The New Rules of Marketing and PR

How to Use Content Marketing, Podcasting, Social Media, AI, Live Video, and Newsjacking to Reach Buyers Directly

David Meerman Scott

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119854296
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

The new eighth edition of the pioneering guide to generating attention for your idea or business, jam-packed with new and updated techniques

As the ways we communicate continue to evolve, keeping pace with the latest trends in social media, including social audio like Clubhouse, the newest online video tools such as TikTok, and all the other high-tech influences, can seem an almost impossible task. How can you keep your product or service from getting lost in the digital clutter? The eighth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR provides everything you need to speak directly to your audience, make a strong personal connection, and generate attention for your business.

An international bestseller with nearly half a million copies sold in twenty-nine languages, this revolutionary guide gives you a proven, step-by-step plan for leveraging the power of technology to get your message seen and heard by the right people at the right time. You will learn the latest approaches for highly effective public relations, marketing, and customer communications—all at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising!

The latest edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR has been completely revised and updated to present the most innovative methods and cost-effective strategies. The most comprehensive update yet shows you details about the pros and cons of AI and machine learning to automate routine tasks. Your life is already AI-assisted. Your marketing should be too, but there are challenges to be aware of.

The definitive guide on the future of marketing, this must-have resource will help you:

• Incorporate the new rules that will keep you ahead of the digital marketing curve
• Make your marketing and public relations real-time by incorporating techniques like newsjacking to generate instant attention when your audience is eager to hear from you
• Gain valuable insights through compelling case studies and real-world examples

The eighth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Content Marketing, Podcasting, Social Media, AI, Live Video, and Newsjacking to Reach Buyers Directly is the ideal resource for entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers, PR professionals, and managers in organizations of all types and sizes.

III
Action Plan for Harnessing the Power of the New Rules

8
You Are What You Publish: Building Your Marketing and PR Plan

Does your company sell great products? Or, if you don't work in a traditional company, does your organization (church, nonprofit, consulting company, school) offer great services? Well, get over it! Marketing is not only about your products or services! The most important thing to remember as you develop a marketing and PR plan is to put your products and services to the side for just a little while and focus your complete attention on the buyers of your products or services (or those who will donate, subscribe, join, or apply). Devoting attention to buyers and away from products is difficult for many people, but it always pays off in the form of bringing you closer to achieving your goals.

Think Starbucks for a moment. Is the product great? Yeah, I guess the three‐dollar cup of coffee I get from Starbucks tastes pretty good. And most marketers, if given the opportunity to market Starbucks, would focus on the coffee itself—the product. But is that really what people are buying at Starbucks, or does Starbucks help solve other buyer problems?

Maybe Starbucks is really selling a place to hang out for a while. Or for that matter, isn't Starbucks a convenient place for people to meet? (I use Starbucks several times a month as a place to connect with people or conduct interviews.) Or do people use Starbucks for the free wireless Internet connections? Maybe Starbucks saves 10 minutes in your day because you don't have to grind beans, pour water into a coffeemaker, wait, and clean up later. For some of us, Starbucks just represents a little splurge because, well, we're worth it.

I'd argue that Starbucks does all those things. Starbucks appeals to many different buyer personas, and it sells lots of things besides just coffee. If you were marketing Starbucks, it would be your job to segment buyers and appeal to them based on their needs, not just talk about coffee.

The approach of thinking about buyers and the problems our organizations solve for them can be difficult for many marketers, since we've constantly been told how important a great product or service is to the marketing mix. In fact, standard marketing education still talks about the four Ps of marketing—product, place, price, and promotion—as being the most important things. That's nonsense. To succeed on the web under the new rules of marketing and PR, you need to consider your organizational goals and then focus on your buyers first. Only when you understand buyers should you begin to create compelling web content to reach them. Yes, marketers often argue with me on this. But I strongly believe that the product or service you sell is secondary when you market your organization on the web.

So I will ask you to put aside your products and services as you begin the task for this chapter: building a marketing and PR plan that follows the new rules. While the most important thing to focus on during this process is buyers, we will do that in the context of your organizational goals. Trust me—this will be like no marketing and PR plan you've created before.

What Are Your Organization's Goals?

Marketing and PR people have a collective difficulty getting our departmental goals in sync with the rest of the company. And our management teams go along with this dysfunction. Think about the goals that most marketers have. They usually take the form of an epic to‐do list: “Let's see; we should do a few trade shows, buy Google AdWords ads, maybe create a new logo, get press clips, produce some T‐shirts, increase website traffic, and, oh yeah, generate some leads for the salespeople.” Well, guess what? Those aren't the goals of your company! I've never seen leads or clips or T‐shirts on a balance sheet. With typical marketing department goals, we constantly focus on the flare‐up du jour and thus focus on the wrong thing. This also gives the marketing profession a bad rap in many companies as a bunch of flaky slackers. No wonder marketing is called the branding police in some organizations and is often the place where failed salespeople end up.

