So…away we go! 12 Minute Marketing is live, we have a nifty logo, and we have people signed up to get trained on all things marketing – in just 12 Minutes a Day.
But why would you need our course? Well, what if you want to Fire Your PR Firm?
Confession Time: Dave once ran PR for a Fortune 500 Financial Services company. AND we did have PR firms that did great work for us.
If you’re at a Fortune 500 company, though, you are less likely to need 12 Minute Marketing than our target customer is: someone who is running a small business, or is in-house at a mid-sized company, and needs to make sense of the modern marketing equation.
If you fall into that second category, let us provide you with three steps…
Questions to Ask Before You Fire Your PR Firm.
Are they interested in your objectives?
Think about this for a second – PR Firms will often lead with what they know. It used to be that they knew how to get you in the papers or on TV. Now they know how to get you “Social.”
Next time you get a call from the PR Firm and they say “We’ve gotta get you on Twitter,” you should say the following:
How can Twitter help me achieve my business objectives?
Stunned silence may follow. Leading us to question two:
Do they have “Shiny Object Syndrome?”
Google+! We had to throw that in there, in bold, because, as a social network, it has achieved tremendous growth, almost overnight.
So did MySpace.
It’s important – no VITAL – for your PR firm to stay on top of the latest trends. BUT, it’s even more important that they don’t try to cram something down your throat that you don’t need – and that is not in line with your business objectives.
A huge problem these days – and one of the things that took us down the path of creating 12 Minute Marketing – is that a lot of PR firms get hung up on social media for the sake of its being the next new thing. And that takes us to Question 3:
Are they believers in “Holistic Social Media?”
Holistic Medicine treats the whole patient. Sometimes, a holistic practitioner will look at your tongue and tell you that your digestive system isn’t working well.
Should your PR firm act in the same way? Yup – not that they need to look at your tongue, but if they treat the individual categories of Social (see our nifty chart below, download a copy if you’d like) holistically – they’re going to want to know who your target customer is, and what your business objectives are.
Now, what happens after you fire your PR Firm?
We’ve created the 12 Minute Marketing course as a complete guide for the small business, mid-sized business, someone new to marketing, someone who needs to understand where all this “social” stuff fits in with things that they learned in school.
We’re not going to suggest that everyone goes out today and fires their PR firm – but the 12 Minute Marketing course has been created for the DIY business person.
Either way, with our course or without it, be sure to ask your PR firm some really tough questions – questions that they should have been asking you a long time ago.