What is Marketing Public Relations?

By Qasim Eisa

May 19th, 2013

What is public relations? and what is marketing public relations?

In previous posts we talked and discussed branding, publicity, advertising or commercial advertising as components of marketing communications or marcom, today we are going to talk about public relations and more specifically  marketing public relations.

what-is-PR

Public Relation (PR) is  the art and science of building relationships between the organization and its key public. It is concerned with communications management.

Some examples of PR includes:

Corporations:

Corporations use marketing public relations MPR to convey the information about the product they manufacture and the service they provide for the potential customer to support their direct sales efforts. Typically they support sales in short and long terms, establishing and polishing the corporation’s branding for strong and ongoing market. Corporations use public relations as vehicle to reach legislators and other politicians to seek a favorable taxes, regulatory, and other treatments. They also use public relations to portray that they are an enlightened employer in support for the human resources recruiting program.

Non-profit organizations:

Includes, school, universities, hospitals, human and social service agencies use public relations in support to awareness programs, program fund-raising, and for recruiting and increasing of care of their services.

Politicians:

Politicians use public relations to support voting and money raising, and when successful at the polling, to promote and defend their services in office with an eye to the next election or at career’s end to their legacy.

After these three examples we will start to know what PR in general and how firms and people use it to achieve some objectives.

Now we will go forward to know more about PR tactics and methods.

Methods and Tactics in Public Relations:

1-Audience Targeting:

Audience Targeting is a fundamental technique used in public relations is to identify the target audience, and to tailor every message to appeal on that audience. An (audience) can be general, nationwide, or worldwide audience and more often is segment of population.

Marketers refers in economy-driven “demographic” such as “white males 18-49″ but in public relations is more easy, being whoever someone wants to reach.

In addition to audience there is stakeholders, literally people who have stake in a given issue. Everyone audience is a stakeholder or (virtual stakeholder), but not all stakeholders are audiences.

For example a charity commissions, and PR agency wants to create a campaign to raise money to find cure for disease. The charity and people with diseases are stakeholder, audiences are the people who likely to donate money.

2-Press Conferences:

Press Conference consists of someone speaking to the media t a predetermined time and place. Press Conference usually takes place public or almost-public. Press conference provides an opportunity for speaker to control information and who gets it, and depend on the circumstances conference can hand-pick the journalist they invite to the conference instead of making themselves available for any journalist wishes to attend.

It is also assumed that the person who hold a conferences will answer the question the journalist ask, although they are not obliged to. When the person hold more than one conferences specially on scandal, the more conferences the persons hold the more aggressive the questions may become.

Therefore it is in speaker’s interests to answer the journalists question at a press conference to avoid appearing that hiding something.

For even more control but less interactivity the person may choose to issue a press release.

3-Press Releases ‘Optimized’ for internet:

The advert of the internet has resulted with new kind of press release known as optimized press release. Unlike the traditional and old days press release, written for journalists’ eyes only seeks for the editor or reporter to consider it as a compelling release to be in print or online news. The optimized press release posted on the online news portal. Here the writer carefully select keywords or keyword phrases relevant to the press release content. If written skillfully can be highly ranked in the search like Google news, yahoo news or Msn news.

4-Lobby Groups:

Lobby Group are establish to influence government policy, corporate policy or public opinion. The purpose of lobby groups is to represent a particular interests. If the lobby group hides the true purpose and the support basis, it is known as front group.

5-Astroturfing:

Creating an artificial grassroots movement is known as Astro-turfing.A typical exampke will be the writing of letters to multiple newspaper editors and for website under different names to express an opinion on issue, to create the impression of wild spread public feeling but being controlled by one central entity.

6-Spin:

Public relations is used to present information in a favorable manner, when presentation uses deceptive or highly manipulative is refereed as spin.

Others:

-Publicity event or publicity stunt.

-Talk show circuit. The PR practitioner does the circuit interview on tv talk show or radio with audience the client wishes to reach.

-Books and other writings.

-Direct communication (carrying messages directly) to the voters rather than using the mass media, such as newspaper, social media networks, sms and emails.

-Direct literature tradtionally in print and now through websites.

-Speeches to the voters groups, professional organizations receptions; seminars, other events, and personal appearance.

Slang word for Publicist or PR practitioner is “Flack.”

We hope after reading this post, you get a clear idea what is PR and how marketers use it to get to their audience.

If you have any comment to add please share it with us.

 

What is Publicity?

By Qasim Eisa

May 16th, 2013

Publicity

Today you are going to know what is publicity, and why and where marketers or publicist do it?

