For brand types, understanding the value of PR is almost inherent. It's getting the rest of the company to buy-in that proves challenging. So how can you bridge the gap between your corporate sales force and your marketing team? Try social media.
As a brand guy, I was always frustrated trying to effectively convey the importance of PR coverage to our sales team. Beyond stats, facts and figures there's little for a transaction-minded sales person to grab onto. And for many companies the only time sales and marketing are on the same page is once or twice a year at the "sales meeting" (insert the name of yours here). This is where you have to "sell the pitch".
How many times have you gone through the motions - trying to scan magazines and send them as pdf attachments through email? Or clipped articles, made copies and circulated them around to the sales department?
I decided to try an internal experiment in social media. We started a blog dedicated specifically to press coverage and aimed squarely at our sales force. Each post had some type of significant press coverage - from television to print and online - and always showed circulation or viewer numbers. We displayed links to articles, blogs and let our audience (our own sales team) see what the rest of the world (namely our consumers) were saying about our products.
The experiment proved successful and it didn't take long for sales to figure out we were giving them a valuable tool. Now, our sales team forwards related posts on to their buyers, keeping them in the conversation as well. Not only did we manage to get them excited about our PR efforts, we managed to speak their language at the same time. With only a short time to sell our products to buyers, taking the "marketing speak" out of their responsibilities is a bonus for them. Now they can let the blog do the updating for them.
For us, the blog is a great way to archive press coverage and share it with anyone in the company. As with most brands, we also have external blogs for our consumers, but none have proved more successful than the one that was developed to sell ourselves, to ourselves.
My only advice is to keep it simple. Blogging is easy and narrowing the audience makes it even easier to produce. Chances are your own sales team or corporate leadership aren't entirely up-to-speed on blogging yet either. If I was to ask our sales team if they use "blogs" they would probably say no, not realizing that our PR blog is in fact a blog. They simply know it as, "Dispatch".
Original post on Pitchengine | Subscribe
As a brand guy, I was always frustrated trying to effectively convey the importance of PR coverage to our sales team. Beyond stats, facts and figures there's little for a transaction-minded sales person to grab onto. And for many companies the only time sales and marketing are on the same page is once or twice a year at the "sales meeting" (insert the name of yours here). This is where you have to "sell the pitch". How many times have you gone through the motions - trying to scan magazines and send them as pdf attachments through email? Or clipped articles, made copies and circulated them around to the sales department?
I decided to try an internal experiment in social media. We started a blog dedicated specifically to press coverage and aimed squarely at our sales force. Each post had some type of significant press coverage - from television to print and online - and always showed circulation or viewer numbers. We displayed links to articles, blogs and let our audience (our own sales team) see what the rest of the world (namely our consumers) were saying about our products.
The experiment proved successful and it didn't take long for sales to figure out we were giving them a valuable tool. Now, our sales team forwards related posts on to their buyers, keeping them in the conversation as well. Not only did we manage to get them excited about our PR efforts, we managed to speak their language at the same time. With only a short time to sell our products to buyers, taking the "marketing speak" out of their responsibilities is a bonus for them. Now they can let the blog do the updating for them.
For us, the blog is a great way to archive press coverage and share it with anyone in the company. As with most brands, we also have external blogs for our consumers, but none have proved more successful than the one that was developed to sell ourselves, to ourselves.
My only advice is to keep it simple. Blogging is easy and narrowing the audience makes it even easier to produce. Chances are your own sales team or corporate leadership aren't entirely up-to-speed on blogging yet either. If I was to ask our sales team if they use "blogs" they would probably say no, not realizing that our PR blog is in fact a blog. They simply know it as, "Dispatch".
Original post on Pitchengine | Subscribe
