Why is personalisation at scale important in public relations, and which of the 8,000 martech pla...

Hello and welcome to the Speak PR Podcast. This is a show for business owners and entrepreneurs that really want to unlock the value in their own businesses by getting great public relations. Today I'm going to talk about the second golden age of martech and really how technology can enable personalization at scale. Now we all want to offer personalized information to our customers and to the media. But the real challenge is how do we do that to more than one person at a time? And the answer is technology. Today, I'm going to share with you some thoughts about personalization at scale from McKinsey. And I'm also going to talk about Muck Rack, which is one of the 8,000 martech platforms we can use for personalization at scale. Now, before this all sounds too complicated, the reason I'm sharing about what technology writer Scott Brinker calls the second golden age of martech is that Public relations is no longer really just about general relations, as I have posited in our Speak PR methodology. Personalization has 3 broad categories: we have our internal, we have our partners, and we have our external audiences. But within these audiences, actually, there are again individual preferences. The reason that it's important is that Now consumers and businesses, in fact all people, have got a choice of what they listen to or what they watch and what they read, because the devices that we all carry really give us ultimate freedom to what we receive and when we receive it. Just if we look at when I grew up, we had one TV in the household and we had at the time 3 channels and then 4 channels, and we watched TV regardless of what was on the television just to sit in front of the television. But now my daughters, Amity and Halo, if they don't like what's on the TV, they go off with their iPads and watch whatever they want to on Netflix or Apple TV or TikTok or YouTube. So the attention of consumers and partners and our staff is no longer captive within the same channels as it used to be. And this is why the challenge has been personalization, but at scale. It used to be that we all got the same information at scale through traditional broadcast— print, radio, TV, signboards— but that's not the case. So in order to have a business that is talking to more than one person at a time, we have this challenge as business owners, which is to develop messages that are appropriate and appealing and compelling to many people simultaneously, but who are at different, what we call, customer journeys. So customer journeys apply to individuals and organizations, and in PR terms, they also apply to journalists. And that just means that We have people that understand already, for example, about our company, and they may be about to already do business with us. There may be other companies who are unaware of our business, and they need a different level of information about our companies. So mapping out what this journey, this customer journey, is, is a central part of the public relations and any sales campaign. And when one thinks about it, really, there are very many parallels between the sales campaign that one would have for consumers or businesses if you're in B2B, and what we need to sell to the media, which is why are our stories, our companies, so compelling that the journalists should invest their time and take the effort to learn and to write or to publish or to post information about our company to their communities. In a 2018 McKinsey report, the authors were really talking about the central role of data. So Julian Boudet and Kai Vollhardt were actually saying that personalization at scale, whilst it sounds intimidating, is easier than many marketers think. But that we have to start with data. And this is actually just the same with public relations. People often think of journalists as being out there, lots of them, and that's why they go to an agency, because they believe the journalists will under— will already have a relationship with the agency. And they, and they may well do, but the, the dynamism now in the journalism field around the world, and also the importance now of people that are influencers, not specifically journalists, has meant that that's a more and more fragmented and challenging role. So what we can do is to look at how we can get the messaging to be relevant to the individual audiences by looking at the data that they create. Now, this, this idea in McKinsey is they're working with big companies and they're talking about having a customer data platform with a 360-degree view of the consumer or partner or any audience group. Now, that's fantastic, but most of us don't have the bandwidth nor the capacity to create such a complex system. But what we can do is start with some relatively simple information. And what we do when we're looking at, for example, media outreach for clients is we look at the, the digital footprint that the media or the journalists or the influence— or it could be, for example, when we're doing on LinkedIn for clients looking at the potential partners— is these journalists and authors and analysts, for example, are publishing often at scale and volume. And what we can do is we can find out what they're writing about, and we can see maybe what the pattern is. And then what we do is when we're going to do a media interview with a client and this journalist is we will read the articles that that journalist has written before about a specific company or topic so that we can get into alignment between what that journalist is writing and thinking and also their skill levels, for example, which is an important one. And the client's desire to communicate their message. So journalists are constantly sharing information about what they're interested in by what they publish, and this creates a trigger for the media relations work. And what we can do then, for example, is we can look at if a journalist comes to— for example, if you have a press room on the website, and you have a— will certainly have an IP address, but also you may have a, uh, a private access, so someone has to enter an email address or a company name. So there are trigger events when journalists do things, when they go to a particular press center, for example, or when they publish a particular story, and those can be tracked And those trigger events can be then opportunities to reach out to those media with our own specific and relevant content. There was a report by a company called Blueshift, um, actually talking about consumer marketing, and it talks about how triggers versus batch emails are effective. So batch emails, or we just send things without, without any particular trigger. In other words, no particular event. For example, like if someone's moved home, or if there's been an incident, an accident, or there's been a new factory opened, for example. Email triggers are 497% more effective than batch emails, and mobile push triggers are 1,490% more effective than batch push notifications. In other words, if I've bought something and then I get an SMS saying, you've bought, do you want this? It's going to have a much greater impact than a generic SMS. So in our marketing, one of the things that we can look at is these triggerable moments. For example, the download of a marketing report. Or the abandonment of a shopping cart, for example. And we can then start to track where these individuals are at in their journey. And if it's a journalist, we'll be able to start to see what