Answer Me This: Two Questions For the B-to-B PR/Marketing Team

By design, marketing and PR teams are charged with increasing brand awareness and supporting business development efforts, while ultimately helping to ramp up sales of a company’s products or services.

These business-critical duties involve programs such as messaging, online marketing, media relations, direct marketing, creative collateral and content development, social media marketing, research and many other programs.

No matter the program, each B-to-B PR and marketing team member should have at least a basic understanding of two critical pieces of information:

• the company’s ideal prospect/ideal customer
• the unique value proposition the company delivers to the ideal customer

Question 1: Who is the Company’s Ideal Customer?

A basic understanding of a company’s ideal customer helps the PR and marketing team connect with the most optimal market segments.  The insight serves as the entire foundation of the PR, marketing and lead generation program. The exercise helps to identify the people and businesses that will benefit your organization the most. 

A range of methods help create a targeted customer profile. Techniques suggested by MarketingSherpa involve a deep dive into current customers to identify the five optimal customers, and the five “worst” customers for profiles of each to understand demographics and characteristics. Other market research efforts, from simple surveys to extremely in-depth market intelligence, provide a distinct picture of where the target market lies. Cultivating a customer mindset makes all the difference to each team member, from the team who develops and maintains the company’s website, to the staff in the booth at tradeshows.

The bottom line is that having some insight into an ideal customer profile helps the team be more effective in awareness building, lead generation and marketing.  After all, marketing programs should resonate with the prospect most likely to buy. 

Question 2: What’s the Company’s Unique Value Proposition?

The second, equally compelling question to ask each PR and marketing team member, is to clearly communicate what the company does, and the unique benefits the products/services deliver over the competition.  A value proposition speaks directly to your target audience and it tells them exactly why they should purchase your products and services.

This means every PR and marketing team member must be able to quickly articulate the concrete results a customer will get from the company’s products or services. Again, MarketingSherpa provides useful insight into the issue.  The point here is that every PR and marketing team member should have at least some insight into why the prospect should buy from the company, the specific value the product or service provides, via wording the ideal customer can easily understand.

Central to Success

It's been my experience that acquiring basic insight into these two areas proves central to the success of any organization, including nonprofits.   

Again, there are numerous resources out there, including MarketingProfs, that help discover the answers to these two questions.

For the B-to-B company, what other questions need to be explored to deliver positive business outcomes?

Whither the Press Release?

There’s an interesting discussion this week via the Forbes website about the role social media plays when considering the tried and true press release. It’s a topic a few clients have recently discussed, as well.

The post is a worthwhile look into the future of the traditional press release, and whether social media channels play a role in the distribution of such content.

A Communications Convention

It’s clear that the press release still plays a crucial role in business-to-business communications and PR.

When issued consistently with a regular cadence, the “lowly” press release is a conventional communications vehicle that serves as the foundation for expanding awareness, engaging relevant media and fueling public relations.   It helps with credibility, SEO and signals a company’s current business activity.

A press release powers other efforts (media placements, reporter contact, web content, blogging, marketing content development, etc.) and has a place in any b-to-b marketing program.

100+ Years and Counting

It’s interesting to note that the first press release was created in 1906, and stayed about the same until the 1990’s when newswire services began to appear. 

Now, PR pros select from a myriad of distribution channels and online news aggregators (PitchEngine for example), many covered here in this blog such as the “one sentence press release” from muckrack.com.  (and yet another recent discovery called “WireTiger”)

An Erroneous Assumption

What bugs me about the headline of the Forbes post, though, is the underlying assumption that social media is another “broadcasting” channel to distribute press releases.

Of course press releases are an important tool for a client to shape the news and create awareness.    It’s unfortunate that some PR folks use social media as a broadcasting tool for sending out press releases and recent client news, and that misses the mark. 

Instead of a “bullhorn”, social media is a powerful listening and engagement tool. 

Social media is all about relevance in message, and relevance in community.  Twitter and LinkedIn facilitate real-time interaction, not just a one-way information flow. 

PR guru David Merman Scott puts it this way in the Forbes article:

“Press releases are not a good idea for social networks, the formality of a press release with headline, sub-headline and text is not the sort of formal communications that works well in social networks.  Don’t use a press release format, re-purpose that content into a more informal piece of content, from a blog post, which is what I recommend.”

2012 Predictions

The press release will live on in 2012 and beyond.  It will always play a pivotal role in business-to-business communications.

What should not live on, though, is the assumption that social media is another “distribution channel” for the press release.

