterminds will show you how.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. This is for you if you're somebody who's got value locked up in the organization that you're leading, and you're just looking for some cost-effective and some relatively simple ways to communicate that with all the people who matter. Today, I'm going to share with you about the Speak PR methodology. This is a program that I've built using my 25 years of experience of running an international public relations firm. But also setting up businesses on three continents. Hello, my name is Jim James, and I'm your host. So let's talk today about the Speak PR program. This is a program that I'm working to make into a mastermind coming up shortly. So on this episode, I'd like to just share with you the framework of storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and to know what I call Speak. PR. Now, the Speak PR program is an overall methodology for anybody, regardless of the size of the business they're running, to communicate effectively and consistently with all of the audience groups that matter to them. So first of all, though, let's start with the S, which is to storify. Now, to storify means that we want to look at the narrative behind your business, why you started that business, And what your motivation is, and what your vision is for why you're creating this company, who you're going to help, and what problem you're trying to help them to solve. The creation of a narrative about you and your business, why it exists, is personal. It's authentic, and it's sustainable, and it's the heart of the storification. Stage of the Speak PR methodology. Now, these days, storification is also about putting the customer or the client at the heart of the business. We've always talked about customers being the central focus for a business, but storification talks about having heroes, heroes on a journey. And your heroes are actually your customers. And your role as a business owner or an organization leader is really to facilitate their journey, to help them overcome the challenges that they're going to face along the way. And you're going to do that with yourself, with your organization, with the goods and services that you supply to them. So storification looks at creating a narrative which includes personalities and challenges and opportunities and ways that you and your company have helped to deliver those stories and those outcomes to your heroes. Now, the second dimension is to personalize, and I mentioned personalization is about 3 different audience groups. There's the internal, those people we pay, the external, who are the people who pay us, but there are also the 3rd element which I call the allies. When we have communications, we need to think about what we call the avatar. The avatar is the, the visualization of the individual characters within those different subsets. And why this is important is because as we think about the characteristics of the people that, for example, we might want to have as employees, or that we might want to have as customers, and that we would need as partners, we can start to identify what kind of messages are going to be important to them. Now, the other dimension to the personalization is the engagement process, because when we look at the individuals that we want to address, we have to recognize that they're not all in the same level of engagement with our company, and we call this the engagement process. So we have these 5 stages of the customer journey. So we have ignorance, awareness, interest, engagement, and evangelism. Ignorance is where people have not even heard of your brand and may not even identify with the issue. Awareness is where that person starts to hear, see, read, or be told about your brand. Interest is where they start to make inquiries, Maybe they visit the website and they go through the beginning stages of due diligence prior to a purchase or to become an employee. Engagement is where they become a customer, where they actually make a transaction. They spend money or they become an employee, for example, or a supplier. And the 5th stage of the process is when they become an evangelist, when they start to tell others about your company because they're so delighted. They're so delighted by the service, they're so delighted by the product, they're so delighted by the customer experience or by the employee experience or the partner experience. So under personalization, we need to look at the avatar, the profile of the individual, but also at which stage they are in the process of engagement with our brand. Now, the next element is to engage, and the only way to engage with these avatars and to move them along this process of engagement is through content, compelling content, which is accurate, which is concise, but most of all is appealing to those different audience groups. And you'll have understood, of course, that different avatars will find different kinds of information interesting, but also because they are processing that information at different times of the day, for example, different times of the year, they're going to be needing different kinds of information in different formats delivered across different channels. Content is now at the very heart of all public relations, and in the Speak PR program, we look at the different formats of text, of video, of infographics, of events, and of signage. And of meetings, for example. The next stage in the Speak PR program is amplification. Amplification is the sharing of our stories using technology, and it's what we call personalization at scale. Every company needs more than one employee, one partner, one customer. So amplification at scale is a key part of the SPEAK methodology. Because of social media and digital technologies, all companies have equal opportunity to amplify their message. It's no longer a function of size. It's a function of using the best tools. And within the amplification module of Speak PR, we'll look at which tools there are that individuals can sign up for and organizations can take advantage of, many of which are free, but all of which will enable the content you create to be repurposed and shared frequently, consistently, and even globally And most importantly, in an automated way. It's going to be the ability to take content and share it without spending any additional time that is going to be a game changer for everybody that takes the Speak PR course. The 5th element is to know. Now, knowing your public relations activity is what we believe is most important. And what we like to believe is important is the productivity. In other words, how much effort you actually put into the public relations campaign. We've defined a term called the Active Communications Index, and the index is a measure of content times frequency times channels. We believe that this is a more sane way of measuring the work being done on public relations, because the alternative is to measure some of the vanity metrics like impressions, for example, and reach. Now those are entirely dependent on the algorithms of the software platforms that you're using, and the vagaries of maybe a trending story. What we like to do on the Speak PR course is to train people to develop the Active Communications Index and to track it every week. By tracking your productivity, your input to your public relations campaign, you will start to ensure that you have a consistent approach, and that will as a function create consistent communication over time. And public relations is essentially the necessary consistent and compelling communication with personalization at scale. So under knowing, we're going to track what you send, where you send it, and when you send it. Very simple measurement, but a very effective one. The overarching theme of the Speak PR program is to enable business owners and entrepreneurs to run their own public relations program without the need of an agency. Or if they so choose to engage an agency, they will have a strategy or they will have a known audience and a known metric in the ACI to give their agency a guide as to the amount of work they want them to carry out. Now, the Speak PR course is going to be taught along the STEP methodology. Now, the STEP methodology of training has skill, theory, example, practice, and evaluation. And each module will follow these 5 elements. And by doing so, we shall ensure that people that take the course will understand the theory and the skills that they need. They will have learned about case studies, of best practice, but also they will then start to evaluate their own company's activities in the light of this new Speak PR methodology. Again, our goal is to pass over the skills that we've built from over 25 years so that individuals can manage their own campaigns. The parallel would be that we would like to teach people to fish rather than to show them how to buy fish. So the Speak PR program has 5 elements: the storification of the business, the personalization of the message, the engagement through compelling content, the amplification to ensure personalization at scale by using technology, the measurement of the activity using the Communications Index. And overall, the plan will enable people to develop public relations programs that will be profitable for their business because it will generate more sales leads, encourage employees to take ownership, and ultimately will transition anybody that's involved in this business from a position of ignorance through to awareness, to interest, to engagement, and ultimately to evangelism. Now, if you'd like some more details about the Speak PR program, please come to the eastwestpr.com website, or you can find me on LinkedIn. That's Jim James from East West Public Relations. Now, in the meantime, I wish you the best of health and a profitable business, and that you keep on taking more control over your communications programs, and that creates some profitable results for you and your company.