The Clean and Green Club

Last month, we talked about the mindset to craft an effective pitch. Now, how to actually get in front of the journalists you want to cover you.

1. Use media query services that aggregate reporters’ requests for sources. There is no better way to get publicity than to hit a reporter who’s desperately looking for someone exactly like you in order to finish an article. I use HARO, PitchRate, ReportersSource and some others I can’t remember, none of which cost anything. In the past, I’ve also used ProfNet, which has a significant cost. I’ve had far and away the best success with HARO and ProfNet. Several of the media lead sources also post leads on Twitter. You’ll want to follow (in  alphabetical order) @helpareporter, @pitchrate, @ProfNet, and @reporterssource
2. Use social media sites to follow reporters on your beat, and build relationships (gently and without pressure); pitch only when you’ve established yourself as credible and your pitch is directly relevant to what they’re working on
3. Send a press release that’s NOT “I’ve written a book” but that focuses on the attitudes we discussed last month. Some sample headlines I’ve actually used for my clients:

• Pro-Anorexia Sites “Danger to Children,” Says Expert

• Moveable Historic Action Figures Awarded BEST CLASSIC TOY of 2009: Industry Newcomer’s First Release Joins Yo-Yo, Crayons, Other Long-time Favorites
• Teenage Partisan Who Fought the Nazis Lives to See Her Story Told—On Film and In Print
• Ethics Expert: As an Ethics Warrior, Spitzer Must Meet a Higher Standard (this was not for a client but a news tie-in for my own book, Principled Profit)

Of course, I go into much more detail in my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers,and in several of my other marketing books too. Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First has a particularly nice section on building relationships with reporters.

Yeah, the big words in the headline are on purpose…and very relevant. Cognoscenti are those in the know, the experts, connoisseurs (same route word, I believe—but French origin, rather than Italian). the secret society,if you will. What Edward Bulwer-Lytton called “the great unwashed.”

Hoi polloi are the rest of us, the masses.

Sometimes you want to market to one sometimes the other. There’s actually a lot to be said for marketing to an in-group, especially if you don’t have to pay to reach those not in your target audience. When you make your prospects feel special, they’re more likely not only to do business with you, but to maintain an ongoing business relationship. You make them feel appreciated, you talk to them on their own level. Just as with my headline, I’m identifying you, my reader, as someone sophisticated enough to be curious about the headline and to read the article. After all, I could have said “snobs vs. the masses” or “the elite vs. the common people.” But those are so…ordinary! You get no satisfaction from conquering those molehills.

When you write for the masses, make your language as accessible as possible. But when you’re seeking a much more select audience, jargon and “secrets” have their place, if not done to excess. Not only does your audience feel like you’re talking directly to them, they feel like you’re one of them.

I was inspired to write this after reading copywriter Ivan Levison’s critique of an ad with the headline,

Levison wrote,

It seems to me that this is less a headline than a secret message that needs decoding, and make no mistake. Writing an ambiguous headline like this  can destroy readership of an ad, email, Web page, brochure, you name it.

Now, I’ve been involved at least a bit with energy and environmental issues all the way back to the 1970s, and to me, this headline made perfect sense. The grid is the infrastructure that transmits the nation’s electricity. The footprint, of course, is a carbon footprint: the impact on our environment, and specifically on climate change.

Levison is right that the headline needs decoding—but he’s wrong in seeing it as ineffective. Those who grapple daily with issues of climate change and CO2 in electricity transmission will be immediately clued in that this ad is for them.

Whether it made sense to place this two-page ad in Business Week is another question; it might have had far better results in something like the trade magazine Electric Light & Power, where actual prospects would be a much higher percentage of total readership. And it probably didn’t need two whole pages. So from a frugality point of view, the campaign could certainly be improved, even if advertising—the most expensive marketing method—is a big part of the mix (which, as regular readers of this newsletter and my books on frugal marketing understand, it doesn’t have to be).

But if the goal was to select and attract those people in the general big business community with key decision-making roles in power generation, it was probably effective. They were marketing to the cognoscenti.

Mobile Marketing, Part 2: Legal, Ethical, and Strategic Considerations: Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, September 2009

Once again, this article owes much to The Mobile Marketing Handbook: Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Mobile Marketing Campaigns, by Kim Dushinski–read this book BEFORE you implement any mobile campaign.

The careful mobile marketer will keep some basic principles in mind, not only to avoid alienating your prospects, but to stay on the right side of the law. First of all, in a potentially intrusive technology, privacy concerns are key. Second, more than in any other medium (even the Internet), you must coax the customer to opt in. And third, the customer or prospect should feel that interacting with you improves his or her life.

