INBOUND 2016: Christine Perkett "How To Use PR, Branding and Positioning to Take on Goliath"

Thank you. Okay. Am I on? Okay, I am. Hi. Good afternoon. I know this is right before lunch, so y' all are probably thinking about food. I'll try to make this quick, but it's not really going to be quick. So, as he mentioned, I have been in PR for longer than I care to admit, and most of what I'm talking about today is geared towards folks that have smaller marketing teams, small businesses or startups, and want to know how they can execute some pr. That's the agenda. We can probably skip through that. So I'm going to start with talking about the importance of branding. According to the US Census Bureau, there are 28 million small businesses in the country. And while they may be small, they. They have a big impact. As you can see, they account for 54% of all U.S. sales, 55% of all jobs, and provide 66% of all net new jobs since the 1970s in the United States. So that's a big impact. And this doesn't even account for the startups that are in the landscape and that people may not know about yet. Not everybody needs branding. All of these businesses need branding. So how much does branding matter? I'm sorry, I'm multitasking up here. If you own or work for a small business, marketing can definitely be a challenge. So how do you stand out when budgets are small and resources are so focused? It can be especially difficult when you're a startup or the smaller player in a sea of larger organizations with really big budgets, or at least bigger than yours. The first thing you've got to do is establish a consistent, noteworthy, and memorable brand. Branding goes well beyond a cool logo and fun company name. It's your voice in the marketplace, as Amy Kosper of Entrepreneur has said before, and it's your proposition for disruption. What makes you special? Why are you memorable? Brand is crucial to letting people know this and establishing your presence in the market. So professional look and feel builds credibility. So that's important. That's usually where most people start. They get a design firm or they have someone creative on the team and they pick out their colors and they get a logo. And that's important because it inspires trust through credibility and a professional look. But recognition goes way beyond the logo. Word association is also important. Great brand makes selling easier. People buy from those that they know and like. So if you create a good brand that puts forth a promise to your audience and seems a little bit human in the way that it markets, you'll be more memorable. And it also leads to name and visual Awareness. I like this quote here. Branding isn't just what you tell people, but it's what you believe and what you make them believe based on the signals that your brand sends. So a great brand story taps into a target's target audience's emotions. And I think that in the last few months, all of which accumulated on November 9, we've seen a couple of brands. One that had a very emotional tact and one that kind of lacked some emotion, I think. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. It ties your value to your brand promise, as I mentioned. So we'll talk about what a brand promises in a second. It conveys the overall experience that people have when they interact with your brand. So not just with your marketing npr, but with your customer service team and with your product or service. It's powerful, relevant to them and to the time that you are in and to the place that you are in. So we'll talk a little bit about that. It's memorable, and most importantly, it's consistent. You want to make people remember what you're providing, what your promise is. So it has to be consistent in order to break through all the noise that's out there. And of course, it helps build a strong and loyal customer base. Sorry, I think I went backwards. Okay. Your brand's story is the underlying story that drives everything your brand does, sells, promises, and elicits. The best brands are built on great stories. So what makes a good story? Well, that depends. First and foremost, you. You need a story that appeals to your audience's emotions, as I mentioned, and makes a promise. So a brand promise is a single promise that you tell or imply across all of your communications, the unique value that you deliver. Coca Cola's promise is happiness. Everything they do, all of their commercials, even their social media, if you look at their Twitter handle, is about being happy and having fun and doing things that make you happy. Apple, obviously, is all about innovation. They continue to market that even when folks feel that they're not being innovative. But that is their brand promise. Louis Vuitton, here on the bottom left, handbags and luxury goods. Their promise is that you will feel special and important and luxurious. And toms, which of course offers a great buy, one, we donate one model, is all about making lives better, enriching the lives of those that do business with them. So getting to brand position takes a couple of steps. You've got to do some of these things. And I purposely don't have a lot of visuals on here because these can seem very tedious so this is a little bit white and black. You've got to take the time to create a good vision for your company. This is to guide your employees and everyone that works with you about what your bhag is, your big hairy, audacious goal. It can be almost outrageous in that it's a guiding purpose that everyone knows they're following. A good example is Pepsi to improve all aspects of the world in which we operate. That's their vision. So that's pretty