As long as we are talking every week about the components of marketing communications today I will explain one of the four promotion subcategories. It is Publicity.

And before start talking about this important component of promotion, let me brief you for a while about promotion.

Promotion is one of the four aspect of marketing. The other three marketing mix are, product management, pricing, and distribution.

Promotion involves distributing information about products, product line, branding, or company.

Promotion includes four subcategories:

-Advertising.

-Personal Selling.

-Sales Promotion.

-Publicity and PR.

The Specifications of these four changeable creates the promotional mix or the promotional plan.

Promotional mix is to specificity how much attention to pay for each of these subcategories and how much money to budget each.

The promotional plan has a wide range of objectives such as, sales increases, new product acceptance, creating a brand equity, positioning, competitive relations, creating corporate image.

Now we get closer to our point. What is publicity?

Publicity is the deliberating attempt to manage the public’s perception on a subject.

The subjects of publicity includes people, (politicians, performance artist) products and services, (organization from all kinds) and works of art and entertainment.

Promotion is one of the marketing mix components (4Ps)

From Marketing perspective, publicity is one components of promotion, the other promotional mix are advertising, personal selling, and sales promotion. Promotion is one of the marketing mix components.

Publicity is a tool of public relation. Public relation (PR) is the management of all communications between clients (company) and selected targeted audience.

Publicity is the management of product – brand-related communications between the firm and the general public.

I think now it sound so much easier than before ;)

Publicity is primarily an informative activity.

Publicity is primarily an informative activity, (opposed to the persuasive one.) Its ultimate goal is to promote client’s product or services, and publicity plan, is a planned program aimed to obtain a favorable media coverage for the organization’s product, or for the organization itself to enhance its reputation and relationship with the stakeholders.

The basic tool for the publicist is press release

The basic tool for the publicist is press release, other techniques like telephone press-conference, wire-news stories, internet releases, multi-component video news release(VNR’s), and in-studio tour. These releases to be used by the media they must be of interest to the public, or at least the market segment the media outlet is target to.

Getting noticed by the press is all about saying the right thing at the right time.

Pros of Publicity:

The advantage of publicity is the low cost and credibility (Particularly if the publicity is aired between news story like event TV news casts)

New Technologies such as blogs, webcams and video conferences, are changing the cost-structure.

Cons of Publicity:

The disadvantage is the lack of control over how your released will be used, and the frustration of the low percentage of the releases that are taken up by the media.

Publicity has several key themes like birth, love, and death, because these themes are of interest to the human lives which feature heavily throughout life.

Do you agree that publicity is effective today? Please share us your comments about publicity.

Read our helpful post:

7 Steps to get your marketing messages delivered

 

 

The 4Ps in International Marketing

By Qasim Eisa

May 4th, 2013

Tactics for International Marketing:

internationalmarketing

 Today we are going to talk about the tactics used in global marketing and the 4Ps that every marketer frequently used to do in his job to achieve his goal.

As you know the role of the typical marketing department is to help the company achieve its objectives.

And the tactic of truly smart marketing department should at minimum include four fundamental areas: Product, price, place, and promotion.

In other words marketing should be about making sure that the right products are sold at the right prices, to the right markets, using the right communication channels.

Below is an outline of a typical questions that marketing tactics should address:

Product:

  • Which products should be emphasized?
  • Which products contribute most to profitability?
  • What product image should be projected?
  • What consumer needs the products seek to meet?
  • What’s new / different in the products that will influence customers’ decision to buy?

Price:

  • Should the competition be based primarily on price?
  • Are discounts available?
  • Are the pricing policies standard, is there limit?
  • What price segments are being targeted, (high, medium or low)
  • What is the gross profit margin?
  • Should cost / demand or competition-oriented pricing be emphasized?

Place:

  • What geographic coverage is necessary?
  • Are there a geographic priority areas?
  • What are the key channels of distributions?
  • Should marketing manager change their degree of reliance on distributors, sales reps or direct selling?
  • Is the sales force organized by territories, markets or products?

Promotion:

  • What are the key promotions priorities and approaches?
  • What are the desired action from target market to become informed with company product, like phone call, visit a website, to keep up with the company news, etc?
  • Which advertising / communication approaches are most effectively linked to different products, markets, and territories?
  • Which media would be most consistent with the total marketing communication strategy?

Sound simple right?

Okay and moreover marketing managers in additional to these typical key questions, they should decide which channels are most cost effective, (fax, postcards, email, newsletters, newspapers, radio, tv, billboards, brochures, magazines, banner ads, etc)

Do you think the above key question is enough to address the trends in the globe, share us with your opinions.