About Larry Bauer

Larry Bauer is a highly skilled, experienced writer who brings an extensive marketing background to his copywriting. You’ll notice from the questions he asks that Larry understands business, how companies get to market, and how to communicate to customers. His ability to think strategically, combined with an appealing, conversational writing style, makes his copy both reader-friendly and effective.

Posts by Larry Bauer:

Social Media Pros & Cons.

By in Blog Posts, eMarketing, Social Media 4 Comments

Social media is a vast experiential toolbox containing communication, collaboration and multimedia tools for sharing user-generated content. Here are some of the pluses and minuses of social media tools in general.

Pros

  • Opportunity to show your human side—that you’re more than a business.
  • Demonstrates a willingness to be open with customers.
  • Potentially fertile new marketing ground with still limited competition.
  • Participants tend to be early adopters—more likely to interact with vendors and offer feedback to improve your products and services.
  • Presence builds loyalty among early adopters—often rewarded with referrals and leads—high potential of viral marketing.
  • Ultimate relationship-building opportunity.
  • Can help your executive team gain a better customer perspective—particularly those normally without direct customer contact.
  • Can help you monitor complaints that don’t make it to or through the service desk.
  • Good vehicles for increasing brand awareness and driving website traffic.
  • Presents opportunities to learn about problems early and correct them.
  • Can improve your reputation as an authority—opportunity to promote and spread ideas.
  • Effective for building relationships with targeted audiences.
  • Versatile—can be used to build both internal and external communities.
  • Search engines love social media such as blogs, because the engines have a passion for frequently updated text and links.
  • Offers a variety of tools that can be used to provide interactive training for your products and services.
  • No specialized technical skills required.
  • Relatively low capital costs—i.e., you can set up a blog virtually for free.

Cons

  • Can be time intensive—demands frequent content updates and at least daily monitoring of comments.
  • ROI is not immediate and direct—you’re building relationships, so get used to measuring traffic, page views, links and comments as well as intangibles like community “buzz” and conversations.
  • Relevance is everything—better have something interesting to say.
  • Risk of your organization sounding like it has multiple tones and positions.
  • Risk of non-communications people doing the communicating.
  • Discomfort of not completely controlling the brand message.
  • Plenty of excellent content still gets overlooked.
  • Potential for developing the “wrong crowd” of friends.
  • Can work against you as well as for you.
  • Still difficult to reach mass audiences—these are more 1to1 technologies.
  • Lots of unknowns.

And the Winner Is…

YOU. Technology tools are expanding each day, and that’s good news for your company. There’s no reason to hop on all of the social media bandwagons, but it’s worth your time to consider the benefits of each alternative in helping you achieve your organization’s marketing goals. Likewise, it’s important to understand how your customers are using social media.

One thing we know for sure is that the marketing landscape is changing rapidly. Smart printing companies don’t get caught on their heels while the market sprints ahead. Sometimes you never really catch up. So our recommendation is to get off the blocks when it comes to social media. Remember, websites were once an unproven tool.

Social Media Tip: If you worry about how much time incorporating social media tools might take from other activities, investigate software tools such as Firefox extension RescueTime, which tracks the time you spend at different sites. Use the data to determine how much time you will spend at each community based on interest and benefits received.

— by Larry Bauer

Public Relations vs. Advertising.

By in Advertising, Blog Posts, PR No Comments


Where to spend your money? That’s always a tough question, but even more so in a down economy when budgets are tight and every dollar counts. So let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of PR and Advertising to help you make the best budget allocations for your organization:

Public Relations

Pros

  • Low cost
  • Third-party endorsement carries high value in today’s cynical marketplace
  • Many smaller trade publications and local newspapers need to fill space inexpensively with news releases and vendor bylined articles
  • Ditto for conferences looking for session leaders, panel members and secondary speakers
  • Opportunities to become an industry thought leader

Cons

  • Requires good media relationships to function at the highest level
  • Little or no control over the final message
  • Limited shelf life—usually a one-time appearance
  • Unpredictable exposure—no control over frequency or amount of coverage
  • Limited metrics

Advertising

Pros

  • Control over message and creative
  • Ability to determine timing and frequency
  • Generally has longer shelf life
  • Better metrics to measure marketing ROI

Cons

  • Expensive—consumes your budget faster
  • Exposure proportional to your expenditure
  • Consumers know they’re reading a paid sales message
  • Lacks authenticity that comes from third-party endorsement

And the Winner Is…

It really depends on the size of your budget. In an ideal marketing world (let us know if you find one), you would have an appropriate blend of public relations and advertising to maximize your overall strategy.