big and pretty broad and they promise that they're going to create a better tomorrow than today. That's a lot for a beverage company, but that's their vision. It's very lofty, but it gives employees a guiding light of what the company is striving to do. Mission is a bit more practical. So for example, Warby Parker's mission is buying glasses should be easy and fun. Leave you happy and good looking with money in your pocket. That's pretty clear. So a mission is a little bit more practical. It's very clear. It lets you know what you're going to get out of doing business with this person. Brand Uber's is to provide a crowd sourced solution to the issue of overpriced, hard to find taxis and revolutionize the unwieldy and monopolized taxi industry. So those are a couple of examples of good mission statements. So they're telling you exactly what they're going to do for you. And then we have the elevator pitch. So this is an even more straightforward description of what you do and it should be clear enough that you could explain it to someone on an elevator ride and they come off that elevator understanding what you do from one or two statements. So again, using Uber as an example, they state that they connect passengers with either drivers of vehicles for hire or ride sharing services in several cities around the world. So that's pretty clear. It's one statement. I think you can get what they do from that. Excuse me, sorry. So also you need to create a positioning statement. So this is important from a competitive standpoint. You want to let your audience know where you land in the market, how you're better and different. You want to make it clear. So during this exercise you should take into account both real and perceived competitors. So that is, you might not think that they're competitors or you've never come up against them yet, but if they can compete for your customers attention and dollars, they should be considered a perceived competitor. So you want to talk about how you're different and better. Taglines are used on websites, logos, even email signatures, they should be short and snappy. I'll again use Uber as an example. Their tagline is get there, your day belongs to you. As you can see on the bottom right, that's pretty clear and snappy. It's a dramatic but effective statement that clearly delivers their value proposition. And speaking of value proposition, it should also be clear and unique. You'll want to create three core messages that you or your spokespersons always share when they're talking about your brand, why you're a leader, what's unique about you, and what's different from your competitors. This is especially important when we get to the PR part. When you speak to media or journalists, you always want to have three key messages that you leave them with. So you want to train your executives or your spokespersons to always leave with those three core messages to your brand. Okay? So it's not just enough for you to tell everyone why you're so fantastic. So to cement your brand position, you'll need proof points. Too many brands don't spend enough time on building these out and unearthing them. They can be found through conversations with customers, analysis of data, execution of a survey, or even alignment with industry statistics so they support and prove your claims. It's not enough to just stand on your own soapbox and say how great you are. You need proof. Although I wrote this before Donald Trump became president, so maybe that's an exception. But for the most part, you need proof points to what you're promising. Two other important exercises in getting to brand position are a SWOT analysis. So taking a really deep look at your strengths, your weaknesses, your. Your opportunities and your threats. And again, real and perceived. For these exercises, I highly recommend working with a professional, maybe a consultant or a messaging, branding or PR agency that can take you through this exercise. It puts you in a better position if you're the internal marketing person. And it also helps get more out of your team because someone outside can really push. Like, why is that special? Why does that make you special? So that. So they can bring a non kool aid drinking kind of perspective to the exercise. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't talk about key audience id. So this is an exercise where literally you can throw up on the whiteboard or wherever it is that you're congregating. Sorry. And put down all of the key audiences. So not just your customers. A lot of smaller businesses are only thinking about their customers, understandably so. But you have a lot of other audience as well. So you want to put them up. It could be journalists, it could be influencers, it could be partners, employees, VCs. So you want to put those up and define what would they want to know and what would they need to know about your brand and your company. So talk about a couple of best practices here. I'm sure you have all seen this isn't a new example, but if you remember that your brand is your company's personality, it's got to be memorable and clear and most importantly, consistent. Are you a serious brand? Are you a funny brand? Are you a romantic brand? You've got to be sure that your marketing content and PR campaign support and show that personality consistently. If your brand isn't one whose voice aligns with using slang or GIFs or memes, then don't use them, even if they seem like the hottest thing out there. Before you create any content, you've got to think about whether it fits your core brand identity and your overall strategy. So this is an example of Oreo and