PR on a shoestring

PR on a shoestring

PR can be a hugely effective, yet inexpensive way of boosting your company image and recruiting franchisees. However, a successful campaign requires careful planning, precision and creativity. Richard Samarasinghe provides an invaluable guide to successful PR.

You only need to pick up any national newspaper on a regular basis to recognise the power and impact of Public Relations (PR), whether it be the recent impact on the world’s perception of the BBC after airing an ‘edited’ promotional trailer film of the Queen storming out of a photo session, or Boris Johnson using every trick in the PR manual to gain column inches in his bid to become the new mayor of London.

In both these cases neither the BBC nor Boris paid the media a single penny for the coverage, as the stories were both newsworthy and would sell. This is what effective PR is all about and it doesn’t need to cost you a single penny.

So what is PR?

Public relations can be defined as ‘those activities that a business undertakes to communicate to its customers that are not directly paid for’.

In any business, big or small, PR must form an important part of the on-going marketing activities and can become the most cost effective way of promoting you and your business to a wider audience.

Developing a PR strategy can contribute to the following marketing tasks:

− Creating product or service awareness and interest
− Helping you launch new products
− Influencing specific target market segments
− Helping you cope with crises
− Helping you enhance your company image and your brands

As Sales and Marketing Director of Techclean Services I was faced with the old chestnut that continually challenges us all, poor quality franchisee applicants and no real budget allocation to improve recruitment. The challenge was to raise our brand profile and communicate information about our unique services to our target audience at a minimal cost.

Techclean Services was established back in 1983 and is a full member of the BFA. We operate an international franchise that provides a unique and specialist IT cleaning service to businesses large and small through a network of 42 franchised and 13 directly managed branch operations across the UK.

A strategic review of our existing franchisee recruitment identified the following: Firstly, our initial recruitment advertising, screening and interview processes did not help us find the right profile of candidates; secondly, we had no formally documented follow-up process; and finally, potential recruits had a poor understanding of the services we offered.

However, demand for our specialist services were at an all time high driven by increased consumer awareness of the issues associated with cross contamination, publicised by high profile stories such as MRSA in hospitals and e-coli poisoning in our schools.

Through our own independent research we knew that the public’s overall concerns about the risks associated with cross contamination and its potential consequences had increased significantly and this was shaping their future hygiene habits. Our research not only reinforced these worries but through testing and analysing a number of every day items such as door handles, toilet seats and IT equipment such as telephones, remote controls and computer keyboards identified high levels of potentially dangerous microbes and pathogens.

Could this provide us with the opportunity to not only increase the public’s awareness of these dangers but also raise their awareness of our brand and services?

Having reviewed the options available I decided that a focused and targeted PR campaign would provide us with a cost effective solution to increase franchisee recruitment whilst utilising the research conclusions. We called our PR campaign a ‘Campaign of Self Discovery’.

Planning is essential for all marketing communications, and you’ll waste a lot of time and effort if you don’t. You need to set clear objectives, define the target audiences and develop effective messages – followed up by careful implementation and evaluation techniques.

It is absolutely vital that you understand what you want to achieve and who you want to communicate your message to.

Techclean case study

Aim
To re-launch our franchise recruitment activity using PR targeted at increasing the public’s awareness of the risks associated with cross contamination and the benefits of IT equipment hygiene.

PR objectives
• To increase customers’ awareness and understanding of the risks linked to cross contamination and to demonstrate the real benefits of using our services.
• To develop a distinctive brand position to reinforce our expertise in this field.

Our hook
Our research had identified that the average computer keyboard has over 3,295 germs per square inch, the average telephone receiver had an amazing 20,961 germs per square inch and door handles over 30,000 germs per square inch. Incredibly, in a typical office, very little was being done to minimise the chances of an employee picking up a bug.

Remember to ask yourself the question is it newsworthy and will it sell magazines? You have to remember that anyone working in the media is constantly thinking, what do I need to do to sell more newspapers, increase viewers and listeners or attract new readers to my website? They all need to fill their pages or airtime and you have to ensure that the journalist you are targeting will be interested.

Action plan
Over an intensive eight-week period we managed a phased PR campaign each of which had a different emphasis and objectives.

Phase 1 which we called ‘make it newsworthy’ used a number of press releases aimed at targeting key journalists and editors with some hard, and in some cases, disturbing facts about every day items including IT equipment designed to engage and motivate them to broadcast and publish articles and stories about our research. The main objective at this stage was about informing and educating the public at large, particularly potentially new franchisees!

Phase 2 was titled ‘generate interest and drive new enquiries’ during which we used our PR activity to reinforce and capture opinion to enable us to act as an expert or spokesperson across the media.

The objective of Phase 3 was to ‘infuse and reinforce’ our previous PR activities through increasing our exposure in more specialist magazines and websites including public sector editorials.

Remember to follow up. Get on the phone and talk to journalists and editors. If you are an authority on a particular subject tell them. They are always looking for exclusive stories and you’ll be amazed what you’ll find out.

What was the impact?

Our activity generated an incredible amount of interest, which was sustained for over eight months after our first press release.

We appeared in 16 separate articles in titles including: The Times, The Independent, the Evening Standard and The Sun which in total have a circulation of just under 10 million and resulted in media exposure that would have cost Techclean over £108,000 based on display advertising rates.

In addition, we were asked to appear on three main-stream radio stations with a potential audience of over 12 million listeners, and two live daytime television shows; ITV’s This Morning and NBC’s Breakfast News, providing us with a truly worldwide reach!

The campaign was hugely successful for our franchisee recruitment with inbound enquiries increasing by 90% year on year. We also noticed a significant increase in the number of high quality applicants, ensuring we reached our annual recruitment target by the third quarter.

Top PR tips

1. Planning your campaign

i. What do you want to achieve?
ii. Who is your target audience?
iii. How are you going to reach them?
iv. How are you going to measure success?

2. Writing press releases

i. What is your hook? Try to find a picture to make your release stand out
ii. Build relationships with local and national journalists
iii. Keep releases simple and make a note to the editor with your contact details
iv. Your copy must not be sales based – it doesn’t work
v. Be very clear why your release is newsworthy and why it will sell newspapers.

3. PR agencies

i. Be sure they understand your sector. Ask them to demonstrate what they’ve done for previous clients and the financial impact of their work
ii. Define and document what you want and by when.
iii. Monitor and review regularly and ask them to provide information on circulation and readership numbers to help you financially appraise your campaign