One of the greatest challenges for a young business is getting customer traction. This rarely happens overnight; however, it won’t cost a fortune or take forever when you apply these three practices:

1. Optimize the message. Make sure the message is clear.  The content of the press release, the tweet, the Facebook post must be concise and to the point. We live in an era of multi-media, so the message can also have embedded video and photos. The old way of doing press releases is dead. Press releases are also searchable by keyword phrases. Make sure your press and social media is written so reporters and media professionals can find you.

2. Open a dialogue. Make sure you can listen to your customers as well as you can talk to them. Gone are the days when you use your mouth, but not your ears. When you write a press release, tweet or post a blog or Facebook entry, you need to give your audience the opportunity to reply AND you must have a way to collect those replies. Using your mouth and ears must be followed by using your brain to evolve your message and your business.

3. Be consistent. Be constant. Be patient. One tweet or press release won’t do anything. One thousand tweets or ten press releases in one day won’t either. A steady flow of information reinforces your message and steadily reminds your customers about your business. Trust isn’t built on a one night stand. Trust is built over time, so understand that you must commit time and discipline to your PR and social media activity.

We constantly hear from fellow entrepreneurs who want a winning PR and social media strategy, but they don’t believe they have the time or the money. Well, it doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars each month or take half of each day to get results.

We found a solution.

We found a solution we like so well that we partnered with them to bring it to you. A company called Vocus, based in Maryland, has created a suite of PR and marketing tools just for startups and small businesses.

From a single dashboard, we can

• Create press releases and deliver them to thousands of reporters and journalists,
• Track activity in our Twitter and Facebook accounts, and receive suggestions for engaging our audience, and
• Receive inquiries from journalists and bloggers who are looking to write stories that could feature us.

Using Vocus, our followers and interaction have increased on Twitter and Facebook and we’re spending much less time while getting better results. Vocus is easy enough to use that you can be completely new to PR or social media and become proficient within a day. Vocus also has great white papers, guides and webinars to educate you on the latest trends and strategies in public relations and social media.

Check it out. They have given us a deal to share with the ActSeed community, and you can see it firsthand in a really compelling personalized demo by clicking here.

We entrepreneurs are always looking to extend our reach into our targeted audience with the most frugal budget, especially in our most nascent stage.  Reality: very few of us reach the national morning shows or become blessed by Oprah without some help; only few of us even achieve our goals as an effective guest on a local affiliate morning show without a little help and grooming.  But how much budget can we afford without some certainty that our choice to help shape and shepherd our public relations strategy achieves the goals we set?

While few professionals can afford to work on 100% contingency, many are starting to drastically reduce their base retainer and make it up by delivering solid value to clients.  At the very least, a PR professional that lives by this model signals their confidence in bringing you material value.

I invited David Oates of San Diego’s Stalwart Communications public relations firm to give us his professional pitch on “Pay for Performance PR”.  He lives it every day with his clients and he certainly welcomes your comments here or directly to him (his email is at the bottom of this article).  So now, “sans plus de cérémonie” (without further ado)…

Entrepreneurs: When choosing PR Firms, think results, not retainers!

By David B. Oates, APR

Companies of all shapes and sizes are demanding that their marketing budget be measurable as well as profitable, and generate adequate returns on the investment made. So why is it that many PR professionals and agencies still resist client efforts to align their fees to a business metric, opting instead to use the traditional – and largely academic – ad equivalency index?

Instead, entrepreneurs should demand that their PR firm embraces performance-based rate structures, as the ability to measure results is now much more cost-effective and readily accessible. This model aligns a majority of client fees to actual results, such as pinpoint article placement, speaking opportunities, industry award recognition and customer/partner/investor lead generation.

Think and Act Strategically

When choosing a PR agency along these lines, companies must look to see if its principals – first and foremost – think less like a Marketing or PR person and more like business managers who thoroughly understand their client’s business and competitive landscape. Communication practitioners should be able to clearly comprehend how their client’s executive team and board of directors measure success. While sales will undoubtedly reign supreme, other aspects of the business will retain significant value, such as:

• Profit margins,
• Distribution and technology partner agreements,
• Investor (private or public) interest,
• Rate of customer acquisition,
• Strategic product roadmap,
• Average sale price per customer and so on.

Agencies will fail to realize true success if their evaluation differs from – or worst case, contradicts – the criteria of their client.

