Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Targeting the RIGHT Audience for Outreach

I have a new blog on It's Your Biz, powered by SBTV.com.

A good thing about the Oprah show being over, to a publicist, is we have always heard from clients "I want to be on Oprah."

Well, that was easier said than done. Yes, there would be great benefit to many clients to be on Oprah. But it wasn't always the best way to spend your money, to have your PR firm spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make this happen!

I remember when I had a client of nurse-owned home health care agencies across the state of California. They wanted to be on Oprah (that's a given) and CBS, and written up in USA Today, and Time Magazine. (I'm not sure how they came up with that list.)

But when we scheduled a half-day meeting to brainstorm a Communications Plan, we took a hard look at their TARGET audience. Their primary audience was case managers at hospitals, people who would recommend an agency when someone was discharged from the hospital and needed home health care services.

Knowing your target audience is so vital. Do hospital case managers watch Oprah? Maybe. Do they read USA Today and Time Magazine? Maybe.

But we know they read the stories in the industry publications geared towards nurses and case managers.

It may not be as exciting at the dinner table to say to your family, "I was featured in Case Manager Today magazine this month" as it is to say "I was quoted in USA Today." But it will be more effective to grow your business! And it's probably just as much fun at the dinner table to say "I got five new clients today" - even though you weren't even on Oprah.

So the basic lessons here are:
1. Develop a Communications Plan, which will include your target audiences.

2. Decide the best way to reach those audiences.

3. When you do get media coverage, leverage it through reproduction, social media, posting on websites, etc., so it has a LONG shelf life.

Read the full blog.

1 comment:

Sally Strackbein said...

This is excellent advice. When you want to reach your target, it works so much better when you deliver the right message to the right audience.