Persuasion

PR makes the most of small marketing budgets

Budget cuts have become familiar for many marketing managers.  Yet the pressure to produce hasn’t diminished.

How can marketing managers maintain a high level of awareness for their brands and continue to drive leads on small budgets?

That’s the subject of my article in this week’s DM News.

I offer three inexpensive and easy tactics:

1. Offer customers and prospects something useful, then promote that offering through an online channel like a blog, e-newsletter or Twitter.
2. Leverage in-house experts for media interviews, speaking opportunities and for commentary on industry blogs, etc.
3. Ensure your company stays relevant to your customers by commenting on trends and offering advice on industry issues.

The entire article can be viewed here.

--Mara Conklin

Social media works with email

If you’re trying to build your opt-in email list, consider text messaging.  According to a study by ExactTarget, Ball State University and the Email Marketers Club, email subscription via text messaging is the fastest growing list building tactic among marketers.  Consumers subscribing to emails via their mobile phones will increase 500 percent this year, the study predicts.

Email marketers also are enabling subscribers to share email content with their social networks.  This practice is expected to increase more than 348 percent in 2009.

More information on the study can be found here.

--Mara Conklin

Clarus Wins Three PR Awards!

We are thrilled to announce that Clarus has won three coveted public relations industry awards for the work we performed for YourEncore, an Indianapolis company that places retired scientists and engineers in R&D organizations for short-term assignments.   The campaign, “YourEncore: Innovation and Retiree Awareness, was awarded:

• The “Silver Bulldog Award for Best General Business Campaign” by the Bulldog Reporter, a national media intelligence organization;
• The “Silver Trumpet Award for Marketing” by the Publicity Club of Chicago; and
• The “APEX Award for Best Public Relations Campaign” by the Northwest Arkansas Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). 

What’s most gratifying about these wins is the knowledge that as a boutique agency with budgets in the thousands we can compete alongside multi-national corporations and large-scale agencies with PR budgets in the millions.  We continually show our clients that big successes can come from small budgets.  The key is knowing how to tell a good story with integrity to the right audiences. 

Click to read the news release.

--Mara Conklin

Marketers are integrating social media, e-mail at rapid pace

A record number of email marketers plan to bridge the gap between online social networks and their email marketing campaigns, according to new research from Ball State University, the Email Marketer’s Club and ExactTarget.

The study surveyed 351 email marketers in March and found that while only 13 percent leveraged the power of online networks last year to grow their email subscriber list, more than 46 percent plan to use social media and email in tandem in 2009.

According to ExactTarget, the global reach, rapid adoption and high engagement found in social media have email marketers “salivating at the potential these environments offer to engage with customers and prospects.”  However, marketers are challenged as to how to best facilitate meaningful interactions with customers on social media sites such as  Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg and others.

The study can be found here.

--Mara Conklin

Welcome Aboard!

Every company is excited to sign a new client, especially in the current economy when firms think twice about expending their resources.

We at Clarus Communications are pleased about our new relationship with Clifton Gunderson, one of the top 15 CPA firms in the country, because this is an exciting time to be working in the financial services industry, which is experiencing rapid changes. Clifton Gunderson wants to take a thought leadership role in identifying the impact of these changes for businesses of every size.

The relationship between our two firms began as something of a ‘blind date’ when a mutual client in the manufacturing sector introduced us to each other.   That led to a series of conversations, some press coverage and finally a contract, which was recently announced:

http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2009/04/20/daily17.html

--Linda Muskin

Baby steps are the memorable ones

The first step to every good PR program is knowing how to talk about your company, product or service in a way that makes reporters want to hear more. In the public relations business, that’s called messaging.

The idea seems intuitive but this is where most PR programs start to fall down. Most executives know their businesses well; they just don’t know the right phrases to capture what makes them truly unique.

Illinois Meetings + Events interviewed Clarus’ Linda Muskin to get her take on what makes PR successful. Needless to say, messaging was her #1 suggestion.

Read the article here. 

--Mara Conklin

Bailout passing you by? Create your own stimulus plan.

It will be months before most small to mid-sized companies start feeling the effects of the government stimulus plan; that is if we feel them at all.  In the meantime, our client Clifton Gunderson has come up with five tips that businesses can use right now to create their own stimulus plan.

The tips include ways to improve working capital, special accelerated depreciation tax deductions available to small businesses, clever tax strategies that can help businesses recoup some real money and other good advice.

Take a look at the ideas and start saving!

--Mara Conklin

An open letter to AIG: It’s time to say you’re sorry

Dear AIG executives,

What on earth are you thinking?

It’s bad enough that you mismanaged your business to the point of needing more than $100 billion in taxpayer-funded bailout money. 

It was disgraceful shortly afterwards when you treated yourselves to a “retreat” in a luxury resort.

It is an absolute insult that you now are paying yourselves $165 million in bonuses, and some of the money has gone to folks who no longer work for the company.

You have a monumental PR problem on your hands unlike any I’ve ever seen before—and it’s all of your own making.

You probably have started losing customers over this.  Certainly, new customer acquisition has come to a grinding halt.

So here’s a little advice.

Pay the bonus money back to the government and apologize.  Profusely. 

Adopt a company culture and an external message that says: we no longer will do business based on the greed model.  Then act on it.  Laser focus on this new mission. 

This will take courage. This will take leadership. This will take getting back to the roots of your business: insurance.  But it’s the only hope you have.

--Mara Conklin

Earned Media Builds Brands

Call it “Buzz.” Call it “Spin.” Call it any name you want. Public relations is the supply chain of information that we all use when making a purchasing decision.  The more high value the purchase, the greater the role for PR.

“Media Prominence Study,” by by Text 100 and Context Analytics, says that public relations may have more impact on a brand’s perceived value than does advertising especially if products are feature-rich, high-involvement and complicated like consumer electronics, financial services and vehicles.

In a recent story about the study, PR Builds Brand for Complex Products Better than Ads, MediaBuyer wrote:

“Industries that sell high involvement products - where a buyer invests time deciding what to buy - have higher correlations between media prominence and brand value than industries selling low involvement products (more likely to be bought on impulse).”

This makes sense. If the purchase requires a substantial investment of time, money or both, the buyer wants to know the whole story. When resources are tight, this need to know if even greater. You want to know the story from several different angles and how it plays out over time. You want to know the story of the company’s history and it’s prospects for the future.

Public relations helps companies tell their story based on clear, concise messaging. Let me know if you want tips on how to tell your story.

--Linda Muskin

Confessions of a Cover Girl

 Secretly, I’ve always wanted to be that shapely model that catches your eye as you pass by the magazine rack.

Thanks to the normal aging process, it is too late for me to fulfill the eye candy dream but today I came closer than ever to that goal.
 
Today, my CLIENT became the cover story on a coveted publication of the billboard industry: Outdoor Advertising Magazine.

So how did that happen? Several months ago when the economy started to spasm, I had a heart-to-heart talk with my friend Darrin Friskney of Watchfire Digital Outdoor and asked him why anyone would buy his product in tight economic times.   After all, these digital billboards represent a significant investment.

Darrin had lots of answers to my question and they made sense.  He explained the economics of digital billboards, the advantage they held over other advertising media, the adoption rate over the last several years, etc.

I figured if I were interested, others would be too.

That’s when I called the publisher of the magazine and pitched the story idea.  He liked it and he liked the beautiful artwork available to tell the story.

The cover is important, it catches your eye but the story is key, that’s what people talk about and what they remember.

--Linda Muskin