GarthBox

A PR pro with more than 30+ years experience reminded me of these tips in a 10 minute chat we had. They’ve helped me develop my PR credentials and thought they’d help you too.

1) Find the potential in everything

To find the potential, you have to be interested, to be interested, you have to be curious.

Even dust can be exciting. You know how when you clean the dust off an object it feels new, it’s like you’ve given life to the object again? Dust is sorta neat that way isn’t it?

2) Have the guts to get into a brand

You might not be interested in what the brand offers, but you’ll never be able to help it grow unless you become one with the brand.

See first tip.

3) Be brave enough to have weird conversations

The best way to learn how a brand can help people is to learn about people, which sometimes requires you to have weird conversations.

Jeane, the PR pro who reminded me of these tips, retold a story about how she was at a convention and talked to a dominatrix for more than an hour. Jeane learned more about how strongly pride plays a role in the choices people make in that hour chat than what she could Google in an hour.

Most weird conversations only start weird, which can be scary. Whenever I’m pitching, the first few sentences with someone feel so weird, but once there is just one episode of back and forth conversation, the weird dissipates. Be brave.

4) Learn about stuff you have not lived

Not only does it give you insight into people you may be working to get the attention of, it also provides conversation topics for any event, and we know how important being liked and relatable is.

I have not lived through a new business pitch that I didn’t pitch to the client face-to-face on their home turf, but I have learned that not visiting the client on their turf has led to an agency not winning their business.

See third tip.

 

Stay Positive & People Do Business With People (They Like)

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Learning how to focus is a lot easier than we make it seem.

Let me ask you this: what is a way that it would be impossible for you NOT to focus?

Answer: it’s impossible for you not to focus when you’re curious.

When you’re asking “why”, when you’ve found a reason to be interested, when you’re curious, you’re bound to be completely submerged in what’s in front of you.

Having better focus isn’t rocket science, but finding what you’re intimately curious about may be. And for that, it will always be a personal battle. No shortcuts there.

However, it’s nice to know that although it will never get easier, it will always be worth it.

 

Stay Positive & Keep Wondering Until You’re Inspired (And Ultimately Focused)

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People die standing still. Brands die standing still. Ideas die standing still.

Movement is essential, but movement with purpose is what I mean when I talk about being a shark in the marketing world: sharks die unless they keep moving forward. To move forward, there has to be purpose.

Think of it like practice. There’s practice, and then there’s perfect practice.

There’s movement, and then there’s movement with purpose.

While marketers and leaders and entrepreneurs are getting better at never standing still, there’s still a tendency to move reactively. A complaint gets filed, you rush to resolve it without thinking of the purpose. If your purpose is to grow, to focus on the best of the best clients, then maybe movement to resolve the complaint isn’t the right answer, maybe movement to wish them good luck in finding a brand they love is the right movement, cut your losses.

Movement with purpose requires us to ask the tough questions.

Why are we entering a new social platform?

Why are we creating unified and brand-labelled images?

Why are we catering to this individual?

Why are we choosing to pitch to this retail business now?

 

Stay Positive & What If Everything Works Out Today? Then What? Why?

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A 50+ year-old archer taught me a lesson about marketing the other day.

During a focus group session to prepare for an upcoming pitch, one archer said the key to success for him was to aim small. The concept applies to marketing as much as it does archery.

If you imagine an archery target, and you fit all 7 billion people into the target, then you aim for a bullseye, which likely still contains about a billion people, how certain are you that you’ll hit just the right tribe of people when you launch your marketing campaign? It’s as if you’re still aiming for the masses.

What if you aimed smaller? Aimed for a specific spot in the bulls-eye, a small small piece of the globe. What if you aimed to convince and convert 10 people to love your brand and left it up to them to call 10 of their friends instead of you firing another arrow, another marketing strategy?

Marketing is as much about accuracy as archery.

 

Stay Positive & Aim Small To Succeed

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The problem is not understanding what being human means.

Being human isn’t acting like every follower’s best buddy. It’s not talking with the latest slang, and it’s not to be entertaining and to laugh at human flaws.

One archery brand comes to mind when I think about a failed effort to be human. They posted an image of a red barn on FB and asked people to tag those they know couldn’t shoot the red side of the barn. Entertaining? Sure. Human? No. Regardless of how many people you could tag.

Another way to explain being human is authenticity. For a brand to be authentic, it is less about being a brand people can care about and more about being a brand that does the caring.

No one wants to be friends with a brand that highlights their shortcomings as a human, especially for entertainment purposes. People care to walk the path to brand loyalty when they feel a brand is beside them, not pointing at them.

 

 

Stay Positive & Be Human, Be Authentic, Be Caring

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While camping this weekend, a little boy and his father walked back and forth from the bathroom to their tent a half-dozen times. Each time they passed I heard the boy asking “why?”

“Why don’t they have a camper?”

“Why are the campsites numbered?”

“Why is he crumpling the newspaper?”

Somehow along the path to adulthood, we lose the drive to ask why.

Moreover, we lose the drive to answer why, which is a terrible condition, especially given we are all marketers (of ourselves, of our ideas, of our existence).

This is one way humans are like brands: we aim for eyeballs, for attention, for likes on a FB page, for instant gratification instead of asking and answering the hard questions.

Why do I matter to them?

Why should they like my page?

Why would they care?

You can’t expect anyone to like your story, to believe in you, until you give them something to believe in. The only way to get there is to call forth your inner child and keep asking why until you’ve made your story remarkable.

 

 

Stay Positive & Keep Going Until You Feel You’ve Reached The End

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