Boost your Public Relations with personal selling skills for Public Relations

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hi everyone welcome to the last topic of the semester which is a continuation of the promotion p of the marketing mix or integrated marketing communications last time we covered advertising and sales promotion today we're going to discuss personal selling direct marketing public relations and social media marketing we're going to dedicate the largest portion of time to that last topic which is social media marketing so last time we said that advertising is a one-to-many or involves a one-to-many form of communication so it involves the marketer speaking to many people at once now this time we're also going to be discussing one-to-one forms of communication personal selling and direct marketing and also many too many forms of communication and that is embodied in social media marketing and again we recognize things like that in order to be very intentional about what we're doing as marketers so for many of you this might be the only marketing course you take if you want to go in much more detail in digital marketing which of which social media marketing is a part we have the digital marketing course and the nonprofit marketing course arts and nonprofit marketing is also quite social media heavy okay so let's start by talking a little bit about personal selling personal selling involves the one-to-one communication model and it happens when a company rep and an individual in real human interacts directly with a customer or with a potential customer to communicate about our good or our service it's definitely the most intimate and therefore the most expensive form of promo so whereas other forms of promotion are generally pulling the product if you can imagine that they involve pulling the product through the channel so you're telling your customer about it and then the customer is kind of requesting it from the retailer and the retailer buys it from the wholesaler and so on and so forth with personal selling you're trying to push the product through the channel of distribution so the the manufacturer is actually going straight to the customer and telling them about the product in hopes that they will make that purchase personal selling is most likely used or questioned say most likely but very commonly used in business-to-business contexts so if you're purchasing large machinery you you you will likely meet with a sales rep if your company is selling accounting services or service agreements for software or very sophisticated expensive things like that you will likely sell them via personal selling the cost per contact is very high so every single customer that you reach is very costly to do so and that's why personal selling is appropriate for expensive products which are going to be worth it to have that high cost per contact and also for highly technical products where you need to really talk the customer through the product one-on-one and explain to them what the product does and why it's worth the money that they will be paying for it that is the extent of what we need to know at this introductory level about personal selling okay direct marketing Direct Marketing is any communication that we do directly with the consumer that's designed to generate a response from them in the form of an order or a request for further information so don't confuse that with either personal selling or with sales promotion that we discussed last time so sales promotion is still one-to-many because we're sending out for example coupons in a magazine and we don't know really who they're going to even though we're trying to elicit generate that response and personal selling is extremely personalized we're going to talk to a person individual to individual Direct Marketing is a little bit different it is personalized yes but not to the extent of personal selling it involves sending direct mail where maybe the letter is standard but the recipients name is changed or email or even flyers where the flyer is the same for everyone but the recipients names might be different so we're changing the recipients name so it would still be considered one-to-one communication and key things with direct marketing is proper targeting so you want to make sure that the recipients of your flyer or your email or your letter really want to receive it and that's that's where targeting is so important you want to make sure that your target market is eager to get that communication from you so think about emails that you get in your in your email inbox that you actually welcome versus ones that you consider junk mail and that's the difference between good targeting and not-so-good targeting okay next element of the promotional mix or the IMC mix is public relations public relations is an extremely specialized area of marketing extremely specialized and extremely well paid PR specialists are hard to come by and that's why they're very well-paid as well and PR is the communication function that wants to build good relationships with all of the organization's different publics like consumers stockholders legislative leaders the basic goal of PR is to do something good as a company and then talk about it send press releases to everyone and let the world know how awesome you are so it's that's your goal but of course sometimes we also have to deal with scandals or with a horrible thing that happened and in that case we want to be transparent we want to be ethical we don't don't want to lie but we also want to minimize the harmful effects of that bad news that happened to us and I'm sure you can think of different examples from your own life of organizations that handled PR scandals in a graceful way and ones that handle them very poorly one thing one important tool that public relations use is the press release so press releases are mailings that we send out whether electronically or by snail mail but usually electronically nowadays to the press to the media telling them about our news it might be that we have a new product release it might be that we have a new executive that we hired we move to a new location we want an award as a