Friday 20 December 2013

NEW YEAR'S WISHES

If you had three business wishes to send to Father Christmas for the New Year, then what would they be?  I expect that one of them would be to have more business in 2014, and another might be to earn more money.   If so, then the third, if you are running a business, should be to have a good marketing plan in place, otherwise the first two might be difficult to achieve!   This is, of course, easier said than done, as I have mentioned on several other occasions, but with the business environment starting to bubble a little bit now, we all want to try and get a piece of that bigger business cake.  And if you want to ensure that you are the company that a potential customer comes to rather than one of your competitors, then they need to know about you!

From our own PR agency perspective, if we had three Christmas wishes, they would be:
  1. To have clients that empower us to do a good job – there is nothing that an agency likes less than a client that wants to micro-manage every little detail and force us to do things ‘their way’, with the end result that we simply carry out an administration – and take the blame if the exercise doesn’t work!
  2. To never, ever, be asked again if we have good contacts in the media….. come on everyone!   That’s like asking a law firm if they know about the legislation or a construction company if they know any architects.  But just because we have contacts, it doesn’t mean that we will get you on the front page of Hospodarkse noviny every day!    We still need you to provide us with the content, which means something that is really newsy and relevant that we can present in a skilful and suitable format…. (so don’t write it for us…!!).
  3. To communicate with US!   No PR or marketing agency can achieve results for you (or in-house person for that matter) if you don’t give them any information to work with, don’t respond to queries from journalists on time and/or forget to inform us about what you are up to!   The more you give your PR and marketing people to work with, the more they can do for you.
And, just to cheat a bit, a fourth one – love your PR and marketing agencies or people!   The more we are stroked, the more we will do for you… marketing people don’t tend to work by the hour (even if we are supposed to!), and the more appreciated we are, the more the creativity will flow!

Wishing anyone that is reading this a great Christmas and a successful New Year!


Jo