Inbound PR Campaign

My homework for IMU course # 11

This would be a ‘dream’ client. I would love to see this come true..

Problem: A state’s office of small business development want to reach out to the small business community, including all kinds of small business: women-owned business, minority-owned business, small disadvantaged business, veteran owned, and more. The office mission is to assist, counsel and advise the small business community in procedures for contracting with the state. They think that the small business community in their state have not really utilized well what they have to offer. They want to be proactive to spread out the word and generating interest from these communities.

Solution: Content strategy

Part of the outreach strategy, aka PR, we recommend them adding two pages within the website for a news room and blog. We talked about having designated employees knowledgeable with the process and procedures to start blogging, assigned a few employees familiar with the use of social media tools to be the community relations persons.

content purpose: assist, counsel and advice.
content topics – starting up, owning, running and managing a business; how to get a contract process and procedures; success stories; and more.
content: text, data, graphics, video, and audio.
the importance of SEO in the press releases.

Channels of (content) distribution

Distribution of content is divided into two groups: 1) public relations dealing with the public, and 2) media relations. The strategy is to go where the target groups are.

Public relations for the public

The recommendation is to go where the communities are. Recommendations include:

bloggers relations: send PR to list of bloggers who covered around targeted topics of small business, women-owned, multicultural issues
distribute content via popular social networking, social bookmarking, social publishing and sharing presentations sites.
host live chat every month with business experts.
syndicate video through tubemogul.
would suggest to distribute content to the less popular social networking sites but targeted for small business audience, i.e. entreprenur connect.
explore if major & local business newspapers in the state have online communities.
build mailing list for updates on contracts, opportunities, events.
monthly newsletters with essential information that direct the readers back to the site for more information.

Media relations

Maintain contact and relationship with business reporters and invite them to participate in events. Another suggestion would be to regularly send press releases out to local and major papers in the state.

I chose to use different channels of distributions to attract the audience my client wants to reach out.

My client agreed on my proposal and as they’re about to sign the dotted line… I woke up.