How to ensure AR programmes deliver to the bottom line – part one
Time to read: 2 minutes
The first post courtesy of Eria Odhuba, a founder member of the collective and our resident AR programmes guru:
There are many reports about how to conduct an analyst relations (AR) programme. Tou can also follow discussions on various LinkedIn groups.
Many of these cover some common areas, such as how to provide a good briefing or how to track and tier analysts. Yet some people find measuring AR programmes’ impact on the bottom line challenging. As a result, the board can see AR simply as a cost centre, with marketing teams struggling to extract and prove its value.
In this three-part series, we look at how to integrate your analyst work with wider marketing activities, ensuring everything feeds into your overall objectives.
What defines successful AR programmes?
Successful AR programs use analysts to improve lead generation, shorten sales cycles and retain customers. That’s basically it!
When managing AR, companies should avoid briefing analysts simply with the short term aim of receiving positive feedback or a quote for a press release. Success has to have a positive effect on a company’s bottom line.
Look at the bigger picture. Analysts influence purchase decisions through their reports and recommendations, or as a result of help given by analysts to position a company more effectively within its target market.
In successful AR programmes, marketing and sales teams work closely together. They involve analysts and ensure analyst feedback is shared internally with specific action resulting in more competitive positioning, compelling messaging, and customer-focused products and services.
Give your AR programme a health check
- Are you only looking for the endorsement or quote?
- Are you focused on one-off engagements rather than building a relationship?
- Are you deprived of the time, expertise or resources required to run a measurable programme?
- Are the briefings timed around your news, the analyst research, or events?
- Are you lumping analysts in with the press, assuming one approach fits all?
- Are you taking the time to fully prep for a briefing?
- Are you sharing the analyst feedback internally?
- Is your AR programme synced up with lead gen and sales activities?
Symptoms of an ailing AR programme
- Difficulty forming an approach for new target markets due to a lack of independent insight.
- Outdated knowledge of key business or legislative drivers.
- Assuming what drives competitive success without independent testing.
- Limited ideas for possible partnership strategies.
- Limited channel knowledge and insights into where prospects look for information, resulting in no new routes to market.
- Poor understanding of whether company messaging is resonating due to an absence of message testing strategies.
Checklist to get your AR programme back in shape
- Be clear about what you want to get out of an AR programme. Raising awareness is all well and good, but if it does not result in more leads or better client retention, then you need to change it.
- Get stakeholder buy-in. Train spokespeople and teams about the value analysts provide.
- Develop proper metrics. Measuring briefing numbers and report mentions, running perception audits, or getting placed on various analyst rating scales are all good. However, if these metrics do not positively impact the bottom line, you need to rethink them.
- Define and target the right experts. Think about individual analysts and not just the firms they work for. Find out how they get information and influence decision-making processes. Don’t forget analysts from small or niche firms, as they may have a unique market impact that you could leverage.
- Plan regular engagements, such as at events, to gain trust instead of one-off jobs every year. Be prepared to follow up with information that helps an analyst with their research.
In the next post, we will start looking at the impact AR can have on various marketing tactics. and in part three, we’ll look at some thorny marketing problems AR can help solve.
Post script: These three AR posts have proved pretty popular. So we’ve put them together, ripped out the fluff, given it a bit of structure and turned them into a whitepaper, which you are welcome to download here:
The free-range freelance worker
spring 2013 with elli in zante
Time to read: 2 minutes
Never lose sight of why you became a freelance worker. It’s all too easy to be constantly hunting down your next job. However, the people (and animals) you love are right here, waiting for you to switch off that laptop.
So I’m comparing tans and my friend, and the puny one says, ‘So how come you keep taking all these holidays?’
’Cos my boss said I could.’ I smirk.
My pithy repost was met with a sigh of exasperation.
Summer 2013 with mum in Devon
Obviously, what my mate meant was, ‘So how on earth do you manage both? To maintain client service levels when you are away for much of the summer? Aren’t you just a humble freelancer at everyone’s beck and call 365 days a year?’
