Most of my clients have public-facing businesses which need to make a regular and meaningful connection with the general public to establish themselves.
So it's always a bit of a shock to see how they survive at all. Very few have all the pieces of the marketing puzzle in place before I arrive to ice the cake with PR. The two aren't mutually exclusive. PR is marketing's final act – it works best when the basics of marketing are established practise and are doing the sales job to a greater or lesser degree.
That's why I have had to get interested in marketing as a broader subject, and find myself steering small businesses in the right direction before feeling the need to work my contacts and generate some positive images through PR. It's my experience that PR only works well for 'visible' companies – businesses which have a presence in the market already.
So what are the basics? Although I work chiefly in tourism businesses, the approach works with other consumer-facing operations. The methodology begins with establishing a budget for marketing and, believe me, you'd be surprised how many of my clients dip into a mythical and variable slush fund when I send an invoice.
'Any business which hasn't budgeted for its marketing doesn't have an income structure to pay for it'
This approach doesn't work for many reasons, chief of which is that any business which hasn't budgeted for its marketing doesn't have an income structure to pay for it. If you don't plan to spend money, you won't plan to earn it. Marketing isn't a cost, it's the investment at the core of all sales and sales drives profit.
Setting a budget from scratch isn't difficult. I always ask clients to establish the previous 12 months' spend by running back through the books, and set that same level for the coming year. That's an easy pill to swallow – your marketing cost will remain the same, so you won't have to look for extra cash from your margins or to increase your margins.
You won't stand still, though. It's my job to make that same spend more effective and reach more customers. There are two main types of spend; background spend and campaign spend. No business can survive without the constant drip-feed of awareness marketing – usually based on advertising but which includes maintaining an effective website. Placing ads should be as regular and as essential a task as sending invoices.
Campaign spend is based on what's left over, maybe accumulated over a period to give a Big Bang effect for, perhaps, a new product. It may be an ad campaign but could equally well be an event. It may also be a concerted PR campaign.
But the background spend must also include some simple PR; editorial placements, news stories, community campaigns and social networking. PR works in concert with the rest of marketing and, no matter how you try, can't be isolated from the rest.
But didn't I promise a 'Starting point for small businesses'? It's this; work out what you spent on marketing last year and create a proper budget for that amount in the coming year. Believe me, when there's a cash pot to consider, the way you spend that money will be far more effective.
