Imagine you start your morning by walking into the kitchen and announcing to whomever is sitting there that you are in for a busy day full of meetings. You arrive at your favorite coffee shop and talk about the reasons why your favorite sports team will win the game tonight, rattling statistics as you go. At the office, you stride into your first meeting and launch into a power point presentation before saying hello to a single person in the room.
At the end of the day, what have you learned? What new information have you gathered? What conversations have you sparked, or new viewpoints have you gained? (Cricket, cricket). Right. It was all output.
Traditional PR tactics of yesteryear were heavily dependent on the output approach. “Get me on TV,” clients would demand, subscribing to the “widest net” philosophy of gaining visibility. Those of us in the industry would cringe as Acme Widgets demanded to be on the cover of every major newspaper in the country…regardless of whether that exposure made Acme’s registers ring any more frequently at all.
Thankfully, today’s marketers realize that effective PR messaging is not about the biggest output possible.
It’s about conversation.
You can throw a message out there, cross your fingers, and hope it’s absorbed…or you can start a dialogue, pose an intriguing question, and actually listen to the responses you generate. Starting a conversation not only solidifies your message, but also gives you valuable insight into the values, needs, and goals of your customer.
Example. I have a friend who runs a successful recipe website with a huge following. For a long time, she would post recipes on Facebook for dinners, desserts, whatever came to mind. She worked on her marketing, trying to match up with holidays, themes, and the like. Response was good. One day, suffering from holiday season burnout, she wasn’t feeling particularly creative. Rather than share a festive recipe, she simply posted a question: “Fruitcake. Love it or hate it?”
The response was overwhelming. People loved the chance to jump in and give their opinion on this seemingly benign subject! Later, she broke tradition by posting a cocktail recipe. Guess what? People shared it left and right. By enlisting and incorporating the opinions of her followers, she had gained invaluable insight and loyalty. Not to mention some pretty darned tasty martini ideas.
How can you engage your target audience in conversation? At Kovak-Likly, we help our clients answer that question every day. We start by asking a few questions ourselves, which you can use to get things started.
1) Who is your target audience? No, really. Hint: they are not a demographic. They are people with needs, concerns, dreams, kids, jobs…you get the point. Form a mental sketch of who is sitting across the divide from you.
2) Where are they? Is their time spent on social media? Is traditional media more their speed? There are patterns which can be identified.
3) What are their needs? And how you can address them. Here’s the trick – ballpark it. You can’t know every detail of those needs, or you’d be psychic.
4) Now ask them. Fill in the blanks by enlisting their input. Ask the questions, lead the discussions, introduce the topics. Then watch that valuable insight roll in.
5) Stay at the table! No conversation continues if one party walks out in the middle. If you are going to ask your audience to engage with you, stay engaged.
If these five steps feel more like one hundred to you, no worries. The team at Kovak-Likly is expert in their navigation and happy to guide you through them. When you are ready to start a sincere dialogue with your audience, give us a call. Let’s start your conversation!
-BML