Becoming a freelance worker: A good work/life balance
Summer 2013 with bestie Lynne in Puglia
Autumn 2013 with Moby in Cornwall
However, one of the main reasons I went freelance was to get closer to a good work/life balance. And I’m guessing that’s why you did, too. Spending time with the people that matter most is a big part of that. I can’t imagine you turned freelance to earn loads of money, so once the bills are paid, ‘affording’ time off is a priority. New bike or a cycling holiday? New wardrobe, or a tan? It helps that I usually share my work, so it’s easy enough to ask one of the collective to be at the end of the line if a client needs urgent advice while I’m away.
Who needs a bad client?
Some freelancers shackle themselves to their desks due to a lack of faith in their worth and uncertainty about the future. Do your best for the rest of the year to look after a good client, and a good client will look after you. After all, who needs a bad client?
It should be remembered that the proverbial lament of the self-employed, ‘If I don’t work, I don’t get paid.’ It can be flipped on its head to mean, ‘If I’m ok with not getting paid, I can take time off.’
So this year, I did.
In search of half-term sunshine
Time off in search of half-term sunshine on a farm in Greece, country house coddling in Snowdonia, armed with a dongle, we holed up in Devon for weeks. We then went AWOL on a vast eating tour of Puglia with the annual 50-mile trek around another bit of the Cornish Coast to get back into all our clothes.
Ok, so the blogging, the marketing, the banking, the admin, the networking, the reading… they all need tending. But the clients and I are back on track, and the house hasn’t been repossessed. There’s plenty of time for filing when it’s cold.
The virtual agency is LIVE!
Time to read: 1 minute
This post is brief because it’s just a shameless plug to say it’s official – our virtual agency exists!
In going live, we now have a home for our recently formed small collective of senior comms freelancers. Here, we can demonstrate our love of B2B technology and our range of skill sets across PR, AR, social, content, and design.
We’ll be crafting expertly worded written content and delivering exceptional communications. Our clients’ social media accounts will be humming with activity, and their content output will be stylishly designed with their own colourways and branding.
It’s been nearly two and a half years since I turned freelance
So, the collective feels like a natural evolution for me. It’s going to be great for our clients who might be looking for a more robust comms solution over a lone freelancer. We are the ideal solution for clients who don’t have the appetite or the budget for a full-blown agency commitment. It’s also great for us. We now have the space and the environment to collaborate, support each other, provide inspiration to each other, all the while delivering to our strengths.
As a virtual agency, we’ll share the work, the responsibility, the money, and the love!
It’s taken us forever to put the site together. At least that’s how it feels to a girl who goes long on ‘genius’ ideas and falls short on patience. But our virtual agency is live now, and despite being immortalized in Ugg boots, I could not be more proud.
The future looks and feels exciting. We’re excited for ourselves and the journey upon which we are about to embark. We’re excited for our clients (existing and prospective) and to show them what we can do.
It started with a frustrated professional dreaming of the freelance life, who knows where it will end…
Top ten tips for writing snappy copy
Time to read: 2 minutes
Because B2B commercial copy is for intelligent business consumption, making it sound grand is tempting, but this inevitably makes consumption so much more painful. It’s writing snappy copy you need to master.
Here are my top tips for writing edible copy:
Who are you writing for?
Write for one person. Assess their motivation for reading your copy. Will it enlighten, inform, entertain, motivate them to act? Think what’s in it for them. Assess the time they have to read it, their knowledge level.
Get the knowledge
It sounds obvious, but you need to know/understand at least as much as your reader. If you don’t have the knowledge, go and get it. Research it, ask questions, find an expert, and get them to draft it if necessary.
Get it all out
If you find yourself staring at a blank screen, just write down anything and everything related to what you are trying to say. From this, you can create structure and extract key facts.
Ask questions that can provide the structure
Ask yourself basic questions like Who, Why, When, Where, and What and answer them in bullet format. Leave the questions as subheads for now. Arrange the questions into a structure that will form the basis of your logical/persuasive argument.
