Time for PR to adapt or die: 4 key actions

Public relations has had a chequered history.  Often seen as the fluffy poor relation to advertising or direct marketing, PR has often been one of the first areas to be scaled back in troubled times.

As markets pick up and business confidence grows, PR faces yet another challenge: how to reposition itself as a valuable channel in the marketing mix. 

Traditional PR, characterised by press releases, press launches, journalist relations and PR stunts, has to adapt to the modern marketing landscape or risk being sidelined to ‘nice to have’ status. Or, worse still, disappear altogether.

To survive, PR professionals, whether agency or in-house, need to address four key issues:

Integrate with the wider strategy: it never ceases to amaze me that many organisations see PR as almost stand-alone.  Separate PR teams with their own strategies seems to have been an acceptable approach.  If PR is to survive, it needs to be fully integrated in the wider marketing strategy and team, in the same way that digital has, at least in many forward-thinking organisations. 

Embrace digital and recognise your audience has changed: PR needs to move on from its traditional focus on print and broadcast media and fully embrace digital channels.  For example, failing to include blogger outreach activity when promoting a news story or launching a product means a significant and influential audience is excluded.

Recognise that PR is part of a wider content strategy: content strategies and plans are not just for digital teams.  PR professionals need to consider how they can align with digital activity, reinforce the messaging and repurpose content to achieve an integrated approach to brand, product or corporate messaging.

Reconsider the traditional metrics:  ‘advertising value equivalent’ is a blunt tool to measure PR effectiveness borne out of the need to justify value in the face of the threat from advertising. Instead, PR professionals need to focus on learning from their digital colleagues and start talking about relevant reach and engagement.

Whether PR survives as a stand-alone discipline remains to be seen.  What’s clear is that it needs to adapt to survive by embracing the modern digital world.

Word of mouth is not dead - it's digital

Word of mouth has long been the cornerstone of many marketing strategies, based upon the understanding that anything between 20 and 50 percent of purchasing decisions are influenced by recommendations of other customers.

But with the rise of internet usage generally, and social media in particular, the challenge now has to be how do we make word of mouth digital?

The challenge is a real one: having a great website and a social media presence is simply not enough:

• There are currently around 1 billion websites globally and this is expected to double in the next two years.
• Research would indicate that around 80% of website visits are a result of searches, not recommendation or advertising.
• Social media is generally seen as a trusted source of sharing and accessing product and service recommendations, with Facebook popular with consumers and LinkedIn with commercial decision makers.

It’s no surprise therefore that marketers are increasing diverting spend into SEO and social media. However, there are three things that marketers need to understand in order to achieve high levels of digital word of mouth:

1. It’s quality, not quantity when it comes to content. If we understand that most websites are visited as a result of a search and that increasingly searches are being done in the form of a question - how do I?  where can I? what is? - then it makes sense that your content strategy must reflect this. Helpful, instructional/educational and unbiased content that answers the questions asked by target customers is essential.
2. Customers inhabit ‘networks’ online. It’s simple really: there are so many sources of information online that customers are increasingly seeking out like-minded others and sharing news, views and opinions within a series of networks or groups. The key for marketers is to understand the networks inhabited by their target audiences and to join them there. Or, even better, build networks that audiences want to join.
3. Build engagement and promote sharing.  Focus on recruiting online brand advocates and understand what motivates your target audience to share content/make recommendations.  Consider incentives for sharing in the short term, but ensure that your content remains aligned to your customers’ interests and is worth sharing - not just by the reader but for your brand. Pictures of cats are highly shareable but not necessarily the right association for your brand. Look into crowd-sourcing and online customer panels/testing as a way of showing that you listen as well as preach.

The message is simple: marketers have traditionally prided themselves on understanding their customers; creating digital word of mouth is no different.

The marketer’s dilemma: short term sales growth or loyalty?

It probably won’t come as a surprise to most switched-on marketers that the modern customer is highly promiscuous.  Shopping around has become a national pastime, particularly as easy access to the internet has allowed many customers to explore the range of offers available in the comfort of their homes without resorting to wearing out shoe leather on the High Street.

This promiscuity is perhaps no more marked than in the highly competitive world of supermarket shopping.  The modern British shopper has, it seems, become adept at taking advantage of price promotions to divide their share of food spend between rival operators as opposed to remaining loyal to one supermarket brand.  Chasing savings has become more important than the convenience of making one trip to one supermarket chain.

This creates a dilemma for marketers:  do you enter the fray and compete almost entirely on price to drive short term sales growth; or do you focus on building a loyal customer base and reap the benefits of lifetime value?  Immediate commercial concerns may well dictate the former.

The answer lies somewhere between the two in my opinion. 

Yes, price promotion may well be necessary in order to drive customers to your business.  But this has to be seen as a short term measure or you may find yourself in the position of continuingly competing on price.

The challenge is to create a shopping experience that is distinctive and gives customers what they want, over and above the attraction of a good deal.  This means making the purchasing process as simple and quick as possible – we know, for example, that a proportion of shoppers abandon their baskets because of queues at the checkout.  It could mean better trained staff with greater product knowledge.  And it could mean additional services and product ranges that make the attraction of shopping in one outlet greater than another.

Marketers outside the food sector would do well to take on board the lessons being learned by the large supermarket chains:  differentiation by price alone will not generate loyal customers.

Marketers: stop "spray and pray" in favour of quality

Research out this week claims that 70% of marketers fail to deliver real benefits to their organisation in terms of increased sales or market share. 

The reason?  Too many forget that “New Media, Marketing Automation, Omnichannel, Big Data and the likes are only Tools (the “Form”) used to best deliver, analyse and/or optimise the messages (CVPs)”. 

In other words, we’ve been seduced by the potential of new channels without doing our homework in developing CVPs (customer value propositions) that are both attractive and relevant to our audiences.  Many, it seems, have forgotten the basics of our profession.

If 2013 was all about “content is king”, the mantra for 2014 has to be “quality over quantity”.  As customers we are all inundated with content on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.  Much of what I receive is indiscriminate, ill-timed or downright irrelevant. 

To give an example, a few months ago I was looking at hotel accommodation in Sydney, Australia.  At the time many of the websites I had visited were retargeting me online with offers and suggestions.  Fair enough.  But why am I still receiving such messages some three months later?

Everyday I receive emails from organisations seeking to do business with me.  Emails that clearly show they have no idea what I do or what my potential interests are.  I shudder to think what their response rate is.

“Spray and pray” is alive and well it seems at a time when greater focus is needed to achieve stand out.  It’s time that marketers got back to basics: well crafted, engaging, targeted messaging that ultimately supports the sales function.

More information on the research can be found here: https://www.fournaisegroup.com/Marketers-Got-It-Wrong-In-2013.asp