Online PR Campaigns: Old is the New New (Why Trad PR is so Wasteful!)
My good pal Doug Kessler at Velocity just posted a great (provocative) piece on the problem of ‘new’ in content marketing. In it, he hints at something that’s been eating at me for a while… namely that run-of-the-mill traditional PR and marketing tactics are inherently wasteful and often irrelevant in terms of our customer requirements.
Most traditional PR and marketing only gets out of bed for ‘New.‘ It’s the way we’re programmed. We get excited by ‘new’ products, ‘new’ think pieces, ‘new’ research and ‘new’ features.
So we tend to plough all of our PR/marketing time, effort and schedules into laborious worships of the ‘New’. Press conferences. Micro-sites. Brochures. Novelty pens …etc.
Now, whilst all of this greases the wheels of the traditional ‘news’ media, giving them new things to say about all of this ‘Newness,’ there’s one critical type of audience that we’re guilty of ignoring: our non-Newbies… ie, all of our longer term customers or prospects (and partners, staff, and investors). (Sure, customers also like a little bit of ‘new’ – but go with me here…)
Whilst we’re getting all hot and excited about the rich functionality of the soon-to-be-announced beta Version 6.7 of SprocketWise, what about all those customers that still haven’t made the leap to Version 6.6? Or the partners who are figuring out the best way of perfecting a service model around Version 6.5? Or the investment team that are still waiting for a return on Version 6.4?
The problem with the ‘New’ in traditional PR and marketing is that it’s often only new and nothing else… and most of the time, for many audience requirements, it’s just plain ‘IRRELEVANT’.
What Doug talks about, and what the majority of our PR/marketing audiences really need instead of ‘New’ is more DEPTH and RELEVANCE. Beyond the shock and excitement of the New, the things that will clinch the deal are answers to questions like: ‘tell me how to make more of the feature set?’; ‘how can I adapt my business model to make more money from it?’; and ‘can you convince me how good you are at support?’
Answering these questions requires a different approach than ‘New’.
The really sad thing is that most of the content that helps us stay relevant and get deep and meaningful already exists somewhere – like a white paper in a web site archive, an executive speech on the Intranet, or a set of training slides in Dave’s drawer under a mouldy sandwich.
Yet we nearly always discard these things because they’re not ‘New’ or ‘News’ – because our traditional PR/marketing mechanics don’t cater for them. They’re not the kind of thing that you can organise a press conference or a product launch around.
At the end of the day, this gripe is aimed at PR and marketing tactics that care for traditional media requirements at the expense of the the majority of our (non-New) customers, prospects, partners, etc.
‘New’ is totally irrelevant and out of place when it comes to nurturing a slow-burning relationship with a customer prospect. Your announcement of SprocketWise V6 got them interested six months ago. Now they want to hear more about your service expertise and other important facets that set you apart from the competition – your thought leadership and your human side if you like…. not another whiz-bang widget.
In order to cater for these needs you need to develop deeper, more meaningful content relationships around a different set of processes and platforms.
Content-based relationship marketing like this is better executed using tools and tactics like: ONLINE PR (!!!), demand nurturing apps, blogs, social networking platforms, microblogging, and the like….
Forget about the New a little. The New New is really the Old. Stop sending NEWSletters. Send OLDSletters instead …because there’s a tonne of super-helpful and relevant things you can do to clinch sales and build relationships with your old, deep and meaningful stuff…
Footnote: Want to learn how SEO works in non-technical, layman’s terms? Cool!! Here’s an OLD paper of ours which tells you everything you need to know and more about Google in under 30 mins. It’s the best thing we’ve ever written on the subject and I’ll bet it’s the most useful thing you’ll read this week. It was first drafted in 2007. So there you go.
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