Does it serve your purpose as well as theirs?
Your copy must add value to the reader, but does it also support your company messages? Make sure your copy always underlines a key value proposition. If it doesn’t, why are you writing it?
So what?
Then, read it through. Anything missing? Ask yourself, ‘Why do I care?’ ‘So what?’ and, ‘What’s so exciting about that?’ Imagine how everyone else feels if you’re bored by your own copy. (At this stage, this might be the longest your copy gets, from here on in, we are cutting it back).
Show not tell: De fluff
Use objective observation and facts to show. Not subjective adjectives and opinion to tell. You are not penning a love letter but compellingly presenting the facts. Imagine the building is on fire and you cannot leave the office until you have shouted the story from the window. This exercise will ensure you only use the words you need to say what has to be said and no more. Regarding snappy copy, a couple of carefully crafted sentences are more effective than a whole paragraph of jumbled thoughts.
Every time you review it, cut it
Aim to reduce word count every time you review the copy (3-5 times), with decent breaks in between sessions, to allow the creative brain to mull over the project and find the right phrase, the perfect word.
Don’t force it
Could you sneak your copy into the conversation? Would it sound natural, or would people think you had gone crazy, swallowed a dictionary, or been indoctrinated by brand Y. Be kind to your reader, and make your copy easy to read!
Read final draft out loud
Now, print off the copy and read it out loud. This helps spot the ‘silly’ mistakes your eyes haven’t seen, but your tongue will trip over. It will also help you with punctuation.
If you like, you can download these tips in a handy PDF to keep on your desk and front of mind.
The hidden dangers of PR career talks
Time to read: 2 minutes
Sam Howard lives to regret. For that, at least, she is grateful…
In its latest initiative to bridge the diversity gap, the CIPR is to go into secondary schools to explain what a career in PR entails.
On the back of my work with The Taylor Bennett Foundation and USC Annenberg, I’ll be looking to lend a hand. It’s odd how things turn out – given that my first-ever careers talk was possibly a tad off message…
Admittedly, the weekend before the gig, it did occur to me that the standard company creds deck, designed to impress your most hard-bitten city type, didn’t have quite the right content. Nor did it have the tone for a ten-year-old from an underprivileged, wildly diverse school in Neasden. But either I built a deck from scratch, which would take a couple of days, and I would never use it again. Or, I could just make it up as I went along. After all, what would they know?
My talk was scheduled for Thursday. Although unsure of my profession, my son’s primary school knew I rushed around a lot, shouted into my phone, and muttered darkly about jet lag. And so the headmistress made inquiries as to what it was that was so important, I had yet to attend a single cake sale. On discovering it was comms, she offered me a slot on careers’ week, saying it would, ‘make a nice change’. I love public speaking me, so penciled it in without a thought.
On Monday, Elliot was, buzzin’. A midwife had kept them enthralled with heart-warming tales of delivering babies, saving lives and what not. “How super!” I said, though this midwife person sounded like bit of a show off to me.On Tuesday, when I picked him up, he was equally full of it. The local policemen had visited with his dog, Blaze, who by all accounts was a magnificent beastie. “Hasn’t he got better things to do?” I miffed, as Elliot noted I was doing 35 in a 30 and that technically he should make a citizen’s arrest right there and then.
On Wednesday, a bloody bastard fireman rocked up.
“Perhaps I should bring in my awards,” I wondered out loud.
“He parked his fire engine in the playground,” said Elli cheerfully, “Let us climb all over it.”
“That’s cheating!” I howled in dismay.
My boy looked at me levelly. “Yep. You’re really up against it now Mum.”
Now, I know at this point, I could have built a deck that talked earnestly about reputation management and CSR. But people, my back was against the wall here and besides my kid was in the audience. That night I dug deep for inspiration and the shiny new deck, was unlike any other deck I have ever built before or after, and ready in the early hours of Thursday morning.
And so it was that I sashayed into that classroom dressed for a full on six-way City pitch. I cast a disdainful eye over my charges.