this is an example of responsive branding, which today is an effective way of branding. It creates unique and on demand engagements with your core audience and thanks to social media, it's possible. So it's a very effective strategy in our always on, ever connected world. So during the power outage of the 2013 Super bowl at the Superdome in New Orleans, which I'm sure you're all aware of, Oreo's ad group, the Martin Agency immediately sent out this tweet. It's an image of a cookie and it's in the dark with the caption power out. No problem, you can still dunk in the dark. It was a huge hit. It was retweeted more than 15,000 times. So responsive branding is very effective. It doesn't have to be costly. Only with your time keeping an eye on what's happening and quickly reacting with creative content can be time consuming. So if you have a small team, you'll need to be sure that you have a dedicated resource to executing this kind of branding. So we'll move on and talk about pr. Oops, I keep hitting the wrong button. I'm sorry, double clicking here. So publicity is. Well, let me back up. If you're in a smaller business or a startup, choosing where to spend your money can be tough and you want to make sure that you're going to do something that works. So people often ask if PR is effective. I'll be honest, there are a lot of companies that have had bad experiences with pr. There's a million agencies to choose from. If you want to work with one and even more consultants. So you may be wondering if it's effective. I put this quote up because Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson, excuse me, obviously thinks so. And so do I, having been in it for 20 years. However, there have been a lot of rumors that PR is dead and dying, especially with the advent of social media. So let's be clear that PR is not dead. It's just definitely changed a lot. And if anything, it's more important and easier to execute than ever. So we'll talk about what is PR anyway? As I mentioned, it's changed a lot, especially over the last 10 years as social media gave every company a new way to engage directly with influencers, customers and prospects and create their own content and do their own kind of PR and marketing through social media. So you'll see a lot of different agencies overlapping now. So marketing, branding, advertising and pr. But I believe that PR is at the end of all of that list. The PR team is the one that takes everything you're creating, your messaging, your content, your visuals, and promoting it to the world. And the important part there is that a PR professional, or if you're doing it yourself, knows your audience and knows what they want and need and can create a relationship with them quickly and keep them engaged. So with social and digital work, the role of PR spans many different areas. Now, it can include what most people identify PR with, which is media relations, but that's only part of it. It also includes industry awards, speaking events, news releases, customer communication and conferences, social media management, and even digital production like video website development. PR firms are getting into that now as well. Content creation, ghost writing, media training, the list goes on. It also now includes data analytics for anyone who actually cares what they're spending their PR investment on. I did it again. I'm sorry. So PR obviously stands for public relations, but at the end of the day, because it's the part of marketing that promotes your brand, you've got to relate to your target audience and show them that you understand their wants and needs. So a good PR executive understands how to do this, whether it's a journalist, an analyst, a customer, or even a prospect, even a vc. A lot of times PR companies will help with the messaging and the visuals for a startup's investor deck. So good PR executive knows how to read people. They also know how to take the time to engage and not just push out promotional materials. So nobody wants to listen to or take recommendations from someone that they you can't relate to. So if you think of PR as a relationship, you'll be off to a good start. It's not rocket science, but it does take investment. It takes a decent budget, a dedicated team or resource, even if it's just one person. Hopefully it's not the business owner, but sometimes it is. And creative storytelling. That's really the crux of good pr. It also takes time. A lot of folks want to hire an agency, have them create a big blow up and have that be it. But PR is an ongoing investment. It's telling an ongoing story that continues to evolve as your company does. So where to start? Always, always start outside of marketing. So many companies forget this when they sit down to do their marketing plan. They don't even talk about their business goals. Business goals should be first and foremost what you share with your marketer or marketing team and your PR team. They have to understand what where you're trying to get and how they can help support that. What are you trying to accomplish? Work backwards from there to build a PR strategy. If you use the smart plan, you'll create specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound goals. Very important for communicating with your team. What you expect. Your plan should include an outline what tools you'll use so everything from social media to visual content and how you'll manage the effort. Again, PR is not good on autopilot. It's got to be managed. You have to decide if you're going to hire an employee, if you're going to hire an agency, or maybe a PR consultant would be a good place to start. And finally, make sure