Local Marketing & Public Relations :: Public Relations
Public Relations Planning
In a marketplace that changes daily, strategic public relations (PR) can differentiate you from your competition. It can lead to positive community and industry exposure for your company, help reinforce your value to existing customers and create opportunities with prospective customers.
Public relations can serve as a major vehicle for communicating your dealership’s focus on quality and service, as well as your association with the Carrier brand. A well-planned PR program can raise market awareness, position you as a credible expert and industry leader, and generate actionable sales leads.
What Is Public Relations?
Public Relations is the art of communicating with various target audience segments to influence their attitudes and opinions in the interest of promoting a person, product or idea. It’s about influencing those audiences’ perceptions about the topic, and creating and reinforcing an image. Used properly and effectively, PR can become a part of your marketing mix, complementing your paid media.
Planning Your PR Efforts
The key to any successful public relations effort is a well-prepared strategic plan. Analyze your communications objectives by asking yourself the following questions:
- What do I want to accomplish with public relations?
- Do I want to generate sales leads and/or build out-of-season business?
- Do I want to build dealership awareness among my local community? Or, do I want to enhance our reputation within the HVAC industry?
- Do I want to report the latest developments or new products offered by my company to interested homeowners?
- What do I want to say about my company?
The answers to these questions will provide public relations goals, target audiences, communication messages and an overall strategic direction for your public relations efforts.
Target Audience
The key to any good PR effort is determining how you will communicate your messages to the target audience. Since most of you will focus your public relations efforts on the community and local homeowners in your selling area, this section of the advertising guide will focus on implementing a local PR campaign.
Understanding Your Audience
In public relations, understanding your audiences’ purchasing habits is a key element. As mentioned earlier, positive PR provides product and service endorsements by third party sources...and your customers are listening.
Before you invest a great deal of effort in communications aimed at your audience, it’s important that you understand the typical Carrier customer. The Stanford Research Institute found that those customers most likely to be predisposed to the Carrier brand are most influenced by credible and authoritative third party source endorsements or information. This means that Carrier customers place value in the information – both positive and negative – communicated in third party sources such as newspaper articles, magazine articles, and television and radio news stories. Customers value what they hear from these sources and make purchasing decisions based in part on this information.
A typical Carrier customer completes research before making an educated buying decision. Research may include the content found in books, newspapers, magazines, TV or cable shows – all places where positive PR mentions about your dealership may influence the customer
to call you instead of someone else.
Just as purchaing a TV spot or a newspaper ad buys your company valuable exposure, effective media relations can also provide you with additional coverage, often at no cost to your company's bottom line. Sounds good, right? By leveraging existing relationships with local newspapers, TV and radio stations where you have already purchased advertising, you have the opportunity to truly maximize brand awareness in your market and further boost the effectivness of your advertising dollars. The purpose of this guide is to help explain effective media relations and how to best utilize it to help it to help promote your company and the Carrier® brand.
Contacting The Media
You have several media vehicles in your local community that you can target when trying to get information communicated to the public, including:
- Radio
- TV news/shows/home improvement specials
- Newspapers
- Weekly magazines
- Specialty publications (Vo-tech, builder, realtor, utility and charitable publications)
- Better Business Bureau
You are most likely aware of some of the local media personalities in your community. If you are not, develop a contact list of home improvement writers and broadcast reporters and editors for local remodeling or business magazines. The list can easily be secured by noting the names of writers whenever you read a relevant article or through Web searches to identify recent local stories on home comfort.
Get to know the work of the relevant reporters or writers and then make an attempt to get to know them personally. Make them your allies. There’s nothing wrong with inviting them individually to lunch meetings. Casual conversation can help them get to know you and your business. You can gain a better understanding of what type of news they are interested in. You won’t always get immediate results, but these reporters or broadcasters may think of you the next time they decide to do a story on offering consumers tips for buying heating and air conditioning systems. The media is very busy, so don’t take a refusal as a negative sign.
