PR and Marketing

While marketing and public relations (PR) go hand-in-hand, these two efforts require two different plans. Sure, the plans have to be in sync but the roles and the scalability are very different from one another. 

Below are my top four suggestions for building a marketing plan around your PR plan.

1.       Think about your audience and their concerns. You also have to ask yourself why they should care about your customer’s product / brand. Fame alone or having a bit of credibility isn’t enough. If it was, we wouldn’t have one-hit wonders in the music industry or reality TV shows with former A-list stars. So, when creating your marketing plan consider why people should care.

2.       Develop a tool kit to go with your plan. This is your resource of tools, such as; email newsletters, auto responders, paid advertisements, social media accounts, etc.  Then identify how you are going to execute your marketing plan with each and every tool in the “kit”.

3.       Relationships are key. Who do you know that can help promote your marketing plan? For PR people, this tends to be easy. While you may not get a free radio advertising campaign out of it, you may get a reduced campaign with a live feed at an event. So, dig into your resource bucket and then use it.

4.       Make sure you have a clear and concise message. Don’t market for the sake of marketing. Make sure you have a message that defines both the brand and the purpose.  This step goes along with step 1. Make sure you know what your message is, why your audience should care, and then make sure it isn’t convoluted in any way.

Until tomorrow,

Coco the CEO