Many marketers and PR people also focus on the wrong measures of success. With websites, people often tell me things like: “We want to have 10,000 unique visitors per month to our site.” And PR measurement is often similarly irrelevant: “We want 10 mentions in the trade press and three national magazine hits each month.” Unless your site makes money through advertising so that raw traffic adds revenue, traffic is the wrong measure. And simple press clips just don't matter. What matters is leading your site's visitors and your constituent audiences to where they help you reach your real goals, such as building revenue, soliciting donations, and gaining new members.

This lack of clear goals and real measurement reminds me of seven‐year‐olds playing soccer. If you've ever seen little children on the soccer field, you know that they operate as one huge organism packed together, chasing the ball around the field. On the sidelines are helpful coaches yelling, “Pass!” or “Go to the goal!” Yet as the coaches and parents know, this effort is futile: No matter what the coach says or how many times the kids practice, they still focus on the wrong thing—the ball—instead of the goal.

That's exactly what we marketers and PR people do. We fill our lists with balls and lose sight of the goal. But do you know what's even worse? Our coaches (the management teams at our companies) actually encourage us to focus on balls (like sales leads or press clips or website traffic statistics) instead of real organizational goals such as revenue. The VPs and CEOs of companies happily provide incentives based on leads for the marketing department and on clips for the PR team. And the agencies we contract with—advertising and PR agencies—also focus on the wrong measures.

What we need to do is align marketing and PR objectives with those of the organization. For most corporations, the most important goal is profitable revenue growth. In newer companies and those built around emerging technologies, this usually means generating new customers, but in mature businesses, the management team may need to be more focused on keeping the customers that they already have. Nonprofits have the goal of raising money; politicians, to get out the vote (for them); rock bands, to get people to buy CDs, iTunes downloads, and tickets to live shows; and universities, to get student applications and alumni donations.

So your first step is to meet with the leaders of your organization—your management team or your associates in your church or nonprofit or your spouse if you run a small business—and determine your business goals. If you run a nonprofit, school, church, or political campaign, consider your goals for donations, applications, new members, or votes. Write them down in detail. The important things you write down might be “grow revenue in Europe by 20 percent,” “increase new member sign‐ups to 100 per month in the fourth quarter,” “generate a million dollars in web donations next quarter,” or “generate five paid speaking engagements in the upcoming year.”

Now that you have the marketing and PR plan focused on the right goals (i.e., those of your organization), the next step is to learn as much as you can about your buyers and to segment them into groups so you can reach them through your web publishing efforts. In the next chapter, we'll go into depth about how your marketing and PR programs drive sales.

Buyer Personas and Your Organization

Successful online marketing and PR efforts work because they start by identifying one or more buyer personas to target, so you need to make buyer personas a part of your planning process. A buyer persona (which we touched on back in Chapter 3) is essentially a representative of a type of buyer that you have identified as having a specific interest in your organization or product or having a market problem that your product or service solves. 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.

Consider the market for tricycles. The user of the most common tricycle is a preschool child. Yet a preschooler doesn't buy the tricycle. The most common buyer personas for children's tricycles are parents and grandparents. So what problem does the tricycle solve? Well, for parents, it might be that the child has been asking for one and the purchase quiets the child down. Parents also know that the child is growing quickly and will want a two‐wheeler with training wheels soon enough, so a basic trike is typically enough in their eyes. However, grandparents buy tricycles to solve the problem of providing an extravagant gift, so they often buy an expensive model to show their love to the child and his or her parents. When you think about tricycles from the perspective of buyer personas, you can see how the marketing might be different for parents and grandparents.

You, too, need to segment buyer personas so you can then develop marketing programs to reach each one. Let's revisit the college example from Chapter 3 and expand on it. Remember that we identified five different buyer personas for a college website: young alumni who had graduated within the past 10 or 15 years, older alumni, the high school student who is considering college, the parents of the prospective student, and existing customers (current students). That means a well‐executed college site might target five distinct buyer personas.

A college might have the marketing and PR goal of generating 500 additional applications for admission from qualified students for the next academic year. Let's also pretend that the college hopes to raise $5 million in donations from alumni who have never contributed in the past. That's great! These are real goals that marketers can build programs around.

The Buyer Persona Profile

After identifying their goals, the marketing people at the college should build a buyer persona profile, essentially a kind of biography, for each group they'll target to achieve those goals. The college might create one buyer persona for prospective students (targeting high school students looking for schools) and another for parents of high school students (who are part of the decision process and often pay the bills). If the school targets a specific type of applicant, say, student athletes, the marketers might build a specific buyer persona profile for the high school student who participates in varsity sports. To effectively target the alumni for donations, the school might decide to build a buyer persona for younger alumni, perhaps those who have graduated within the past 10 years.

For each buyer persona profile, we want to know as much as we can about this ...