they've done and what they're interested in. And what we can start to do then is to track that and start to share with them what we think is going to be interesting information. Now, this is easier maybe than it seems. So, but one of the things that we find is that personalization at scale requires, you know, an agility in the organization, but also cross-functional teams, and also for companies and clients to recognize who's going to be the best person to recognize those triggers and to understand what the media or the potential partners or analysts are interested in. Many, many clients treat their agency as a distribution service, maybe to help with content creation, but, but many clients don't think of their agency as really an integrated part of the team, which, as I, as I shared the other day about how often marketeers are in their 30s and they're selling things to people in their 60s and 70s, it creates a dislocation between the people creating the messaging and the people who are delivering the messaging and the people who are receiving the messaging. So one solution to that is for companies and people contracting, either internal or external, is to allow an understanding of which people in the team or even if they're not in the specific team, which people in an organization are, are closest to the trigger events, that they can raise an alarm or even create an action. So for example, if you have people in the organization that are particularly keen or aware of sporting activities and you're in the sporting business, why not let those people be the internal alarm system for opportunities to promote the company and at an upcoming sports event, for example. So how do we do this at scale? Well, the, the 2018 edition of Scott Brinker's Marketing Technology Landscape lists some 7,000 marketing technology solutions. In my technology applications directory for public relations, I've listed over 100. These are available at our website at eastwestpr.com. .com. So I just listed just 100, but Scott is obviously a very busy man. He also works at HubSpot, and in 2020, apparently this list grew by 13.6% to 8,000 martech solutions. In other words, there has to be a solution for pretty much every problem that you're facing. The challenge is how to find the right ones. So technology is important, the data is important, and the analytics are important. But the companies that just go to martech on its own will find, as I have when I was working with the company on outsourcing my, my, some of my back office administration, I was being asked to change my business system to fit their martech solutions. In the end, I said, I don't want to do that. I have my own workflow, my own business process. I'll find the solution that meets my own work processes, not change my work processes to fit theirs. And with 8,000 martech solutions, that's everything from PR, sales management, CRM, online support and so on. There are so many that we can choose from, and I'll put a link into Scott Brinker's website where he has a directory for these. But one, one company actually from America that is claiming to help with the personalization at scale for journalist relationships is one called Muck Rack. And they have what they now call a public relations management platform. And now with many companies like Muck Rack and Cision and Presley and Prowly, they are helping us as entrepreneurs to access a vast amount of information— in their case, 10,000 journalists— which otherwise we could never collate on our own. Now, in the case of Muck Rack, I've included that because I think it's quite interesting, because the journalists themselves go in and showcase their pitching preferences right on their portfolios. So the journalists now in the Muck Rack platform are basically saying what kind of stories they're interested in and how to pitch to them. We want to do personalization at scale. If journalists, as we see in Muckrack, are actually giving their personal preferences in order to save themselves time and to receive impactful stories, then our job of creating the content for these journalists has become so much easier. Now, Muckrack claims to be the only media database that offers journalists the ability to control their own public profile Certainly some of the other ones I've looked at, like Telem and Cision, are sort of research-based, and Prowly is AI where it's going out and finding journalists' contact details by searching the web with AI and bringing back things like Twitter and, and Facebook and Instagram handles. But Muck Rack for 10 years has had this ability for journalists to write down what for example, what time of day they would like to be pitched at, whether they would like to respond typically to a pitch or they don't, how long they like the pitch to be in terms of word count or duration, whether they like a follow-up. So there are some other tools there around enabling you to share that information with your team, which is— I think collaboration now, of course, is essential. You can work from a unified platform, and you can also store your own data. For those of us that have in the past used Excel spreadsheets and then shared them, for example, on Google as a shared spreadsheet with other team members, we're pretty familiar with that. But also what you could do with Mutrack is you can send and schedule personalized pitches. By customizing the email content for each person and tracking who's engaged and managing the follow-up. So then you could create batches. You could create batches for journalists that are profiled both by interest but also by style of approach. So this is that personalization at scale that is the holy grail now in consumer marketing. But in public relations, as we have more and more dispersed and fragmented media, but also let's call them unofficial media— influencers and bloggers and so on— it's impossible to keep up with them all. It's certainly impossible to have a relationship with them all as we used to in the old days with a limited number of media with a lot of time And the old PR long lunch, which was legendary, of course, there isn't even time for an espresso anymore. So this golden age, or second golden age of martech, where there are ecosystems, experts, and citizen engineers, as Scott Brinker calls it— I'd like to add the fourth element, and that is entrepreneurs, because ecosystems experts and engineers don't have anything to say on their own. They're waiting for the content that entrepreneurs can share, and it's the content that's the king still. It's the stories, as I've mentioned, for example, with the model for storification with Park Howell. It's the entrepreneurs' stories that ultimately are the fuel for the martech engines. So I share that personalization at scale is something that we can all do, and we can do it as entrepreneurs, as small business owners, by using the technology. There are plenty of them out there. If I can help in any way to help you select or shortlist or to interview people that you find interesting, I would love to help to do that. So my name is Jim James, and I'm sharing ways that business owners can unlock value in their businesses using great stories and using great technology. So I'm sharing this in a way, it's personalization at scale, because you're listening to me one-on-one in a, in the quiet environment with your headphones on, and I'm talking to you from my own TARDIS here in Somerset of England. So with that, I wish you best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep communicating with personalization at scale.