Communications Planning 101 - Developing a communications plan requires a disciplined approach. Your first order of business is reviewing your current program for impact and efficiency.

How To Be A Great Radio Guest - Radio – despite changes in media habits – still is a great way to get in front of a lot of people. As a radio talk show guest on a national program, millions could hear your message.

Pithy Pitches - Your painstakingly crafted email pitch is completely customized and ready to send to the in box of that carefully targeted reporter. There it goes! Did you hear that? That was your email pitch being deleted.

Six Tips For Perfect Email Pitches - Your media pitches can go straight over the plate. With a little forethought, and a few tips, you can throw fewer balls and more media relations strikes.

Slow Day? Create News -  Sometimes there seems to be no client news worthy of coverage. That’s when the savvy PR pro digs deep into the old bag of tricks and pulls out one of these ideas to perk things up.

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For the sake of transparency, I’ll give you my numbers from the 23 evaluation forms that were completed:

Overall, the course was Excellent/Very Good – 17 attendees; Good – 5 attendees; Poor – 1 attendee

Harry Hoover was Excellent/Very Good – 20 attendees; Good/Fair – 2 attendees

As I read through the comments, it become clear to me who the two disgruntled attendees were and why they were disgruntled. This comment said it all to me,

As a small business, none of the info provided helped me in my marketing plans. The Q&A was better than the presentation.

I told the group that if they don’t remember anything else from my presentation that I want them to remember this: Focus. You must focus on your current customers and clearly understand them, know where they are going in social media and follow them there.

Based on the business owner comment above I think I know who wrote it. He was the guy that kept asking questions specifically applicable only to his business. The disgruntled owner was mad at me because I didn’t do the work for him. That’s asking a lot from a free one hour workshop.

It’s true that you are never going to please everyone when you give a presentation, particularly when you have such a diverse group with an understanding of the topic ranging from 0 to 100. But I do take all the comments – good and bad – to heart and try to improve my next presentation. Have you had similar experiences with your presentations?

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1. 8 Ways To Use Twitter Lists
2. Twittering Journalists
3. Be Relevant
4. When Billboards Go Bad
5. 7 Ways To Kickstart Your 2010 Marketing 

What’s your favorite?

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Define Your Customers.  I had a client one time who told me that “all carbon-based lifeforms” were the targets of his advertising. Needless to say, I quickly disabused him of that notion. If you want to spend your money wisely, this is the#1 thing you can do right now for your marketing effort.

Focus On Current Customers. I know that you want to go out and take down that new business buffalo, but you’ll get a greater return by getting more business from current customers.

Get Referrals. If you have done a good job for existing customers, they will tell their friends about you. But you need a strategy to make this happen.

Activate Your Customers.  It is no secret that I believe email is still one of the best ways to generate goodwill, referrals and business.  Plan your email attack to activate customers now.

Open Your Wallet. I’ve been accused of being against paid advertising. I am not. I’m just against unplanned, poorly focused advertising. Some of your competitors are still weak from the recent economic strife. You still have an opportunity to kill the weak, if you’ll spend some money smartly to take market share.

Be Sociable.  Humans – being human – love social interaction, particularly of the face-to-face variety. Always have, always will. So, look for ways to add human interaction to your marketing. Also, reexamine your approach to social media.  

Be Tactical. First off, let me say that I’m a strategy kind of guy. But sometimes you just need to do something to get your marketing off dead center.

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Here are a few things I’m thinking about for 2010.

How much should I budget – both in terms of my time and money – toward marketing and PR? Does it make sense to spend it in traditional marketing, in PR, in direct marketing, in social media or in some combination?

Have the media habits of my clients and prospects – marketers and HR executives in Fortune 1000 companies – changed? With which media are they spending more time and which ones have they abandoned? Where is their pain in 2010? Are they still short-staffed and looking for outside resources to round out their teams?

Based on some of the research I’m seeing, it looks like marketing budgets will be up a bit this year.  According to eMarketer,

Next year, while broadcast television, radio, newspaper and magazine spending continue to downsize, though more slowly than in 2009, online ad spending will enjoy a nice bump-up: eMarketer currently forecasts 5.5% growth. And the increase won’t all come from search—banner ads will grow 3.3%, and online video will jump by 40%.

This is shaping up perfectly for My Creative Team, since we have a great deal of expertise in the online environment and in developing flash animation and corporate video for online use.

LinkedIn now connects me to 52 million professionals. Is there a better way to utilize my nearly 600 connections on this social platform? How can I use LinkedIn’s advertising capabilities to reach my target audience, specifically the HR audience? We develop a great deal of employee communication and training materials for Nucor, and would like to expand into HR with other Fortune 1000 firms.

Does a My Creative Team presence on Facebook still make sense since we are focused on Fortune 1000 contacts?

Tell us what you are thinking about. We’d love to hear your thoughts on how you plan to market in 2010.

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More than four in 10 US consumers said they were skipping ads on TV and the radio as well as avoiding Websites with intrusive ads more in 2009 than they were the year before.

Why, you ask? Because advertising is increasingly less relevant. We’ve discussed this before: advertising needs to be relevant, original and impactful or consumers will avoid it like the plague. And they certainly won’t share the ad with their friends.

When asked about positive ad-related activities, such as searching for advertisements online, sharing and discussing ads with friends, or following brands on Facebook and Twitter, responses were in the single digits. Most consumers reported never doing any such activities.

Relevant ads get shared. But most ads aren’t relevant because the advertiser hasn’t done the hard part: determining who his target audience is from a demographic and psychographic perspective. The more you know about the customer, the easier it is for your creatives to develop relevant, original and impactful messages, and to determine the best ways and vehicles through which to disseminate your messages.

But I’m not letting the agencies off the hook here either. Too often, the agency goes for the easy, humorous approach because they know that using humor increases likeability of the brand. Here’s the problem with that: they inject the humor but leave the brand message out of the equation. How many times have you laughed at a beer commercial only to say after it was over, “whose ad was that?”

Remember, understand your customer and ensure your agency is developing relevant, original and impactful ads for you, or save your money for something besides advertising.

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57.7% of respondents “ideally” plan, and 56.3% “realistically” plan to include social media in their media plans next year. That finding is significant, because it shows the rapid speed with which social media, including social networks like Facebook, micro-blogging services such as Twitter, and other new and emerging formats connecting people to each other online have taken a precedent with both consumers and marketing and advertising industry professionals.

Now, if you ask these buyers why they want to add social media to the advertising mix, you won’t get much in the way of solid, credible support for getting on the social media bandwagon. They want to be there because it is all the rage. Hello, people! What happened to hard-nosed number-driven media planning?

I ran across this piece from ClickZ Columnist Sean Carton, who agrees with me that this trend is worrisome.  Says Carton,

Sure, plenty of clients (and prospects) I’ve spoken to in the past year or so made vague noises about viral video or being on Facebook or tweeting, but when I’ve pressed them for why they want those things, few can give me an answer.

They have been hypnotized by the steady media drumbeat extolling the virtues of social media. They, too, are probably being pressured by clients and organizational higher ups to add social media to the plan, strategy or not.  It is up to us to help determine whether social media makes sense for our organizations.  And if it does make sense, what should our approach be? Like every other media decision since time immemorial, your target audiences will direct you to the appropriate decision.

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