PR Tools and Tactics

What’s the big deal about key messages? Your company is your company, your brand is your brand and your products are your products, right? Not so fast. I bet if you asked two people to describe your company, your brand or your products, you’d get two different sets of descriptions. Have you ever identified an object as blue, only to be told that it’s not blue, it’s cerulean? It’s kind of like that.  (For those of you who know I’m color blind, you’ll see a bit of humor in this.)

It’s important to control how your company, brand, products or services are messaged. If you don’t position them appropriately, someone else will most likely interpret them differently, and you might not like the results. You might think you’re offering a cerulean masterpiece, while somebody else might call it a blue piece of junk.  Messaging dictates how people perceive what you have to offer, and you can’t leave that to chance. You want your leadership team, your sales team, your customers and the media to describe what you have to offer the same way—the way you describe it. The secret to that is your key messages.

When the Kovak-Likly team works with our healthcare clients to develop key messages, we start by asking the following questions:

• What do you want people to know about your company?
  • When asked who you are, what do you want others to know about your company?
  • What does your company stand for?
  • Who does your company serve/who are your customers?
  • What is your company’s record and reputation?
  • What do you want people to know about your brands/products?
  • What are the brand’s key values?
  • Who does the company/brand/product aspire to be?
  • What makes the company/brand/product special?
  • What problems does your company/brand or product solve?

Once you answer those questions and you write out your messages, consider the following factors and think about refining your messages:

• Do your key messages align with the interests of your target audiences? If they aren’t in alignment, are you planning to go after a new target audience? Different audiences want different things. Some people buy on price, others on quality, still others on exclusivity. If your key messages don’t align with your key audience’s priorities, you should think about new messages, or  shifting your target audiences.
• Do your key messages differentiate you from your competitors? Positioning yourself as the same as the other guy is not going to win any hearts or minds—or sales. Key messages need to identify your key differentiators. Is it your U.S.-based manufacturing? Your customer service? First/best/only?

Once you develop your key messages, you should validate them with your key stakeholders and target audiences, then stick to them with conviction and deploy them everywhere. Use them in media interviews, adapt them for your marketing collateral, talk about them within your company and on your social media platforms, etc. And if you need help with your key messages or getting them to your targeted audiences and making them sink in, shoot me an email. We’d love to help.

– BML

In college, I was a competitive skier and had the opportunity to compete internationally at a pretty high level.  I learned a ton of life lessons from that experience.  One of those lessons is that getting back to the basics is critical if you want to ensure top performance.  I made a point to get back to basics once a quarter, which meant taking a hard look at my training and competition plan, evaluating the components of those plans, my execution of that plan, and my technique.  I often found that if I was working hard and not getting the results I expected, I needed to revisit these basics and focus less on the clutter that filled my world.

The same strategy applies to leveraging public relations to drive business goals and objectives.

If you currently work with a PR agency, you hopefully already know the impact PR can have on your company and your brands. (If you work with a firm and you can’t see the value, you should call us. We should have a serious talk about getting back to basics.) Maybe you’re somewhat new to PR or maybe your boss or mentor has suggested some PR counsel might be helpful to your business. Regardless of which camp you are in, knowing the basics—and focusing on the basics—of public relations will always net a better result than all the pomp, circumstance, glitz, glamour and money you can throw at a challenge.

To start, it helps if you speak the same language as the experts. Here’s a quick overview:

What is PR?

It’s short for public relations. This means exactly what it says. PR helps to build, repair and maintain relationships with the public. Who that public is depends of the specific needs of each client.

How do you determine which public to target?

Research and listening. At Kovak-Likly, we do our homework. We ask questions and we listen—really listen—to our clients and members of the communities they wish to serve; and we conduct research to determine how to target messaging efforts more efficiently and effectively. Which audiences we want or need to reach in order to meet an objective is usually determined through our understanding of specific industries, the needs of our clients and input from a wide variety of sources which we check and cross check.  Knowing who your most important key audiences are, and validating that understanding, is a basic component of highly successful public relations programs.

What does relations really mean?

Relations should really be thought of in terms of perspective.  This notion of perspective is an important, basic component of successful public relations programs. The relationships we have with others, with companies and with brands we choose or don’t choose are fundamentally based on the perspective we have with them.  As an extension, relations are affected by the messaging, information, education and resulting perspective audiences have on a given topic.

So when you think of public relations, you should really be thinking in terms of educating targeted audiences on a given topic or providing information that will assist those audiences in gaining perspective that is valuable in the way you would like your company or brand to be perceived.

When you approach PR from this perspective, there are limitless opportunities to cost-effectively reach large audiences and impart on them perspectives that are most valuable to you and your business.  It will also aid your key audiences in viewing your company and brands in the favorable light you are looking for.

Here are some realistic expectations for your next PR campaign:

• PR  can educate first time buyers so they can make important decisions with valuable knowledge up front, making the buying experience more enjoyable, more efficient and hopefully more fruitful for your business objectives.
• PR can educate distributors and decision makers (and even gate keepers) along the decision path to facilitate acquisition of your product or service.  This can help you secure stronger distribution partners and develop supportive relationships with intermediate decision makers and often critical gatekeepers.
• PR can educate multiple audiences in a specific marketplace either independently or at the same time. Using healthcare as an example, there are a wide variety of public relations techniques we use to help clients educate the marketplace on new medical developments and get valuable information to doctors, nurses, hospitals, insurance companies, patient advocacy organizations, research institutions, patients and their loved ones so they gain the valuable perspective we’ve been discussing.

There are so many other ways PR can help you achieve your objectives.  What is most important is knowing the basics and executing on them with focus and determination.  I hope this gives you a good start. Let me know if you have any questions, or if you’re interested in learning more about Kovak-Likly’s capabilities.