“So, I hear you’ve met a mid-wife, a policemen and a fireman already. Was it just great hearing about how all those clever, kind and brave people have dedicated their lives to helping others?” And they chorused that it was, it really really was.
“Well I can tell you now,” I said fixing them with a steely gaze.
“I don’t do anything like that at all.” An attentive hush seeped through the room.
“What I do, is a very, very TERRIBLE thing.” There was a collective intake of breath.
“You see,” I said archly as I span neatly on my highest heels and began to pace the room. “I work for the dark side.”
I had them.
“What I do is make MONEY – by helping other people make MONEY. Lots AND lots of it.” The headmistress actually seemed to be sliding down the wall, but the kids, they were on the edge of their seats…An adrenalin-fueled hour later, sharing a celebratory MacDonald’s with the boy, he passed his judgment.
“I liked the bit when you talked about trainers and celebrity endorsement and brand advocacy. Like, who knew there was no such thing as free will.” And he munched on his onion rings reflectively.Looking at me with a sly pride he pronounced, “You did good mum, you did good.”
Though strangely I was never invited back…
The second year as a freelance independent
Time to read: 2 minutes
Major validations, minor tribulations and lessons learned—two years into Sam Howard’s career as a freelance independent PR.
No more awards for you, my girl. Think on.
Smug moment: Ongoing clients have expanded their remits, project clients return for more projects, and growth rates are healthy.
Dark muttering: So why haven’t I won Employee of the Month or been given a round of applause, a certificate, a mug, or anything?
Note to self: Stop hankering for external validation. Ain’t ever gonna happen.
Smug moment: Stress levels are down, inner contentment levels are up, and my aura has never been so glowy. Everyone says so.
Dark muttering: It can be astoundingly bad when you have a bad day. The temptation to cry is immense. After all, no one is watching. Usually, it’s just a matter of keeping the faith, but it’s easier said than done.
Note to self: Just read the contract, you stupid, stupid girl.
Smug moment: I’m getting to do more stuff with more people and getting back to a more integrated approach.
Dark muttering: Peer collaboration is all very well, but where’s a lovely, enthusiastic junior when you need one? Media monitoring…at my age.
Note to self: Get over yourself. It’s the same day rate.
Smug moment: Blog’s doing good.
Dark muttering: I’m a bit behind on sorting out my own brand. What brand, you say? Quite. I abandon it as soon as client work comes in. Worse still, I keep changing my mind. I am more empathetic now with past employers who could never ‘get their act together’. It turns out neither can I.
Note to self: Use your project management skills, dummy.
Smug moment: I’ve enjoyed getting back to my roots, direction, content and outreach. I still get a huge high when I see client content getting picked up.
Dark muttering: Why did I think setting up alone would get me away from the spreadsheets?
Note to self: There’s software out there to do this stuff. Decide where your time is best spent, and spend it there.
Smug moment: So, as a reward for going freelance independent, I got a rescue puppy. He’s a black lab, crossed with something, maybe a kangaroo. But our daily walks give me head space, and I’ve dropped a dress size!
Dark muttering: I somewhat underestimated how wildly distracting the dogaroo’s ebullient puppyhood and protracted adolescence would be. There were days, I’m telling ya…
Note to self: Don’t be tempted to spread yourself too thin, even by a puppy.
Smug moment: I’ve rejected any pretence at standard working hours, standard dress, and standard working practices – and it all works well for me.
Dark muttering: Ask any of my former bosses. I was always borderline employable. Are there rescue shelters for feral freelancers, offering warm and loving forever contracts, doing the filing in the basement for some kindly brand?
Note to self: Better stick with the programme, kid.
As Fat Boy Slim might say:
‘We’ve come a long, long way together
Through the hard times and the good
We have to celebrate you, baby
We have to praise you like we should.’
‘Cos no one else is gonna do it for you.
Made by clever people for clever people
Time to read: 1 minute
In fintech, Sam Howard asks: Can clever comms people add value, or are they the weakest link?