that you include measurement. As I mentioned, to determine how your investment is paying off. You have to pay attention to what's having the greatest impact so you can repeat what's working and pivot from what isn't. I've seen a lot of companies invest a lot in PR and not only not really sit down and identify concrete goals with their team or their agency, but never measure a benchmark, never create a benchmark and measure against it. And I don't know any other part of the business where someone doesn't want to know what their investment is getting them. So measurement today in PR is a big growing area. I am slightly biased because of my my software company. That's what we do. But if you go out and just Google PR measurement or right now if you're on Twitter, you can look at the hashtag measurepr. It's a Twitter chat that happens one Thursday a month. If you're interested in how to measure your investment, I recommend following it there's a lot of really smart people on that chat. Okay, just looking at the time here, so must haves. There are of course several different elements to a successful PR strategy, but ultimately it's the ability to tell good stories and not everything your business does is interesting. I know that sounds rude, but it's true. And it's also one of the biggest pain points for a PR executive. When owner, CEO, vp, cmo, whoever it is, is in charge, wants to announce everything that you do. We want to announce our new website, we want to announce our new hire, we want it to announce our new product. Some of those things are relevant and important and some of them aren't. So you've got to think about stepping outside of your own head sometimes and think about what interests you to see from other companies. Do you care that they have a new website? Do you care that they hired a new product marketing person? So step out of your own head and think about what's interesting to you and then work backwards from there about your own publicity. Determine who the key players will be, who are involved, which executives will be spokespersons. I highly recommend that they are media trained. If you'll be talking to journalists or bloggers or influencers of any kind at the most simplistic level, step back a couple slides and give them those core three messages. Explain to them what NDA means, things that they shouldn't be talking about with journalists, and that off the record doesn't really ever exist. So make sure they know that. If you do need media training, I do highly recommend finding a qualified trainer and investing in a session at least once with with your spokespersons, with them, and again put work into identifying your differentiators. What's special about your business? How do you tie that into a compelling ongoing story? Are you the innovative company like Apple? Are you a customer service obsessed brand? Or do you own the majority of the market? And if so, why? But no matter your size, you have to find a special angle and a sweet spot that is the narrative of your ongoing story. And last but not least, timing is also crucial for an effective campaign. If you're releasing news, for example, you'll want to make sure that you're not competing with other things in your industry, maybe a competitor's client, customer conference, maybe inbound, or maybe even an election. So you want to take a look at the calendar before you define what your timing is for. Especially for news people, Remember first and foremost how you make them feel. And they love brands that make them feel good. If I think of A brand that makes them feel good. I think of L.L. bean and I think of JetBlue, which I know is kind of ironic because it's airline and nobody likes flying in the airline business. But I do believe, mostly from their marketing content and their customer service, that they really care about making your experience better than most. So your story should start from. From that consideration how you make your audience feel. Are they going to be taken care of? Will they be nostalgic, excited, empowered? So all of your stories, whether in your ads, social content, press releases, or other pr, even media pitches, should support this underlying feeling. Another great example is Budweiser. Budweiser wants you to feel happy and like you belong and you're taken care of. So they have commercials, marketing, content, pr. Whether it's a puppy leading a horse home, as you saw a couple Super Bowls ago, or if it's a bunch of friends hanging out and you feel really special, the content always has that underlying story and that underlying feeling. So what makes a good PR story can vary. It depends on your business, your audience, what you have to offer. But it usually has one or more of these elements. In addition, if you're pitching a story to a journalist, it has to be relevant to what they write and for whom they write. You've got to do your homework and understand that the kind of stories that they're looking for, sometimes it's easier. Easier than others. But this is the number one complaint from journalists about anyone doing pr. Do you even read what I write? It's amazing. It keeps happening. I've been on the end of PR pitches as well for some of the blogs that I write. I usually write about business, tech, women in business, STEM careers, and I will get pitches for. I think the last one was a baby diaper, which you would never see that on anything that I write. So. So you've got to make sure that you take the time to read whoever it is, whatever journalist or blogger or influencer is writing about. And there's no excuse not to know that. Today all you have to do is look at their Twitter handle