How to create passionate fans for your company, products & services..

In my latest Harvard Business Review article, I discuss how the PR efforts of most companies — from huge to startups — is hurting them.

I lay out three problems and solutions. Here is the beginning, and the first problem from the piece:

I’ve been on both sides of public relations. For years, I wrote a syndicated technology column for the Chicago Tribune. Now, I run a consulting firm that focuses on clients’ marketing efforts, helping them craft the strategy and language to create critical masses of loyal customers.

Then, when I was a recipient of press releases, and now, as I evaluate and streamline marketing and PR efforts, one thing has always been clear: that the majority of media-relations work hurts more than it helps.

I know this statement will upset some readers who work in PR, but you can’t read through the problems detailed below and tell me the picture I am painting is not accurate. Also,some PR professionals are terrific, but the majority commit the following three mistakes with regularity.

Today, PR is a numbers game rather than a relationship business.

Most PR professionals blast pitches to thousands of press people, most of whom they have never met. Getting coverage — even online — is a relationship business. When I was a Chicago Tribunetechnology columnist there were a handful of PR professionals whose pitches I always tried to cover, because they were helpful. We had a relationship. They knew me, my work, and my audience. Most other releases? I rarely got past the oft-incomprehensible headline.

Solution: Stop blasting. Build relationships. Learn about who is on the receiving end of your pitches. Understand the audience of the media being pitched, and try to help those people. Anything less is laziness. Good PR takes effort.

Read the rest of the article over at HBR.org.

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When I tell clients, audiences and readers that they must never stop communicating with their market, I often hear a version of this:

“But we don’t have millions of dollars to advertise on TV.” 

And I am not saying that you should. Not even close.

Rather, you should be talking to your market through these avenues:

• Your own list of customers
• Your own list of prospective customers
• Wherever possible, lists of customers of the competition
• Through the mainstream earned media (coverage)
• Through online earned media
• Through social media

How to talk to people is easy and inexpensive.

What to say to them  is the part that most companies get wrong. And this is where your work must focus.

Your message should focus on the value of your product or service to your audience — whether it’s life improvement or increased sales; increased productivity or decreased expenses. Whatever your product or service does for your customers — talk about that.

How do you know what you product or service really does for your market? You must ask. The key to good marketing is to have deep, qualitative insights from your customers and prospective customers. If you don’t have that, you’re just guessing from a conference room.

Once you know what to say, you have at your disposal a variety of avenues to effectively say it.

And none of costs very much at all.

I am a marketing consultant with clients that include TiVo, Logitech, T-Mobile, Sprint, Yelp! and ZAGG. 

My new book, Evangelist Marketing, has been on the market for less than two week, and is 288 pages on topics like this one.

The Evangelist Marketing infographic is here. 

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I wrote this for the Harvard Business Review’s Web site last week. Here is the intro and the first of the six marketing mistakes I saw (I saw a lot more than six, but these are the big ones).

I’ve spent the week in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where billion-dollar companies unveil multi-million-dollar products looking for mainstream popularity, and where startups unveil ideas, looking for angles and angels.

And everywhere you go in this gathering of the smartest people in the most exciting business category on the planet, there are marketing mistakes being made. It’s fascinating, really: most of the products and ideas shown here are tremendous — it’s the showing that is generally awful. The engineering of electronics has never been healthier, but the quality of the marketing lags far behind. To wit:

All the focus is on the features, not the lifestyle. I tell my clients that if they want to create consumer evangelists, they must begin by painting a picture of lifestyle improvement. Show the consumer what their life will look like after using your device for a while. Sure, it’s an industry show, and the press here understands technology, but how do you think they will communicate about your product if all you give them is tech specs?

For example, you don’t make a video-distribution technology. You let people enjoy their favorite movies and shows, from any device, on any screen in their home.

You don’t make wireless Airplay speakers. Rather, you liberate music from the confines of a hard drive for families to enjoy together.

Read the next five problems over at HBR.

Here’s a short video from book’s video series, about the huge distance between early adopters and mainstream consumers.

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