Getting your message heard Communications in the association

sector

• Communications career spanning 20 years, established Mexia in Jan ’06

• Experience in journalism, agency PR, in-house marketing, event management

• Regular speaker on social media and articles published

• UK and overseas experience

Kursha Woodgate - @mexiaPR

• Do you want more association business?

• Do you feel associations know your brand?

• Is it easy to get in front of associations to communicate your messages?

Getting on the radar

• All here today with venues and destinations that you want to sell to associations

• Before you can communicate the benefits of your offer, you need to get on the radar

Get on the radar…

Breaking through the noise

Breaking through the noise

Sales and marketing alignment The buyer’s journey..

• Two key ways of getting your message across to associations:

• Direct – Sales calls – Emails – Face-to-face at events etc

• Indirect – Influencing the influencers (ambassadors, media) – Softer approach to building your profile – PR, social media and content marketing

The Buyer’s Journey

Customer Buying Experience

PR

Social Media

Outbound Email

Corporate

website

Events

Direct

• Requires good knowledge of who you are targeting

• Tough to break through without brand building platform and top of funnel activities

• Time-consuming for sales team

• Doesn’t take account of the buyer-led approach

Smart PR and the new wave of content marketing

• Two areas to address today:

• Traditional PR:

– Raising your profile with association trade media

• Social media & content marketing:

– Extending your reach through engagement and effective content marketing

Traditional PR

Meeting journalists needs

Journalists want:

• Exclusive stories where possible

• Interesting angles that will engage their readers

• Facts and figures

• News – actual news that has not been revealed elsewhere and is relevant to their readers

What makes a good story?

• Press release must cover:

– Who, what, why, where and when?

• Celebrity – press love famous faces

• Pictures/images

• Human interest (eg supporting charities, personal stories, local heroes)

• Headline grabbing statistics

• Hot topics (eg horsemeat scandal!)

Meeting journalists needs

Journalists hate:

• Marketing/sales talk

• Heavily branded material

• An expectation that they should write about you

• Bombardment with irrelevant material

The rise of digital comms

• Social media has become a fundamental part of the communications mix

• Associations are active on social media and are looking to further engage their members via social

• Great way to extend your reach and get on the radar without overt selling

Social media - stats

Facebook – 1.11 bn users

Twitter – 500 million users

Google+ - 343 million active users

LinkedIn – 225 million users

Instagram – 130 million users

Pinterest – 70 million unique users

Foursquare – 33 million users

Vine – 13 million users

5 things to extend your reach

1.Great content

4.Advocates 2.Network

5.Multi-channel

3.Consistent comms

Creating awesome content Ask SIMON

Sharing

Interactive

Multimedia

Original

News

Think like a reporter…

What makes news? Try our SPACEMAP

• S – statistics

• P – products or services launched

• A – appointments

• C – CSR initiatives

• E – events (attending, organising)

• M – milestones

• A – awards

• P - partnerships

Thoughts to take away…

• Regular communication via ‘indirect’ channels will build your brand and create a platform for easier direct selling

• Think about taking a more ‘content marketing’ approach to communications, develop content that is useful to your target audiences to encourage sharing and engagement

• Develop a strategy for traditional and digital communications and roll out the plan to support it

Questions…