I’m a comms person in b2b tech, primarily fintech. Fintech – that’s software geeks creating awesome stuff for banking geeks. All fintech comms people have to do is wrap their pretty little heads around how the global markets work. How a financial institution works and how it makes its money.
Then, evaluate the opportunities and obstacles created by the latest market conditions and regulations. Opportunities and obstacles might help or hinder it from making that money. And then piece together how their client’s technology taps into those opportunities and obstacles, so a bank might want to buy it.
Anyone got a PHD in anything at all they are not using right now?
Dear software geeks, we understand your fear of getting us comms people involved. We share your fear. We have reoccurring nightmares where our efforts sufficiently underwhelm Anne Robinson.
But Einstein once said that if you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you can’t explain it. Let’s assume everyone in the room is clever; it is the common denominator, so there is no need to posture on that. Don’t be tempted to use content to show off how much you know – they know you know. The key is to add some value to the debate, explain the complex lucidly, ensure that overarching points are not lost in the minutiae of the detail and that those points stack up to a logical argument leading to an insightful conclusion.
It’s not as ‘easy’ as it looks, I can tell ya, getting the people with the PHDs to look up not down, out not in. And if, in so doing, we tend to simplify things rather than wonder if we haven’t dumbed down your whole reason d’etre, just trust you know how to build software, and we know how to build reputations.
In the kingdom of the big and the clever, it’s the six-year-old kid you need to impress.
Is freelance for life or just ’til Christmas?
Time to read: 1 minute
Take Sam Howard’s festive freelance quiz to find out. Tot up how many of these apply to you:
1. If you spend longer than six minutes getting ready of a morning, you consider yourself to be ‘faffing’.
2. When it comes to the three-minute lunch break, soup bowls seem an unnecessary middleman and are no longer required.
3. It never occurred to you before, but now, instead of religiously visiting the salon every six weeks cos you’re so worth it – every so often, you just yank your hair into a big ponytail and lop off the top bit with the bacon scissors.
4. Your City client asks for an 8.30 am briefing,g and you have jet lag for the rest of the day.
5. You get a pair of sheepskin house boots to keep your tootsies warm all winter, spending over a hundred quid on ugly slippers.
6. When asked what are doing at the weekend you look at people blankly, then reply, ‘working’ I mean what else would you do?
7. Next bank holiday, instead of gallivanting off on a City break, you will re-grout the kitchen tiles. It’s funny you never noticed that when you had a proper job and were out of the house for 60 hours a week.
8. Your city high heels haven’t seen daylight for six months. When you eventually try them out, you walk with less grace than a lad in a frock on a stag.
9. You catch up with a City friend. She regales you with tales of ridiculous internal politics, bodacious power plays and incompetent bosses – but all you can contribute is that the dog ate your Amazon parcel this morning.
10. Dress Down Friday has become Dress Up Friday as that’s the day you go to the supermarket.
Freelance quiz roundup
If you scored 5 or less:
It’s too late for me, but you must save yourself. Book in for a weekend spa retreat, a full makeover and hire a personal shopper, so no one need ever know what happened here.
6 or more:
Consider yourself utterly unemployable, and welcome to our world of freelance. We are your people now.
Ten tips for better media interviews
Time to read: 2 minutes
Sam Howard advises on how tech companies can give better media interviews.
Media training – that’s a terrible phrase, isn’t it? Makes you think of all those awful politicians that enunciate every syllable emphatically and use all their fingers to underline each phrase, talking at you as if you were Jeremy Paxman. So let’s not go there. But there is still much you can do to make sure your conversations with journalists go well. The key is to remember the journalist has very little time to create a very good story, and it’s your job to help them with that.
Some sensible tips for sensible media interviews:
so it’s adaptable scalable innovate and flexible is it? Yeah you lost me at ‘it’s’
1) The Press are more concerned with business arguments than technology methodologies. So, the WHY needs to be answered way before the HOW. This is where many tech companies need to lift their heads. The WHO is pretty interesting, too. Whatever you do, don’t tone down your colourful characters.
