"You Are What You Publish: Building Your Marketing and PR Plan"

With the continued growth of social media comes the need for organizations to build stronger Marketing and PR Plans to connect better with their consumers.  This raises several points of clarification for Marketers which include, but are not limited to:

• Defining the organization’s goals
• Identifying buyer personas and their profiles
• Importance of buyer personas and what are they saying about you
• Determining what you want your buyers to believe
• Developing content to reach your buyers
• Measuring success

 

Defining Goals:

Seems pretty simple and rudimentary, but step one includes meeting with team leaders to define what goals your business wishes to reach.  Is your goal to increase revenues, the number of Facebook Likes on your brand page or grow market share in your product category? Connecting with PR to understand their goals for the organization helps to align Marketing on what goals they should focus their attention for synergizing plans.

Buyer Personas:

Typically a specific target audience is defined and the marketing plan is geared to that target range.  In Chapter 11 Scott points out that “Building buyer personas is the first step and probably the single most important thing that you will do in creating your marketing and PR plan.”  (Scott, 2012, p.165)  He goes on to discuss that these personas should be segmented so that appropriate marketing efforts are effective in connecting with them.  Building profiles for each of these personas allows Marketers uncover the buyer’s background, their interests/habits/behaviors and provide insight into how they can develop a resolution to meet their needs.

Buyer Personas – Web Marketing / What Are They Saying About You:

Marketers can be guilty of using a one-size-fits-all approach in reaching their audience. By identifying and segmenting buyer personas we begin to understand how they become aware of your product or service and how they research your organization.  Having a generic brand website may not speak to them and it may not even be a resource they use to research your organization.  Take for instance, the Nikon / B&H example discussed in Chapter 4 – those consumers went straight to the blog to air concerns and issues (Scott, 2012).  We need to consider how these personas are researching your organization and what lingo and/or search terms they use when researching your organization.

What Do You Want Your Buyers to Believe?

                So now the dots are connecting…we’ve identified goals, personas and segments and what buyers are saying about your organization.  Next, we need continue our understanding of these buyers and determine what we want them to believe about our organization.  For example, does Volvo want to sell a car, safety or both?  Does Gatorade want to solve dehydration for athletes only, or do they want to solve for dehydration caused by overindulging in cocktails?  This segues into our next point…

Develop Content to Reach Buyers:

                Scott uses the example of creating a robust website for content development to reach buyers.  If the organization is successful in following the aforementioned steps so far, it is possible to still create one website that addresses various persona segments by integrating links, pages, forums and other tools to connect with each persona segment.  The same holds true for using specific social networking tools to reach persona segments based on how they seek out your organization (i.e. Facebook vs. Pinterest).

Measuring Success:

                This all ties back to the first step in determining your goals.  Did following these steps allow you to meet your goals? Scott recaps seven things organizations can measure, briefly described below:

1. Quantity of people participating in on-line efforts (i.e. Facebook Likes, Twitter Followers, Blog Subscribers). 
2. Quantity of people downloading your stuff (i.e. presentation decks, videos, podcasts) 
3. Frequency of bloggers writing about your organization.
4. Blogger content – what are they saying? 
5. Search – where does your organization appear (i.e. what phrases, search terms)?
6. Contact Volume – quantity of people engaging with you (i.e. contact us forms). 
7. Are you meeting your goals (typically ties back to financial goals)

REFERENCES:

Scott, David Meerman (2013-06-19). The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. Wiley. Kindle Edition.