Contacting media sources is typically done through a press release and follow-up calls. When writing a press release, do not include every piece of information about your topic; include those aspects that are most likely to draw attention of the media. The content of the press release, especially the lead sentence, should focus on the announcement of a single
newsworthy item.
In many instances, a media fact sheet may be used in the place of a press release, provided it includes the same pertinent information.
Following are quick tips for formatting and distributing your press release:
- Always use your company’s letterhead.
- Provide the name and daytime phone number of the person to contact at your company should the media require additional information.
- Indicate when the information can be released publicly – immediately or after a certain date.
- Type your press release and headline in all caps, bold-faced type and underline it.
- Provide the most important facts – the who, what, why, how, when and where – early in the release.
- Submit your release to local newspapers at least two weeks in advance of when you want the information to run. Trade and consumer publications typically work months in advance so plan accordingly.
- Press Releases may be mailed, faxed or, in most cases, sent via email. Ask editors from the local print media how they’d prefer to receive your releases.
- Photographs increase the chance of your story being covered provided the photo is relevant to the article. Include a caption with any photograph explaining the action and naming the subjects. Most likely, your photographs will not be returned so always send a copy.
Helpful Media Hints
Do your homework and make sure you are sending information to the correct person. Call the location you wish to submit to and confirm the appropriate contact, as well as the phone, fax and email address. Many publications have specific editors for different topics.
Take the initiative to follow-up with the contact if you do not hear anything in a few days. Don’t be surprised if your contact never received the information – media representatives typically receive hundreds of faxes, letters and email communications every day. If the contact does not have your information or cannot recall it, suggest you resend the information immediately to his/her attention.
If the contact tells you the story is not something they wish to run, do not argue the value of the topic with them. Simply thank them and inquire about sending them future stories for consideration. Relationship building will ensure your information is considered when received.
When your information does result in a call from the media, keep a few things in mind:
- The old saying “this is off the record” is a fallacy. Everything is on the record when speaking with media and anything you say could end up being publicly communicated.
- Keep a single file with all of the information related to your story nearby. When the media calls, it is best to be ready.
- Ask the contact when the story might run so you can communicate to interested parties.
- Stick to the facts – never embellish to create more media interest.
- Respond back to the media promptly if additional information is requested.
Making News
While it’s important to know the secrets of good media relations, it is even more important that you understand when your company has the opportunity to make news. Oftentimes, brainstorming can help you generate good ideas. One approach is to:
- List out all of the things that are strengths, business accomplishments, community activities, and so on.
- Assess the list to see what items might have the most media appeal. It may surprise you how many newsworthy ideas are within your company’s everyday dealings.
When brainstorming PR opportunities for your dealership to promote to the local media, put yourself in the position of the reader – which is also your potential customer. For instance, if you have developed a unique service program that will change the way consumers view air conditioning contractors, you probably have a newsworthy story.
While each dealership is unique, some areas where you might find PR opportunities include:
- Milestone anniversaries – both company anniversaries and employee anniversaries
- Personnel appointments to local boards
- Local/national awards
- Participation in charitable community efforts
- Disaster responsiveness
- New products/services/innovations
- Seasonal information – this could be promotion announcements, service specials or tips of readying your equipment
- High visibility projects
- Special events
- Participation in local home shows
Sharing PR Success
Once your company receives positive coverage, share the excitement with employees and customers:
- Distribute press clippings to your employees.
- Create a clippings album and display in your showroom.
- Add clippings to your customers presentations.
- Frame clippings and hang in your dealership.
- Post clippings on your Web site (check first with the media source to obtain permission to use in this manner).
- Use the Retail Credit message statement feature (free to dealerships) to notify your customers that your business was recognized by a media source (example: “ABC Company’s sponsorship of the Habitat for Humanity house was recognized in the November issue of XYZ newspaper…”). Contact your distributor for more information.
Conclusion
Every organization practices public relations whether they know it or not. Every phone call, every letter, every customer interaction results in the public forming some type of opinion about your business. The goal is to establish good public relations with those parties most crucial to your business. When implemented effectively, a strategic public relations program can ensure that your organization secures a leadership position in the market and loyal customers for life.