Your decisions would be based more on the type of business you have and your marketing objectives. For example:

  • An accounting and management-consulting firm might weight its budget more toward public relations because of the value that indirect, third-party endorsements bring to a professional services organization.
  • A large national retail chain might have a heavier advertising budget to generate store traffic while allocating smaller PR budgets to individual stores for community relations building.

But your situation is different if you are a smaller organization that doesn’t have the budget luxury of creating an optimum plan. For you, PR is likely the better approach for direct and personal communications with your target prospects.

What is clear is that you need to actively promote your company on a consistent basis. Down economies make the task more challenging, but companies that market in good times and bad enjoy more success over the long haul. You remain visible to your audience and send a message of reliability, to say nothing of promoting your brand when others aren’t.

— by Larry Bauer

Mastering PR Basics.

By in Blog Posts, PR 2 Comments

Building a basic public relations program requires as much perspiration as inspiration. You must have a commitment to doing PR activities consistently and in a professional manner that will create demand for your news and subject matter expertise. The better you understand the rules, the better you’ll be able to play the game.

Here’s what you need to gain more exposure:

  • Learn how to develop a media list. There’s nothing more important than this database, so you have to spend some time getting the appropriate contacts and keeping the list updated. Determine the right local, regional, national and international media (newspapers, magazines, newsletters, blogs, radio and TV stations) contacts for your organization. Most of the information you need is readily accessible.
  • Learn how to develop relationships. Commit time to getting to know your media contacts. If possible, arrange a media tour, which is a series of individual meetings or a single event to promote your organization, product, or service to members of the media. For example, you might arrange meetings with the local newspaper business editors, or travel to see key members of the trade publications that cover your segment. Another approach is to invite members of the trade media attending a trade conference to a briefing. This works especially well if you have a newsworthy product or service to introduce.
  • Learn how to create a press kit. Regardless of your approach, make sure you prepare and have something to say. One of your goals is to establish your organization as a thought leader worthy of being quoted in an article—or perhaps even authoring the article—so be sure to look the part. That means having a press kit (See “How to Create a Winning Press Kit” in this issue), presentation materials and either an internal or external representative trained in interfacing with the press.
  • Learn how to write a news release. The better you do this, the more likely you are to receive free publicity. Not only do professionally written and presented news releases make you appear more credible, but increasingly understaffed media outlets also value copy that provides a solid foundation for an article without heavy rewrites. When you’re composing a news release, focus on the “news” element while emphasizing the basics of who, what, when, where and why. News releases with a good, crisp, relevant photo also tend to get more play. Digital cameras and the fact that most news releases are now submitted via email make the entire process easier and less expensive than ever.
  • Learn what’s newsworthy. There is likely more news in your organization than you think. A good practice is to form an internal “news team” that identifies newsworthy developments. You should set a goal of issuing at least one news release per month. Here are some items you should consider newsworthy:
    • New staff additions or promotions at the manager level and above
    • Capital investments in facilities, equipment and systems
    • Major new contracts or customer acquisitions
    • Company milestones—significant company and product anniversaries (AARP Turns 50, etc.)
    • New products, technologies or services
    • Significant customer benefits delivered in cost savings, time-to-market or quality improvement
    • Awards and honors—remember you usually have to enter to win
    • New corporate initiatives—sustainability, internships, etc.
    • Community relations—sponsorships, major contributions, scholarships, employee service programs, etc.

And remember this important takeaway: PR is for your customers too. Be sure to mail or email your news releases to your clients as well as the press. There’s no better way to continually let your customers know that you have an exciting, growing business and remind them of why they chose you in the first place.

What if You Don’t Have the Internal Resources?

MondoVox helps companies of all sizes with their PR programs. We can perform key services from developing a media contact database to writing your news releases and creating an effective press kit. Most importantly, we can help you develop a winning PR strategy that fits your budget and business requirements. For more information, email Julia Moran Martz.

— by Larry Bauer

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