Meaningless Words and Blah Blah Text: Three Buzzwords to Avoid

“”When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’” L. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

As another year comes to a close, folks are taking stock of the year in buzzwords – especially pertaining to business-to-business marketing communications.

It can be fun reading posts about “PR Buzzwords” or “Overused Words in LinkedIn profiles” – but it can be painful, too. 

As a marketing communicator, I’ve written a fair share of content with words like  “Value Add,” Award-Winning,” “Industry-Leading,” “Mission Critical” and “Thought Leader.”

Beware the Blah Blah

Granted, these are useful concepts in PR or marketing communications.

Yet terms like these and others quickly become meaningless and instead of adding “more” they start to mean “less” as so aptly put by Humpty Dumpty in the quote above.

In fact, they become “blah blah” text, and are best deleted.

The Long and Short of It

Mark Twain once said about an essay or a letter he had written, “I am sorry this is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter.”

It takes time to write concise and compelling text.  One must first capture the essence of the idea, write an initial draft, go back and reorganize, then return a third or fourth time to “slash and burn” meaningless blah blah that adds no value. 

Top 3 Offenders of 2010
In the spirit of “slash and burn,” here are my suggestions for the top 3 offending blah blah terms of 2010.

• Transformative – This isn’t a word.  Using the word in a proposal or marketing blurb does not make it so. Exactly what does "transformative" mean anyway?  This is a major blah-blah word. Best avoided 
• Deep Dive – I hate hearing this term in a meeting when it means, “to explore an issue or subject in-depth. "We should meet to do a deep dive on this issue." What’s the converse – a “shallow dive”? 
• Going Forward – This is “filler” and of no value.  It means “looking to the future” and can be deleted anytime you see or hear it, as in the following sentence:  "Going forward, we anticipate earnings improving in core industries, with even better results in the expanding diversified markets."   Simply remove “Going forward…” and the meaning of the sentence is not impacted.

Additional Resources

As for additional reading, here’s a suggestion for going forward. Visit these transformative websites to take a further “deep dive” into the subject:

BuzzWhack - demystifying business jargon & buzzwords - check out the funny warning on the home page! 

The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary - the most complete A-Z "blah blah" resource there is! 

Happy Buzzword-Free New Year!  

When a Brown Bag Isn’t A Brown Bag

I just returned from a marketing communications planning meeting with a team of execs from a UK-based manufacturing company. It was a great meeting about the importance of a strategic approach to PR.

Specifically, the company recognizes the value of generating “top of mind awareness” within their industry space. With systematic creation and distribution of key industry announcements, press releases, and news, the company can reinforce their brand image of technological innovation.

A regular news stream helps populate other marketing communications programs such as e-newsletters, direct mail, websites and social media.

We talked about how traditional advertising, or even PPC, has its place but isn’t an affordable option right now to meet their purposes. Conversational, or social marketing, in the form of internet content is gaining momentum and effectiveness. PR fuels this effort.

Watch Your Words!

As the discussion turned to topics worthy of announcements and news releases, it became clear that there is a distinct difference between UK and American “business-speak” and other vocabulary.

As an example, one of the company’s execs shared that in the UK, the term “brown bag” has a dramatic difference in definition than in the US. Here in the US, a “brown bag seminar” means a business meeting in which participants bring their own lunch, or “brown bag it” as they view an informative presentation. In the UK, however, the term “brown bag” conjures up visions of a homeless drunk on the side of the road. This is an important distinction when building a press release!

Never Say “Pants”

The term “pants” is also problematical. In the UK,"pants" usually refers to underwear- not trousers. The descriptive term "pants" is also used when referring to something that is of poor quality ("the movie last night was pants").

Business writing is also unique in the UK, where one will see terms like “whilst”; “heretofore”; “henceforth” and other words not often seen in business writing.

For Further Reading

The Project Britain blog on all things British life and culture offers a handy worksheet and vocabulary listing that translates UK and US terms.

As the blog points out, many Brits are familiar with American slang terms and idioms from consuming US media. Still, it pays to be sensitive, especially when dealing with a multi-cultural business communications project.

PR builds trust and credibility. It is cost-effective way to validate a new product or service to the most people possible. The challenge is to get the word out/generate interest/awareness from unbiased, third party opinion, but to use the appropriate vocabulary!

I married into a UK family, so I understand these issues. I’m just grateful the team reminded me of these particular words. So far, I better remember to stay away from “Brown Bag” and “pants”!