business were holding or have held an important event especially a charity one or it might be a press release related to what I just mentioned as scandalous or bad news something that we we don't like but we definitely want to comment on it and tell the world more about it and there is a very specific format that companies use for a press release I'm going to post that on I also want to show you here we start the press release almost always with the words for immediate release and then we have a headline we mention our location city and state or maybe city and country and then the date and then you want to start with a very strong introduction paragraph typically covering who what where when and why your five W's and then go on into the the remainder of the body of your release so tell the world tell the media what happened include photos include links if you can send them to more detailed information or maybe background information or your social media and then you you typically end it with what we call the boilerplate statement which is background on your company and what it does if they don't have that background as well as contact information if they need more information and then we end it with these three hashtags and these signify that that's it the press release is over I'm going to include in the document that I post on Moodle tips for writing an effective press release you can find a lot of examples online I will show you a couple but some of them include some of the tips include use the active verb as much as possible use attention-grabbing words the beginning of it is key when you're when you have people's attention avoid hype this is not a sales pitch so yes you want to be exciting you want it to be newsworthy but you also want to be honest I advise against exclamation marks they tend to be overused and more tips that you can find in the document here here's a couple of press releases they both happen to be from the medical field but they're very different this is one that and now is that an event has been cancelled due to the corona virus and it starts with the world with the words for immediate release and then it has a sentence 24th annual celebration walk rescheduled and it says the date and it talks about exactly what's happening it leads you to more information and who to contact for that it has the triple hashtag sign at the end and it has that boiler state statement about who we are who that organization is and then this is one where an organization Children's Mercy at mercy of Kansas City a hospital held a charity event fundraiser and they raised a whole lot of money they had celebrities there such as Paul Rudd and it does not have the words for immediate release because it is posted on their website in on a page dedicated for press releases dedicated to press releases but as you can see they're very excited but they do not have a single exclamation mark in here talks about exactly what they did contains a lot of pictures that the media would have permission to use contains links to relevant background information and then you know contains contact information at the end these are just a couple of examples of really good press releases okay and finally we come to social media marketing I am NOT going to be using examples we'll do that on the discussion forum or I'll try to refrain from using a lot of examples but social media marketing is so important such such a huge area of marketing right now it is still not where we spend the majority of our marketing budget surprisingly advertising still Trump's social media in terms of spending dollars but I believe that our marketing dollar does go further in social media and our spending in social media keeps increasing year after year so extremely important social media is many to many form of communication it involves not only the marketer communicating to their audiences but the audience is communicating with each other people communicating with each other about our products so our aim should be to create content that we will want people that people will want to consume and that they will also want to share and communicate about to their friends and their family and just be excited to talk about that should be the aim of social media marketing I'm gonna go through the platforms one by one this information is a little bit more detailed than what is in your book and a little bit different so you may want to jot down some notes the number one platform that we always recommend that marketers start with its Facebook Facebook is the biggest social media platform it has over 2 billion users which is actually bigger than any country in the world you need to have a business page when you're on facebook you cannot just create a personal profile because that opens up doors for you to do different things including advertising targeted advertising sponsored posts it also allows you to do these same things on Instagram because the two are owned by the same company and they are linked and finally it allows you to track different metrics and analytics that you cannot do on the personal page Facebook is unique because it allows for many different types of content like long posts photographs video the carousel stories you can do a lot on Facebook and many people surprisingly or maybe not so surprisingly rely on Facebook as their new source so that's that that is something to keep in mind one thing as marketers that we don't like about face book is that organic reach is very hard to achieve you often need to pay to reach your audience okay what would you guess is the second largest social media platform let me give you a second it's actually YouTube yes we do consider YouTube a social media platform it has about 1.3 billion users 300 hours of video are created every single minute and posted on YouTube and we also considered a search engine so it's a social media platform and a search engine a lot of companies use it as just a repository to post their videos and then link to them from the other platforms but it can be used very effectively as a platform and it's alright so maybe look up what Red Bull is doing on YouTube they're doing very very creative things next we have