Author: Garth Beyer

Use All The Advertising You Want

Garth Beyer

Or save that money to make sure you can keep your business afloat and add value to your product while you reach out to the users and establish relationships. Start conversations. Send emails. Make contacts. Show up.

Instead of paying for ad space in Denver, drive there.

Instead of paying for ad space in the Silicon Bayou News, contact a reporter, share your story and establish a relationship. Your story is advertising enough. (right?)

Instead of paying for ad space where your target audience hangs, go hang there yourself.

Instead of paying for ad space between television shows, go create an incredible (sharable!) YouTube video.

Advertising is great fun when you have the money to try remarkable things with it, but when you don’t, money is better spent adding value to the experience, to the story than it is trying to show the experience to people with an ad.

After all, if you have to pay for a product to be in someone’s face to get their attention, is your product really worth it? A lot of people are beginning to wonder the same thing.

 

Stay Positive & Experience Speaks For Itself And People Are Happy To Relay The Message

Reach Out, Connect, Care

Garth Beyer

connect

I’m not sure why I still get amazed by it, but I do. I get amazed by the friendships I have with people who, one day long ago, I reached out to on a whim, with no expectations for what might come from it. They were strangers at the time. Just names.

An email has connected me with people all around the world and people who travel around the world (see above). My response rate to emails is 92 percent and 90 percent of the strangers became friends.

On top of that, every job offer and all freelance work has come from me reaching out to someone. No applications, no resumes, no formal letters. Just a considerate email. (Or tweets. The freelance work I’m doing now came from tweeting to a business letting them know I would be happy to work with them if they wanted to expand their PR team. Yup, it’s that simple.)

If there’s one thing to take from this, it’s care.

Care is why the response, rather, connection rate is what it is. You show someone you care about them, they’ll be happy to connect with you.

Not only do people love knowing they are cared about, they also love caring. Every person I’ve reached out to has helped me in a way because they cared that I cared about them. It’s a crazy spiral of success (and, corny as it may be, of friendship).

Just wanted to let you know how worth it it is to reach out to… anyone, really.

Reach out, connect, care.

 

Stay Positive & Go Send An Email To Someone You Think Is Interesting

Almost forgot. My email is thegarthbox@gmail.com in case you didn’t click the “connect” tab at the top of this page

Awesome By Accident

Garth Beyer

I wrote about voice yesterday. When a group of mine (who did the same activity) commented on my short essay, they expressed how crafty I was by neglecting indentation. As you will read in my response about voice, I talk about not needing to be perfect because it takes the humanity out, the voice out. They went on to say how not indenting made my writing flow better and drive home my point. To be forward, I simply forgot to indent.

Goes to show many might love what you thought was a mistake. If that’s the case, might as well try making a mistake on purpose to make your writing or your work more alive. An accident isn’t always a bad thing, and an accident on purpose may be just what you need.

For those interested, you can read my short essay on voice here. (3-min read)

 

Stay Positive & Give Your Work Some Voice

PR Freelancers Don’t Neglect The Last Phase

Garth Beyer

Public Relations Phase

A PR strategy can be broken down into three phases. The last, the most important and often neglected.

1) Ideation

Write down everything. Brainstorm. Read about other products’ PR strategies (not just similar brands to the one you’re working with). Talk with a different person each day and ask for help. You can do it alone, but you can do it better with others’ help. Here’s a site I read a lot when brainstorming.

2) Evaluation

No one loves to redo something because they forgot a piece. Nor does anyone enjoy scrapping work they’ve spent hours on because while it may be good work, it doesn’t fit the overall strategy. Evaluation is easy, but dealing with the criticism may prove difficult to handle. You can get attached once you start creating, not before.

3) Creation

Here’s the spot a lot of PR freelancers neglect before pitching their strategy. It’s easy to suggest a business sends out a newsletter. It’s much more difficult to write that newsletter yourself. It’s easy to suggest how to use Twitter and Facebook, but much harder to think of 30 tweets or 24 Facebook posts they can use. It’s easy to suggest building a clock a bird pops out of each hour and sings, but … you get the idea. No business wants to hear what they should do they want to see it. After all, they are hiring you to do it, not just think about doing it.

 

Stay Positive & Go Create Something Special

The Truman Set

The Truman Set

Garth Beyer

Harry's GQ Magazine Ad

Harry’s is a brand of men’s shaving products. I’ve had a browser tab open with a Harry’s product (the Truman Set) for nearly a week. I want it. I think it will be something worth talking about. And I’ve had the same big brand razor for at least 4 years. I’m tired of it.

Yet, each time I open my laptop and see the Truman Set, I wonder why I haven’t committed to the purchase. I’ve been asking myself over and over, “What’s missing?”

I think I figured it out.

When you look at the Truman Set you see the handle, two razors, and cream. Harry’s, who tells an exceptionally beautiful story with their products (and advertising!) falls short on putting some of that humanity into the product package. There’s a missing emotional, personal, human factor in the product package.

Perhaps a card verifying the integrity of the product signed by Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider? Perhaps a 5-tips guide to shaving written by them? Perhaps a coffee packet or Simply Orange coupon or a unique spoon to get people to share pictures of them owning their AM?

It’s hard to create a flawless product. It’s harder sometimes to remember to add a little humanity to it… sort of the opposite of flawless.

 

Stay Positive & Add Some Surprise To Every Gift

To add a bit of humanity to this post, I’ll have you know each time I refreshed my home page to edit this post, Harry’s advertisement came up on it suggesting I “Shave goodbye to my old razor.” I think I will. 

Changing Your Mind

Garth Beyer

It’s cool, it’s no problem, it’s often better you do (so long as you’ve thought enough on the benefits and consequences of the act). Maria Popova reminds us that one her biggest lessons from running BrainPickings is to allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.

What you believe in and stand for right now doesn’t need to be what you believe in and stand for later.

Everything in the world, outside of your control, is always changing. Why should you be any exception?

 

Stay Positive & Keep Moving, Keep Changing, Keep Rediscovering Yourself

A Much Needed Appreciation

Garth Beyer

It’s really refreshing to notice more people in all industries (especially PR) are appreciating the conscious and deliberate action of their employees, friends, managers, coworkers and interns living life: traveling, meeting culture shock at its door step, experiencing other parts of the world that aren’t labeled “work.”

I see more people getting hired after they come back from a 3 month trip to Napal or Beijing than I do college students holding a diploma. I’m not arguing the significance of a diploma, I’m simply stating a trip to a new location (for whatever reason) offers you more to talk about and people are generally, oh, hell, they’re always more interested in hearing about your unique experiences than your time in school.

Forget work and balance. Just focus on life. It resonates more.

 

Stay Positive & Damn Do People LOVE Stories