With its legally mandated emphasis on authenticity, honest disclosure, and customer involvement/opt-in, mobile marketing is very much in harmony with the ethical methods I’ve been advocating for years (see my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People first, https://www.principledprofit.com).

Still, mobile marketing may or may not make sense for you–or for me. Dushinski’s 16-point checklist is a great tool to determine if there’s a fit. In my case, she convinced me that if I do any mobile marketing at all, it will be a text-based SMS newsfeed that I can pilot first on Twitter; most of the other mobile technologies are either too expensive and complicated for me, or simply don’t apply to a non-location-based business like mine–this is crucial information that could prevent me from wasting a lot of time and money on methods that aren’t appropriate.

One thing I WILL do after reading Dushinski’s book–and soon!–is set up a website that’s optimized for mobile phone users, and includes a press kit for reporters on the go; this is a no-brainer! Optimizing the experience for anyone wishing to access at least my main site from mobile could potentially yield huge dividends, and can be set up simply by simplifying existing content and hosting on a subdomain of one of my existing sites.

Three times as many people carry a cell phone or PDA than use stand-alone computers. And the opportunity for marketers, particularly for those willing to be pioneers while the field is wide open, is huge. Mobile marketing is in its earliest stage, where the Internet was around 1996. If you have an appropriate offering and strategy now, you might just ride the next boom. Just in the US, sales of hard goods (not including downloadable purchases) via mobile is expected to go from $480 million in 2006 to $1.9 billion in 2010 (that’s a nearly 400 percent increase in four years). And some experts expect mobile to become the most popular way to pay for a transaction within the next few years.

But you need a roadmap in this universe, where a wrong turn could leave you bleeding and broke. I recommend The Mobile Marketing Handbook: Step-by-Step Guide to Crating Dynamic Mobile Marketing Campaigns, by Kim Dushinski–from which all these tips came. (and there are a lot more I don’t have room for. If you’re going to market to mobile users, read the book.)

Remember that mobile marketing cannot be intrusive and succeed. It must be welcomed, so use pull rather than push strategies. In other words, your prospect must be a willing and eager participant in your marketing, and that means your mobile marketing has to offer actual value. Here are six possible ways to do that:

Tap into location-specific needs when they are physically nearby

Offer timely and time-sensitive information (example: we had a cancellation, so now you can get that earlier appointment you wanted)

Make life easier for them (examples: click to call or launch a web page)

Provide financial incentive

Entertain

Let people connect with each other

Mobile marketing can also add enormous value when you integrate it into your existing marketing. As an example, by adding a mobile-based response system such as a shortcode or photo-loading web page, even a billboard can go from a mere branding exercise to a powerful, trackable direct-response marketing system. Dushinski identifies six different ways to incorporate direct response into a mobile campaign.

Next month: legal, ethical, and strategic considerations in mobile marketing

This special bonus article concludes our series on partnering with nonprofits to sell more books. Take what you’ve learned in the previous five installments in this series and apply it to for-profit corporations.

You can approach corporations with two very different strategies.

First, approaching them directly to buy in quantity for their own uses. Thus, a friend of mine sold 15,000 copies of a grits cookbook to Quaker, the largest seller of grits in the U.S. The company did a “self-liquidating offer,” which means customers had to send in a few bucks to cover the cost–and printed tens of thousands of grits boxes with labels offering the cookbook.

Quaker benefits because, firstly, when more people know all the ways to use grits, they sell more grits–and secondly, because they establish themselves in the customer’s mind as a pre-eminent company that has its customers’ interests at heart, and wants to make it easier to figure out new and different ways to use those grits sitting in the pantry.

Similarly, you can do deals with pharmaceutical companies, cookware manufacturers, travel and tourism boards, banks, service providers…the list is infinite. I have personally done deals with Southwest Airlines for 1000 copies of Principled Profit, with two foreign publishers for the same book, and with several meeting planners who bought copies of various marketing books to distribute to attenders.

Even better is the second approach, popularized by Brendan Burchard: look for nonprofits who could really use your book. Ask these potential partners what corporations like to partner with them. Then go to the corporations and suggest they sponsor and subsidize a quantity of your book for their preferred nonprofit partner. This way, everyone wins.

For more on forming win-win partnerships with other entities, I strongly recommend my award-wining sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First; I happen to be running a special on it right now.

Here are some quick and easy no-cost ways to begin market research, beginning with your own customers–which I would certainly do before bringing in a firm for more professional results. That way, if you need outside help, the firm will have more guidance about where to start and what to look at, and you’ll benefit both from having the original results immediately and second by getting a deeper level of consulting later:

Match Message, Medium, and Audience–if you want your marketing to succeed.