How Performance-Based PR Revenue Models Work

Under a performance-based model, a PR firm should charge a small amount of a client’s budget to a monthly program fee in return for offering that company unlimited hours of work. This eliminates the potential for agencies to be perceived as “nickel-ing and dime-ing” clients for time spent on non-valued items. The remaining budget should then be structured in performance fees where clients pay only as results occur. Some examples include:

• Articles placed, tiered by size, circulation and demographics,
• Speaking opportunities secured,
• Industry awards secured,
• Qualified customer, partner, investor leads brought into the pipeline,
• Web traffic increase and subsequent conversion rates,
• Unsolicited PR opportunities secured,
• Brand value/perception audit increases with targeted audiences

The benefits of performance-based revenue models are numerous and mutual for the PR agency and the client:

• Performance metrics/expectations are outlined and agreed upon in full between
• the agency and the client before an agreement is executed, since it will determine
• how and for what an agency gets paid.
• The business risk is shared between both parties. The agency doesn’t make its
• money unless it can produce.
• The ROI is embedded in the fee structure.
• Client satisfaction and understanding increases.
• Client retention increases.
• Client turnover/churn decreases.
• Client referral rate increases.

Performance-based PR fee models also apply to all aspects of public relations and marketing – and not just media relations as some would believe. It’s all about setting measurable goals and aligning fees accordingly. Some examples include:

Crisis Communications

Agencies can tie their fee structure to their effectiveness in meeting those goals, such as where and when those key messages were portrayed in a broadcast or print story and how many resonated with key stakeholders. PR firms could also measure their effectiveness by how long the crisis lasted when compared to other similar events.

Internal Communications

An organization can most certainly look at internal communications for its value in improving employee retention and recruitment rates. The reduction in employee churn and increase in productivity are indeed quantifiable and mission-critical elements in any organization. PR agencies need to recognize this and align their fees accordingly.

Counsel to Execs

Oftentimes, PR professionals offer such counsel to ensure executives can either solidify key messages and/or effectively convey them to their stakeholders and media. PR agencies should create benchmarks as to the capabilities of an organization before and after such counsel and measure the improvements over a period of time. Firms may also find that this program’s benefits extend beyond corporate communications to the marketing product management, sales/customer service and investor relations departments.

More and more clients today are asking their PR firms to share the burden of generating results. As a result, this sharing model will drive performance-based revenue models to evolve as the industry standard for the next decade. The underlying question to all of this is whether one believes PR efforts can be measured and benchmarks can be set. To that, I answer with an overwhelming yes.

###

About the Author: David Oates, APR, is the President of Stalwart Communications Inc., (www.stalwartcom.com) a San Diego-based marketing and public relations firm. He also runs a social media site, PayonPerformance (http://payonperformance.com), to engage business leaders in discussion on this business model. David can be reached at david@stalwartcom.com.

Before Jing – a nifty product from a Michigan company called TechSmith - I was using the “Prnt Scrn” button to capture the entire screen and customizing the view with annotations and cropping in PowerPoint or Adobe Photoshop Elements (the limit of my graphics capabilities) before pasting into the email.  Time required: LOTS more than 30 seconds.

Now, I have a small sun at the top of my screen that I can click, which enables me to “draw” a rectangle on my screen.  In this screen, I can either capture a still image or even start a video capture that pulls whatever occurs within that drawn screen area.  Using my microphone, I can also comment on what is occurring on the screen, and I can even send the captured video segment directly to my YouTube channel or save it as an mp4.

When developing and debugging ActSeed’s community platform with a development team located in the US, Spain and India, we used Jing extensively to rapidly and clearly capture issues that needed modifying.  We’re going to use Jing with one of its sister products (Camtasia) to create ActSeed video tutorials. 

In summary, it’s worth your time to check out this clever tool.  They offer an image capture version for free and the version that captures video (“Pro”) is only $15.   If you don’t know me yet, I’m a big fan of paying for value, so I purchased the $15 version and think the price might even be a tad low for the value received.  If you’re using a similar tool called Snagit, then you’re already familiar with this type of tool and guess what?  Jing and Snagit are both siblings of the same parent company (TechSmith)!

You can download the free or Pro version of Jing here.

Disclaimer: Jing didn’t give me a free download.  They didn’t pay me to say nice things.  I pay my own way, but want to share this cool tool with other entrepreneurs and business people.  We’re generally all the same – lots of needs, short on time and limited resources, so it’s nice to share a way to leverage our common reality with a tool like Jing!

Do you have a story to share about how you use Jing?  I’d like to hear it, so please leave a comment if you can.

 Do you have another cool tool or service that you think we should highlight?  Please tell me!

…………………………………

I’ve benefited from many random but excellent recommendations and suggestions over the years. Have you ever overheard someone talking about a productivity-enhancing tool or widget, tried it and found it to be irreplaceable?  Have you ever had a colleague recommend a service in casual conversation that becomes indispensable to your business?

Well, I have for sure.  Many of them, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with you.

 When we can, we’ll do our best to not only suggest processes, technologies, services, etc. that can increase your productivity, boost your efficiency or generally protect your sanity, but we’ll also try to give you the “entrepreneur’s perspective”  and possibly even share a word or two from the entrepreneurs who are responsible for the innovative solutions we’re championing.

We want this to be a two way street as well.  Please share tips, tools and services that you discover.  Inspire us!  We hope to return the favor here…