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Jennifer Foster Marketing

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Using Your Time Wisely: Finding Influencers While You Work on Funding

Dallas just wrapped up its second Dallas Startup Week.  It’s such a great way for the start up community to come together to celebrate (and commiserate, ammiright?) the pros and cons of startup life.
So let’s talk about the elephant in the proverbial start-up room.
Funding.
Or rather waiting on funding.
So many start ups in the world are “waiting on funding.” It can be hard to be productive during this wait-and-see time. Sure, it’s easy to stay busy, but staying productive is different.

One of the best things you can do while you wait on investments is to build connections with potential influencers. Networking takes time, but the good news is that for the most part it is free. Taking the time you have now to build relationships will pay off down the road when time becomes your most limited asset.

There are several ways to grow your network. A few that I like are:

  • Attend a local 1 Million Cups presentation — 1MillionCups is a nation-wide program that offers the ability for young companies to practice their pitches and gain valuable feedback from the audience members. Sitting in the audience, you can meet everyone from angel investors to fellow entrepreneurs — influencers! If you think you’re ready you should present! You never know who may be sitting in the audience. When you’re there you can likely find out other programs and stages for similar presentations. Practice makes perfect!
  • Social Media — It’s just almost trite to say if you’re not on social media you need to be. You need to be. But you can’t just be there — you need to have meaningful content. Show your influencers that you are a thought leader and that you’re on the cutting edge of whatever industry. You should talk WITH people on social media not just to them. Search for people talking about what you want to talk about. Tools like buzzsumo.com are amazing ways to find curated content quickly. Other tools I like, include FlipBoard and, once you have a little cash, look into Meltwater or a similar monitoring tool.
  • Publish Content — Right along the lines of social media is blogging. If you’re not blogging, you’re missing a huge opportunity to find and reach out to your influencers. I like to use my blog to “power” my social media. If you don’t want to blog on your website, then blog via LinkedIn or another social media tool. The important thing is to write, just write. You can tell people about what you’re learning and what you’re doing. Best of all good content is easily shareable and you’ll create brand evangelists in the process.
  • Attend conferences as a Speaker — One of the best PR tools I have is getting my clients onto stages either as a guest speaker or as part of a panel at events. It’s a great way to get your message out to a room that likely contains at least a handful of your influencers. We were lucky enough to get a client on stage two different times during Dallas Start Up week. One of which then resulted in a pic being on the front page of the business section. FREE ADVERTISING! YEAH!  While Dallas Startup Week was a free event, as a speaker you normally can get a complimentary pass to the rest of the event. (You may save yourself a couple of hundred dollars in admission/sponsorship fees!!) Additionally, speakers usually enjoy “back stage” access to other speakers and event organizers. Great potential networking with influencers!

Building anything from scratch is a daunting challenge. Anyone who has started a company knows this. Startups are often challenging much bigger, well-financed competition. Disrupting them means you have to focus on marketing activities that give you a solid return.

 

 

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DIY MEDIA RELATIONS: Because The Media isn’t sitting around waiting for you

I won’t name any names or share any images, but I saw a post on FB this week that said essentially ” We’ve got a great new product. We’re looking to launch next week. Does anyone have any media connections to help us?” 

Now, I’m not a native southerner, but I couldn’t help but think “Awww… bless your heart.”

In my 20 or so years in the south, I’ve learned that when a southerner says “Bless your heart” — it’s not good. It’s actually really, really bad.

Probably worse.

Southerners use that phrase when there is so much wrong with someone or something that they can’t even begin to put it to words.

Media planning requires just that: Planning.

Whether you call it public relations, media planning or media relations, the most important word is NOT media or public. It is the planning and the relations that take the effort. Expecting news media, even media dedicated to your niche industry or business, to be waiting around for you to be ready to talk to them will not work. (Or shall we say “That dog won’t hunt.”)

I listened to a great podcast last week on StartUp Dallas that featured Michelle Lamont (@lamontPR) who did a phenomenal job of explaining how she’s made a career out of effectively promoting and  managing the images of some pretty significant companies (including her own start up.) A key point she makes is that media relations takes time: the first time the media hears from you should not be when you want something from them. She tells a funny story about running an advertisement in a national publication and then patiently waiting by the phone. And waiting. And waiting some more.*

So how should a young company start engaging the media before launch? 

Create Meaningful Public Relations
Create Meaningful Public Relations

One of my current clients has a solid client-base, but they’re looking to implement some new marketing for the first time, going heavier on the social media/PR to gain some growth. Here’s a quick sketch of how we’re putting a plan together.

1. Find your fans — Your first step should be to go connect on social media with EVERYONE you know — this is especially helpful if you’ve been active in the DFW or local start up scene or, if you, like my client have an existing base. Connect with those you know already like you.

2. Make new fans — Social media makes it easy to find people who talk your talk, whatever that talk is. Go find them. Use your hashtags, use your search, use Google search and find social media connections from web sites. Just build your connections and include your media targets. Start introducing yourself to them NOW!