That sounds simple, but what does it actually mean? It means that you talk to people differently depending on what you want to say (message), how you’re choosing to reach them (medium), and who they are (audience).

So, for instance, you wouldn’t put a screaming “Crazy Eddie”-style radio commercial on a quiet classical station. And nor would you advertise your upcoming lectures on Mozart’s influences from Bach to Haydn on a brassy, teen-oriented Facebook page.

This sounds obvious, right? Then why do so many marketers goof around with stuff like (these are REAL examples):

• A radio spot for folksinger Michelle Shocked that made her sound like a Kiss/Black Sabbath-style heavy-metal rocker–and aired on an acoustic-album-oriented station that would have been perfect for her real sound
• A district-wide direct-mail piece from a candidate for State Representative in a three-town district, with literature that only talked about his own town and ignored the two others (not surprisingly, he lost)
• Twitter feeds that are 100% mindless sales pitches and show zero understanding of how to use the medium effectively
• An ad in my local family-oriented newspaper that actually used the headline, “Sex: Now that I Have Your Attention”–to promote a car dealership!

The truly wonderful thing about marketing in the 21st century is how easy it is to find the exact audience you want, and to target those exact consumers with a message about them, through a medium that they use. If you try to create one marketing message to be all things to all people, you end up being nothing to anyone.

If you want to know more about this concept, I discuss it in much more detail in my marketing books, and especially Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (buy them together and you’ll receive a substantial discount).

Do you offer any freebies to build your business? I sure do!

I’ve built my business on giving away vast quantities of information–but through that, selling both information and brainpower as an author and speaker, and as a consultant and copywriter. Google loves my sites because of the thousands of articles (about 2/3 written by other people). People on discussion lists hire me because of the quality of free information I provide. I get  exposure for my books by strategically giving away copies here and there, and subscribers to my newsletters  through participating in launch-bonus programs. I actually got a book contract with a major publisher because I contributed an essay, for free, to one of its authors’ books.

And let’s face it. Even though I do get paid for writing my books, the amount of content I include far outweighs the price, and on a per-hour basis, is not the most bean-counter-effective use of my time. But the books give me credibility in the media…inexpensive gifts of great value that I can use strategically…at least some income stream…tons of “street cred”…something to sell when I speak… and assorted other non-monetary advantages.

The point is to do it strategically. To be totally transparent, I am posting here figuring that at least a few people reading this will pop over to https://www.frugalmarketing.com to access some of the free content, sign up for the newsletter, maybe buy a book or two, and consider me when they need marketing consulting or copywriting.

Also, when I give information for free, I often mine material I’ve already created, so the labor factor is low. This article started as a response on a LinkedIn discussion group; now I’ve tweaked and repurposed it as the featured article in this month’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tips newsletter.

Which doesn’t mean every time I do a giveaway, I’m expecting an immediate return. I think of it as a karmic thing. But it’s been the dominant factor in successfully marketing my business since 1996.

See more great advice in Shel’s award-winning marketing books. Click here to learn about them.

Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip, April 2009

If you ask journalists their biggest peeves with PR people, and especially with people trying to do their own PR, the most frequent response you’re like to get is “they waste my time with off-topic pitches.” If you think the rest of us have crowded inboxes…triple it for journalists. They are looking for excuses to hit the delete button or drop your precious press kit in the recycle bin.

So be smart and don’t do give them any! Only contact journalists who cover your beat, and let them know right from the top that you’re on topic.

Lets say you have a company that makes a new product in the renewable energy arena, maybe something that is so energy efficient that it pays for itself in one year. We’ll say it’s a furnace add-on that lowers fuel consumption 15 percent, and it’s called the Furn-i-Soar. (I’ve got dinosaurs on the brain today, OK?)

Your first contact in many situations is going to be an e-mail (or a submission on the media outlet’s webform). So the first thing you need is a subject line that lets the reporter or editor or producer know that you’ve got something fresh in the area they already cover–and that you’re looking for coverage.

You might use a subject line like

Pitch: Green Furnace Add-On Recaptures 15% of Fuel, 1-Yr Payback

At 64 characters, it’s a bit long; some e-mail systems may truncate or eliminate the word “payback.” But that’s OK, since it can be guessed from context (and in some e-mail systems, will be repeated in full inside the e-mail). This strong headline…

1. Announces that it’s a pitch
2. In eight words, summarizes the key idea
3. Uses the word “Green” to make it clear that this is an environmental story (since you’re pitching reporters on the enviro-technology beat)
4. States the dramatic results in a very concrete, non-hypey way

If the word “payback” were essential, instead of starting “Pitch:”, we could end the subject line with (Pitch)–or simply sharpen the headline until it was 55 characters or less

Let’s move on to the body (my comments in italic and outdented). Notice how every paragraph advances your agenda, and most of them are crammed with talking points.