or their Facebook page. If they don't have a website, you could still find that information out. So again, get out of your own head. Who is a story for? Why would they care? It's not just about direct promotion anymore. You have to relate to people about topics they care about first. Blatant promotion on just your products and services really doesn't work anymore if you create content about topics that your audience cares about. If you create content on things that are going to help me and be a resource to me. I'm going to want to keep coming back to learn something more. And then when you tie in your products or services to those things that you've been talking about that I care about and that you help me with, I'm going to be more receptive to your message and listen to you. So make sure that you're thinking about how you're taking care of your audience first. So if you have limited resources and you can only pick a handful of things, here's what I suggest. Definitely social media. It's very often free, by and far the best thing that's happened to marketing in a long time, in my opinion. It obviously offers inexpensive ways to reach a mass audience when it's done correctly and you can expand your audience beyond what was once kind of regionally captive and become an influencer yourself in ways that weren't possible. Don't count out traditional media relations as I was just talking about. Although many people say its demise is near, I don't believe that it still remains a very influential form of pr. And the number one thing that companies call agencies and ask for might be tied with social media today, but still media relations is very important. That third party credibility that it brings really emphasizes and raises the awareness of your brand. Media still carries weight even if they just write about you but don't blatantly endorse you. It's still by association a very positive thing for your brand. Unless it's a bad review, for example. But most of the time it's a pretty positive thing. And writing yourself blogging, I still think is very important. Using key terms and being smart about the content that you're writing. WordPress and other platforms are very helpful at giving you guidelines and telling you that your headline should be shorter or longer. So there's no excuse for not, not doing some writing from that perspective. Another great strategy to having your blog extend your reach is to have guest bloggers or guest interviews. You can do this very easily, you know, paying attention to influencers. Obviously they should be associated and connected to what you do and your industry, but you can send them a q and a, 10 questions in email, ask for their picture, and boom, you've got an extended audience because they are going to say, hey you guys, I'm over here, look at this blog. And they're going to extend that to their network as well. So you've just probably doubled the audience that will see it. So that's a great, it's a great strategy for blogging and it's easy and a little bit less time consuming than always writing your own. So those are the three things that if you only have one person or it's just you and you're the business owner, if you can try to do these three things, those are the ones that I would recommend. So PR can be a little bit intimidating, but if you really want it to work, you'll dedicate the resources to it. So it just takes focus, it does take time, it doesn't have to be complicated. Definitely takes time to invest in relationships, humanize your approach. A lot of people think or brands get intimidated. Like I can't say that that's not something a company should say, but it's actually the opposite. Today people want to connect with brands in a way that they feel like they're being heard. And so the more human you can make your brand, interacting with people on Twitter or answering something on Facebook, the more likely they're going to feel emotionally connected. I'm going to skip forward a little bit because we're on time. So if you are a small business or a startup or an individual entrepreneur, you've probably faced these challenges. I can relate. I've been there. As I mentioned, I've started and run a small business and I'm currently in the middle of a bootstrap startup. So I know what it's like to have to be more creative with your money, your time and your marketing, including trying to navigate the never ending sea, because that is a lot of brands up there of recommended tools and vendor pitches. Obviously companies like HubSpot do a lot of top lists and explain other tools and products, but it can get overwhelming. So you've just got to take a look at first your budget and then your needs. If you buy a great piece of software but you don't have time to manage it, then you're probably wasting your money. So taking a look at that, asking colleagues and looking at what influencers may recommend. And once you do, how do you find the time to educate agencies or vendors? Provide feedback for creative content, ensure it's successful execution? It does take a lot of time. However, you do have options for help. You could hire someone in house or as a consultant. You can hire an agency, which I'm being kind here with the price on the agencies, they can go way north of this depending, but I'm trying to keep it focused on the small business startup audience and be realistic. Or you can do it yourself, which just means you have to dedicate the time and resources so each have costs not just money, but time. So no matter what you choose, make sure you have a good mix of what really matters. Again, news. Make sure it's meaningful. So many people associate.