Ahhh, the old “marketing is marketing is marketing” gambit.
PR is a difficult subject to explain at the best of times, but if you try to segment it down into areas of expertise, it gets even more complex when really, it should make it easier. For example, if you were a grocer (let’s think small for a minute) and you wanted to publish some news about your shop, you could publish it in your local newspaper which would reach your intended audience. Simple.
However, the same grocer now wants to sell his shop. Does he publish it in the same way? No, he goes to a dedicated trade channel and magazine and gets the advert in front of people more likely to want to engage with him.
That’s a really simple example granted, but let’s think about it. In order to get the most out of any advertising or marketing, it really makes sense to put that marketing and in fact any material in front of people who are more likely to engage with it. With any public relations, the formula is the same but some organisations don’t realise that within the PR world there are specialists, too.
I was recently at a networking event where there was a guy from a large electronics company. The company had actually just been created by a large holding company and had inherited their marketing department to get them going. The holding company had experience in retail food sales, a world away from circuit boards. This chap was having a terrible time with marketing, the conversation went like this:
Me : “Do you pay for your marketing then?”
Him: “Yes, it’s a business transfer and we get a good rate, but it’s still costing a lot”
Me: “And what return are you getting?”
Him: “Pretty much none, it’s not really working at all”
Me: “So how are they specifically targeting the electronics world?”
Him: “I don’t think they are, I think they’re just doing a broad-brush marketing campaign”
That’s not a great start for a company of any size.
Find a starving crowd
There’s a great story over here about a marketing teacher talking to his students. You can read the whole thing (it’s pretty good) but the general premise is this, if you wanted to sell hamburgers then what would be the one advantage you would want over everyone else? The answer?
“A starving crowd”.
Take Pinnacle’s campaigns for engineering audiences. Because we employ engineers we know what engineers want. Which means we can create content than resonates with an engineering audience and talk at a technical level with the journalists and influencers who reach our clients’ target markets. If you have a technology that you want to get in front of people – if you want to find your starving crowd – then it’s best to go with a company that knows who they are and where they are.