3. Share useful content — I did a post a few months ago about how to develop social media content  (if you missed it read it here.)  For the first month or so of my jumping into Twitter I didn’t have ANY original content (because I didn’t know I needed it, but that’s another story). I simply shared and retweeted and used my web site content. Guess what? It worked. It won’t work forever, but while you’re finding and making your fans, it’s great.

4. Build offline relationships — It’s so important to make yourself known. Take time to attend events where media (and media connections) will be. In Dallas a simple trip to the Launch DFW website will give you a host of events. If you’re in a specific niche, like architecture or accounting, find groups who meet. Meet Up is great and while some of the key events won’t be there, attending a few of them will clue you in on where else you need to be.  Convert your offline relationships into fans and get them to follow your social media and read your blogs. (Don’t neglect LinkedIn here — it’s a great way to meet industry peers.)

5. Volunteer — There are so many events that need volunteers and guess what — you get in for free! I volunteered for a Dallas Business Journal event late last year and made several connections with other volunteers, but, also during lunch, I got to go sit in the audience and network. The place was crawling with media guru’s who are dying to become fans of your product! #dying

6. Do your research — Once you’ve identified the media coverage you want, you need to READ THEM. More importantly, engage with them. From the comfort of your couch you can reply to their tweets, comment on their blogs, share their FB posts. I’d also recommend that you attend events they sponsor or attend, engage in live and virtual conversation with them, but be careful not to be overly self-promoting. Bonus: this also helps you know if the content you’re sharing is meaningful.

During prelaunch, very few companies have budget dollars for outsourced public and media relations and that’s okay, you can likely have a lot of success with a simple DIY model. Learning and understanding that the media you’re looking to reach aren’t thumbing through press releases to actively reach out to every new company. If you learn what they are looking for and where and how they talk about it, then, when you’re ready you’ll have strong connections of your own to leverage.

Tweet me your successes or questions (or failures?) at @jrfoster75231. And go listen to that podcast!

Best,

Jennifer

* (She also talks about being so dedicated to her business that she slept in the bakery because she couldn’t pay electricity at both home and the bakery. It really is a great podcast!)

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Creating Shareable Content for Social Media and Beyond

The most shareable social media need to be relevant to the reader's emotions.
The most shareable social media need to be relevant to the reader’s emotions.

This past week I was working on a digital marketing proposal for a client. A key element of this plan, or any plan that I’d put together is content: creating good content drives just about any avenue. And bad content won’t be saved by any of them.

Content factors break easily down into the old “Who, What, Where, When and Why”.

Millennials like to say they’re changing marketing by demanding that it be relevant. As a long-time marketer, my take? It’s always been necessary to make marketing relevant — at least  if you wanted to be any good at it. When it comes to making content shareable this is a huge measurement of relevancy. What is relevant gets shared.

  1. Know your audience and understand what they expect you to talk about. If you’re reading this blog or follow me on social media, you know I like to talk about marketing fundamentals and how to integrate them into today’s vehicles. My social media shares tend to be things that I like and believe in.
  2. What do you expect your reader to do based on the information? Generally, I think of social media as my public relations. I don’t expect this blog or that Tweet to convert to a $7k per month retainer (but a girl can dream, eh?) Rather my social media is how I relate to all you and hopefully establish myself as an expert in your minds and hearts.
  3. When is the right time to share? This is where your forecasting comes in handy. In all likelihood your business has some level of seasonality to it. For me, marketing budgets are set in 3rd and 4th quarters and plans are in place by May or June. Meaning if I’m not in the door in the next few weeks, I won’t see a return until 2016.
  4. How can your content help me? It’s no secret that readers are much more likely to click and share if your headline includes words like “Top 10 Lists” or “6 Steps to ____”. We’re all busy and we need help from people we think have good ideas and effective solutions.

When it comes to writing your content keep in mind that most content comes in one of 3 flavors

1. Motivate: Inspiration loves Company We love to be inspired. If I had a dollar for every motivational quote in my collective newsfeeds, well, let’s just say the retainer mentioned above wouldn’t need to be as big. Sometimes motivation for marketers comes in the form of making a sale (yep, sometimes). So leverage your content to help create or cement a need within your readers’ minds.

2. Educate: Keep, Stop, Start In doing my research for this blog I looked back over my personal shares and nearly all of them intend to help someone learn something. Start using an online app to raise money for pet shelters when you walk your dog, stop eating processed food, keep promoting the good deeds of my favorite political candidate. I share what I care about. So do your customers.

3. Entertainment and Current Events Last week when the royal princess was born, I was a bit irritated that no one had shared this. It was Saturday morning and I hadn’t turned on the TV yet, but of course I’d checked my various news feeds, probably more than once if the truth be told. There was no mention of this sweet new baby girl for nearly 2 hours! Imagine that?!?! If you’re like me, we expect our news to be everywhere, quickly. And if you can’t be first, you need to be unique.

The secret sauce: combine these flavors — a neapolitan social media strategy if you will — and you’ll hit the emotional sweet spot! Remember the inspirational story of the man who walked an extreme distance to or from work? It was a social media trend topic that THEN became a current event. Presto!

Would love to see your content ideas. Tweet me @jrfoster75231 or post your comments below.