Informed Marketing Gets Results

Vertain advertising agencies know the value of learning something about the media outlets they’re pitching stories to before actually mailing out press kits or phoning news rooms. Smart clients demand that they do.

But every day the onslaught of misplaced come-ons through cold phone calls and forest-killing mass faxes — all of which are basically aimed at getting print and electronic media to do some portion of a company’s marketing for them — is staggering. Our friends in TV and radio agree that the firms most adept at getting their clients news coverage are the ones that have invested some time in learning about the local media. “Power Marketing for Small Businesses,” an Oasis Press book by Jody Hornor, offers some good guidelines, but we have a few more suggestions.

Realize that not every station or newspaper is going to cover every story. The trick is not simply analyzing each outlet’s demographics, but understanding how the outlet is perceived locally and which individuals make its editorial decisions. Relationship building never guarantees a marketer that a story will get done, but knowing what editor or producer might be receptive can save plenty of valuable time for a firm’s clients.

The Northwest Arkansas Business Journal, for instance, is a niche publication focused almost exclusively on issues affecting business executives and managers in Benton and Washington counties.

The print edition is published every other Monday, and daily reports are available at www.arkansasbusiness.com. Our print deadlines require quite a bit more lead time than daily newspapers, but our Internet reports often turn breaking stories around in less than an hour.

For our print edition, we are mostly interested in big picture stories that look at whole industries or sectors. We also have the most veteran business reporting staff in Northwest Arkansas and pride ourselves on breaking news that matters to our demographic — successful local business leaders.

We don’t write much that’s not directly and dramatically tied to the two-county area. We are very unlikely to write consumer-oriented stories, since daily newspapers with their mass audience are better suited for stories with mass appeal.

Their demographic is the wall behind a dart board and ours is the bullseye.

Pushing a company’s name in all caps is not the answer. Learning media outlets before trying to plug into them is.