In this Issue:

• How PR Supports Your Marketing Message and Strategy
• Making the Most of Metrics: How to Measure Your Marketing Success
• News Around the Net
• Tools and Resources

How PR Supports Your Marketing Message and Strategy

The information revolution is changing the needs of business and non-profit organizations. How are you enticing new business or support for your organization? Marketing is often too focused on price related data or the "new" to get people in the door. Today's clients and customers are wanting more-- they want to know the essence of your organization and feel good about their relationship with it. Public relations is the missing link between modern consumer wants and a business or non-profit fulfilling them.

Public relations is too often associated with handling negative press. This miscalculation couldn't be further from the truth! Great PR experts are masters at promoting positive press, and shaping how the public sees a business or organization. For businesses, a PR professional can help customers find value in a product or service beyond the price. A non-profit organization should use savvy PR staff to help the public form personal links with a cause, leading to more financial and volunteer support.

The digital age has made PR vitally important, as one disgruntled client or customer can globally launch complaints with little effort. PR still isn't only about putting out fires, but providing a beneficial balance in the information out there with your marketing strategy. PR enhances your marketing campaign with this positive information. A sales item becomes even more desirable, or customers become interactive with the product through a website after seeing a commercial during the nightly news. Donors can personally connect with the good work their money allowed to happen.

Public relations has out grown simple "spin doctoring" into a necessary component of a strong marketing campaign. The creative minds make up the tag lines that stay with a donor or customer. The public relations expert is the focused mind that keeps the relationship going with the public, long after the advertising budget is spent. Professional management of your organization's public relations is really a way to add value to your marketing dollars, not just another line-item on the annual budget.

Best,
Vanessa Wakeman

Making the Most of Metrics: How to Measure Your Marketing Success

Business survivors anticipate the road bumps ahead. Small business owners and non-profit corporations stay ahead of the curves with smart decisions about marketing and public relations. But how do you know when it's time to change lanes in your public relations? Before you put on that blinker, make sure you consult your road map: a metric to measure marketing success.

A metric is a measuring stick on paper to gauge the effectiveness of marketing actions. Great metrics are written specifically for the goals and objectives of the small business or organization in mind. For example, everyone in business wants more customers or clients. This is a very broad objective. To achieve any objective, specific goals are assigned.

One goal may be increase a donor mailing list of 500 by 20%, or 100 people. This increase should result in more donations because your organization is making more petitions for support. Sending 100 random mailers is a waste; you need qualified potential donors likely to care about your cause. Since buying a generic mailing list isn't going to work, you will reach the new donors through some type of marketing or public relations campaign.

Now we have a clear goal-- adding 100 qualified donors to the mailing list-- the organization is ready to take action. For a small business, a similar goal is 100 qualified sales leads likely interested in your product or service. In both scenarios, the process is the same even if the public relations plan is slightly different.

Each action in a marketing or public relations plan is tracked by key performance indicators (KPI). KPI is the raw data on the marketing action-- a tangible number associated with results. Overall, KPIs provide organizations and businesses information to evaluate progress towards a specific goal.

Examples of PR KPIs include:

• Clip Counting
• Column-Inches of articles appearing in publications.
• AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency)
• Minutes of Media airtime (TV/Radio).
• Number of new on-line articles (monthly and annually)
• Virility of Content - Push beyond just the initial consumer, but to their associate through social media.

There are two important requirements for a successful public relations campaign. First, the metrics must be correct. Small business owners and non-profit leaders are great at making and measuring goals. However, translating a business or organizational goal into effective marketing actions takes specialized experience. In addition, the second requirement is a knowledgeable professional to remain focused on the public relations campaign.

A PR professional maintains the public relations campaign within the organization's overall marketing strategy, and alerts clients of any necessary adjustments. Marketing budgets large and small cannot afford wasted money on ineffective messages to the public. Non-profit organizations and small businesses mitigate their risk of wasting valuable marketing resources by hiring a PR professional, especially if they cannot afford to keep one staffed in-house.

The shelf-life of a strong marketing metric and plan is fairly long. Many organizations use this data to make decisions about next year's goals, budgets, and even anticipated returns. KPI data can give support or refute the potential success of new marketing actions. Expansion of a public relations campaign becomes less of a mystery. Once any small business or non-profit organization possesses their personal marketing road map, that valuable metric, it's easier to find the ways to future success.

News Around the Net

Mayra Ruiz-McPherson posting in the Women Grow Business community blog shares great insight on effective communication with PR Drivel.

Also, check out the "7 Secrets of 'Media Darlings'" published in BusinessWeek Small Biz and learn how to be regularly quoted in the press to raise your company's profile.

Tools and Resources

Looking for a simple way to see where your messages are landing in the digital community? Give PRMetrics.com a try. With this online tool, you can get a good feel for how your message is traveling through the Internet with results posted from Flickr, Web Videos, Twitter, Blogs, SlideShare and Scribd. PRMetrics can also doubles as a research tool, too.