Instagram owned by Facebook but for whatever reason people engage with the brands that they love much more on Instagram than they do on Facebook there is still Facebook / Instagram that company still handicaps business pages business accounts versus personal accounts a little bit in terms of reach but it's not yet I think it's coming but it's not yet as bad on Instagram as it is on Facebook it's the fastest growing platform and it's has been younger than Facebook in terms of users in terms of audience but that out audience is getting older and older as it becomes a more popular platform we can do regular photos and video on Instagram but we can also do stories they're extremely popular on Instagram Twitter Twitter is great for microblogging short 280 character posts by the minute news Twitter is also great because you can post 10 times a day on Twitter and no one will think anything of it it's fine whereas if you post it 10 times on Facebook or on Instagram that would really be considered spamming people people often use Twitter your audience will use Twitter to send public compliments or complaints to you on social media so that's something definitely to keep in mind LinkedIn is great for business to business so if your target audience is potential employees or another business if you're a company that wants to target other businesses LinkedIn is a great platform for that ey the accounting company is doing awesome things on LinkedIn check them out other than that the platform looks pretty similar to Facebook that has gotten more and more similar to Facebook you can also post original content share things photos video and so on on LinkedIn and it does have a robust advertising capability as well snapchat are you guys to lunch snap snapchat a lot of its users have moved to instagrams it has lost a lot of users to Instagram especially after Instagram added the stories capability a couple years ago but you know some people still like in snapchat particularly for messaging the audience skews very young 12 to 24 people love it for the augmented reality the you know the the crazy filters that they have and some brands have found a lot of success on snapchat if you want to look up a brand look ups Taco Bell they're doing stuff on snapchat Pinterest Pinterest is a very unique in that things are posted on bulletin boards they're posted in the form of a grid rather than a vertical field and the other unique thing about Pinterest is that their post life is very long so things last for a long time on Pinterest whereas a post kind of dies off within maybe minutes or you know 30 minutes on Twitter maybe a couple hours on Facebook or Instagram posts last for an average of 30 sorry 3 months on Pinterest and that is extremely unique Pinterest is also extremely visual even more so than Instagram and that's why a lot of visual companies like companies that have to do with fashion home decor and so on like Pinterest but other brands are also starting to to see its utility not not just home decor fashion food art etc and finally and most recently tic-tock tic-tock is the newest I actually say the newest but the newest social media platform that is that companies are paying attention to so when it first came out a lot of us sad just forget about it it's not gonna go anywhere but it has gone places it companies have started to really want to advertise on it and to gain a followership on it it's 15-second videos you can look them together and make 60 second videos max it's it has a very specific culture to it the videos are kind of very centered on pranks and jokes and very creative not extremely refined in terms of being edited closely a lot of people say tick tock is more genuine than a lot of the other platforms I don't know let me know what you think about that the discussion board it definitely has the youngest audience of all of the other platforms and brands are starting to pay attention to it and do more on it so it's so new that we really don't have very many guidelines for it although they're just starting to come out beyond these specific things that I said about each social media platform I want to give you a few pointers in general about using social media be careful as a company when you post on social media when we talk about doing social media it doesn't just mean hire young people and have them posts for you you really need to be careful a sloppy presence will have people thinking that you're also a sloppy company so be careful with that you want to have a specific voice for your brand make sure that you're conveying that book voice in every posting be confident in what you post don't don't begin your post with things like we try and we hope replace them with we know we guarantee but of course it has to be true you know don't say don't say things if they're not true use the active voice rather than the passive voice edit and re-edit to make sure your posts are grammatically perfect and then don't be what I call too salesy so use the 80/20 rule only about 20% of your posts should be direct sales pitches about 80% of your posts should be just sharing information that your customers or your audience like to see sharing value-added stuff they can be things like interviewing a customer sharing things about your employees may be some kind of tutorial maybe asking your audience questions inspirational things telling stories even sharing other con from elsewhere on the on the social media on the web or on social media but if you do that be sure that you add something to it don't just post it and say nothing about it okay finally I want to talk about some social media metrics the three key ones that I want you to know our reach impressions and engagement similar to some of the things we talked about last time Reach is simply how many people saw our post how many unique audience members saw our post impressions is how many times our post was seen so even if it was seen multiple times by the same person that counts in our impressions and finally engagement is how many times our audience members interacted with our post whether by liking it commenting on it or sharing it that's all for today and I will see you on the discussion forum