Dear Ms. Phelps,

You do such a great job of reporting on eco-technology! I particularly enjoyed your recent story on solar magnifiers and I thought this would be of interest to your readers.

You’ve just established yourself as a “player.” You read and enjoy and are familiar with her stuff, unlike 90 percent of the people who pitch her. Ten minutes with Google or the publication’s website is all you need to make that difference–or to discover that a reporter you’re targeting isn’t the right reporter after all. Oh, and obviously, substitute “listeners” or “viewers” for “readers” if you’re pitching radio or TV. And spell the reporter’s name right!

My Springfield-based company, Energy Efficiency Technologies, has just introduced a device that recaptures 15 percent more BTUs from fuel oil, by re-oxygenating the oil and cycling it back into the burn chamber. It’s energy-efficient, very Green, and usually pays for itself in one year or less. We call it the Furn-i-Soar, and yes, there’s a story behind that name.

Right from the start, you let the reporter know your company is in the media outlet’s territory. If it’s not such a tight fit, e.g., you’re based in Springfield, Massachusetts but the reporter is 90 miles away in Boston, you might say “Massachusetts-based.”

Next, a quick statement of the core benefits, the underlying technology, the nice, short payback period. Finally, that paragraph concludes with a teaser. Now the reporter is curious. She’s going to want to visit your website.

This is new technology that we developed in collaboration with our German partner, Furnace GmbH. Germany, as you know, is the world leader in renewable energy technology. It’s been used in Europe for the past year, but this is the first time it’s been rolled out to the US market.

Another story angle–international cooperation. Plus it’s both new to market and well-tested. One of those should “stick” in the reporter’s mind.

On the press page of our website, https://www.furn-i-soar.com/press , you’ll find:

• Full product specifications of our three different models (residential, office, industrial)
• Company history
• The story of how we developed this product, working on both sides of the Atlantic–and why we named it Furn-i-Soar
• Profiles of key executives and product developers, with high-res head shots and action shots
• Price and ordering information
• Color and black-and-white product photos, audio and b-roll that you’re welcome to use in your story

Wow! You’re making it sooooo easy for a reporter to do a story! You obviously know what you’re doing, know what reporters need, and are going to be helpful. This one will be a joy to write.

Because this is new and proprietary technology, I should warn you that the press page is open only to qualified journalists. You’ll need to enter your name and the name of the media outlet, but only the first time you visit.

Uh-oh! Reporters hate squeeze pages or anything else that puts a barrier between them and their research. But sometimes it can’t be helped. At least you’ve warned her, explained why the inconvenience is necessary, and you’ve also told her it’s only the first time she visits.

I’d be delighted to set up an interview or help with whatever else you need to get a great story.

Helpful and professional once more.

One more thing: If you’d like to test out the product, we’d be glad to install a unit in your home or office for the first three months of the heating season, and let you judge the savings, comfort, and performance for yourself. At the end of the trial period, we’ll uninstall at no cost to you (or give you the option to keep it at a discounted price).

Like everyone else, reporters love free trials. In fact, they’re used to getting all sorts of things for free. Your product costs a few hundred dollars and you can’t afford to give them out like candy. But you still have a way for the reporter to test it out in the real world, and you may even make a sale at the end of the trial. And if you get lucky, you may get a story now and another story after she’s lived with and enjoyed it for a while. (Note: depending on ethics rules for the journalism outlet, as well as ethics regulations within your particular industry, this offer may not be appropriate.)

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to make your life easier while you’re working on this story. My direct line is 413-555-1290, my cell is 413-555-9900, e-mail is jjames@furn-i-soar.com, and my Twitter is @furn-i-soar. Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

John James, Product Manager

You’ve made yourself extremely accessible. If the reporter has questions, she won’t have to struggle to track you down.

Here’s a Frugal Marketing extra: HP is offering a new design service that ” brings professional brand marketing services – usually reserved for the big guys – into the reach of small businesses.” This is through a program called MarketSplash. And a s a launch special, 100 free business cards, not even a shipping and handling charge.

Well, I’m always one to take advangtage of a good free offer, and I actually need new cards for two new sites I’m creating, painlessgreenbook.com and recessionbusterbooks.com (nothing up yet at either site). We’ll see how it goes.

(Disclosure: by posting this, I get entered in a drawing to win some t-shirts).