2) The old truism,’ no one is that interested in you,’ is – erm – true. They are interested in issues, though. If you can help solve them, then that’s the angle to go in on.
3) Journalists are busy, so PLEASE get to the point. Work out how your issue-based messages can be delivered top-down. If you’ve struck a chord, you can drill down with more insight or leave it as a one-liner if it gets no traction.
4) It sounds obvious, but actively listen to and genuinely try to answer the question. You need to answer questions as best you can, weave in your messaging where appropriate, and leave it out where it isn’t.
It’s critical to be seen as someone who understands the market and how it ticks
This is more important than getting all your messages across in every interview, euch! You may manage it the first time, but I doubt if anyone will want to talk to you a second time. However, if you can establish yourself as a credible and trusted source, then the journalist is more likely to talk to you when you have relevant news.
5) The journalist is looking to create a compelling story from a mixture of background information, intelligent argument and quotes. If you want to be quoted, you need to have a view and be incisive. Otherwise, you find most of your effort gets swallowed up in unattributed body copy or as background information. Answers can be your own thoughts based on experience or theory, statistically or anecdotally based or ideally a mixture of the lot.
6) Spokespeople should be reading a weekly digest of relevant hot stories, remember head up!
7) It should go without saying, but follow the publication and the journalists you hope to meet so you can assess what messaging will resonate best for that particular journalist.
8) Be courteous, Allow time for the journalist to finish their note taking and prepare their next question, do not dictate or just talk into the silence. Offer sustenance, and DO NOT look at your phones.
9) Remember this is a two way conversation, ask what the journalist is seeing and hearing in the market and future story ideas he is working on.
10) Every interview is different, but you should be able to answer the following fundamental questions:
Where are your customers spending their IT budget in your sector in these cash-strapped times?
What are the drivers behind this (i.e. sticks and carrots)?
So, where do you fit in?
Other companies do what you do, so why are you better?
What tech Holy Grail are your customers chasing right now?
What’s preventing organisations from achieving it?
What are the key trends in your technology sector right now?
What’s your sector going to look like in five years?
When men inspire words, and words inspire men
Time to read: 1 minute
Sam Howard pays homage to the Olympians and the Wordsmiths.
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| Thanks for the warm up. Now meet the Superhumans. If writing strap lines was an Olympic sport, that’s your gold medal winner right there |
So clearly it’s not ‘disabled’ it’s ‘differently-abled’. A term that’s been around for years but now looks set to be embraced wholesale after the last two awe-filled, outrageously beautiful, amazingly uplifting weeks, which have left us feeling spiritually renewed and oh-so proud.
So what to do now with the defunct phrase ‘disabled’?
It works ok if you throw ‘temporarily’ in front of it. Like, you fall off your skis and break a load of bones – you are temporarily disabled. You’re probably just going to sit it out and sulk about a bit while you can’t do anything.
Another way it could be applied is to those of us who are just useless at sport. At 6ft I”, all shoulders, arms, legs, and feet – you’d think I’d be good at something, anything.
But as my sporty father could testify, I’ve been quite rubbish at everything from the earliest age. Whip-smart in my classes; I’d get my comeuppance in PE three times weekly. Instead of letting my sporty dad coach/cajole me into doing anything involving developing physical skills, I preferred to stay indoors writing angsty poems and drawing very thin, dead-looking people. I have remained steadfastly crap at sports, as now my sporty son can testify.
I take some comfort in believing I’m not the only one
I’d very much like to think that maybe it was a sportily-challenged person like myself, sitting in Channel 4’s superb in-house agency 4Creative, that came up with the concept and the words, Thanks for the warm up. Now meet the Superhumans. For those are mighty fine words that provided the spark that lit the touch paper for the Paralympic flame to burn so very brightly.
A Paralympian, a differently-abled person, a Games Maker, a sports-incompetent, a creative – there’s room enough for all of us to contribute. To make a difference and to make the world a better place.
