Competition for business is currently at a peak in every industry, so making sure that prospective clients are aware of your company and what it has to offer is more important than ever. In this episode of www.smallbusinessadvice.tv presenter Sean Walsh will explain how simple, low-cost PR and marketing activity can help your business through the economic crisis and strengthen your brand and reputation.

Joining Sean in the studio will be Mark Borkowski, founder and head of Borkowski PR. As the owner of a successful, dynamic SMB, Mark has first-hand experience of keeping the strengths and services of a business fresh in the public mind. And with extensive, top-level experience gained through working with names like Sony UK, American Express, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile, he is perfectly placed to advise you on how to make your Marketing and PR budget stretch further, reach your audience more effectively, and on the tools you can use to achieve these ends.

Sean will also be joined by Dan Matthews – business owner and journalist with around 10 years experience editing and writing for the likes of the Financial Times, Guardian, Real Business Magazine and his own online title LaunchLab.co.uk, which has seen him interview such notable public figures as Gordon Brown, Alan Sugar, William Hague and Duncan Bannatyne.

If you have any questions for Mark and Dan, please e-mail them now via the box above and we’ll do our best to answer them during the live show.

As always, we will also have our regular round up of all the latest small business news from the British Chambers of Commerce.

H: Sean Walsh, host
M: Mark Borkowski, Borkowski PR
D: Dan Matthews, small business owner, founder launchlab.co.uk

H: Well hello and welcome to another edition of Small Business Advice.TV brought to you by the British Chambers of Commerce and Dell in collaboration with Intel. I’m Sean Walsh and in today’s program we’re looking at how small businesses can work their way out of the downturn via the effective use of marketing and PR. Now Martin Sorrell, the chairman of communications giant WPP and a respected media commentator has recently gone on record as saying that while his clients are cutting advertising budgets, PR is bucking the trend, with brands increasing spending to keep their profile in the public eye. So, how do you as a business owner ensure you get the very best value out of your marketing spend in order to help your business through the current crisis, and help strengthen your business brand and reputation? Well to delve further into this pressing issue, I’m delighted to be joined live in the studio by Mark Borkowski, founder and head of Borkowski PR, and Dan Matthews – small business owner and journalist and founder of the website LaunchLab.co.uk. Gentlemen welcome, thanks very much indeed for taking the time to join us today. Now before we start remember we are live, so if you have any questions for either Mark or Dan, please send them in via the box on your screen and we’ll do our very best to answer them in the time that we have allotted. And also stay tuned as we will be announcing the winner of our Dell Vostro Laptop competition and here’s the beast here itself, and quite a handsome piece of work it is too, and we’ll be announcing that at the end of the program. Right gentlemen, I’d like to start by asking you a bit of a tough question – I’m a small businessman, I run a small business, I’m struggling at the moment. Why should I be spending money on fluffy things, non-business essentials like PR? Mark, what’s the business case for it?

M: That’s a very good question, I think that’s the first question you’ve got to ask. Is – how is my marketing spend being spent and is it being spent effectively? Too many people sort of make a knee-jerk reaction of what they think they need. You have to actually have a core understanding of what your offering is and what medium you want to use to communicate that, so you really need to start talking and understanding about your business and why it ticks. If you’ve got a product, why should anybody be interested in it? That’s the first thing. So you’ve got to do your basic market research about what you’re doing. If you then get to that sort of point where you feel you have something to communicate, a service or whatever, how you connect with your community. How do you create –

H: Yes Mark, that’s fair enough, but I’m in a situation where you know budgets are extremely tight, I’m barely making a living, I’m barely keeping the business going. Surely PR and marketing are the first things I’m going to be cutting out of the budget?

M: Well if you want to be stupid yes of course you cut PR

H: So tell me what the value there is?

M: The value is – I – use Bill Gates’s quote, if I was down to my last buck what would I spend it on? Publicity. Publicity is a cheap and effective tool, and it actually is in your power to understand it. What you have to have within a business story, you have to communicate that story. The world is full of free medium now to actually communicate that story. You need a PR to help craft that, and that’s certainly an eighteenth of the cost of what you might spend in advertising.

H: Indeed. I mean it seems that the PR route, if you are going to market your goods and services, appears to be the sensible one, where advertising issues are quite expensive. And Dan what’s your take on that from a journalistic point of view?

D: Well I think Mark’s absolutely right from – whether we’re in a recession or not, PR, marketing is absolutely vital because you don’t want to start a business with the mentality that you’ll build it and they will come because it just won’t happen like that. You might have the greatest product in the world, but if no one knows about it, then whose going to buy from you? So whether there’s a recession on, whether it’s the worst recession in history, you’ve still got to tell people about what you’re doing

H: Right. So if we agree that there is value in actually getting out and marketing and getting involved in PR, there’s often the question of how much should I devote towards that in terms of budget, and we’ve had a question just in now from James from Loughborough, and he says “I’m a start-up and in the last year, and I’ve really seen my profit margins suffer. What percentage of our profits do you think I should be investing into PR and marketing, and do you have any advice for me?” Mark what are your thoughts on that?

M: I don’t know what his profits are

H: No of course not

M: I mean it’s impossible to say, but I think –

H: Is there a rule of thumb though?

M: I always say a third, I mean it’s a good opportunity to fund a third, and actually there now is a very good time to look at sort of PR because you can buy it more cheaply. You can buy most things now, it’s down on 20% / 30% in terms of fees, in using it. It’s actually getting the right match and actually trusting. The crucial element is understanding what your communication message is, turning to PR and looking at that person between the eyes and saying can this man, or woman, carry forward my message?

H: Indeed can they deliver? Does that make sense to you?

D: Yes absolutely I think it’s less relevant to talk about how much of your budget you should allocate to PR, and much more relevant to talk about how can I make it very, very efficient? If you haven’t got much money then go down the routes that are going to bring the biggest bang for the buck. That’s the simple rule

M: PR now is not about the old adage of public relations, it’s about a public conversation. We’re seeing social networking, we’re seeing a boom and the cliché surrounding about Twitter, but how do you get people talking about your brand? What are your services? I think a great small brand that grew and grew and grew with very limited money was Innocent Smoothies. I mean they had a very simple message, which is you know, we want to just create, make the nation a little bit more healthy. The packaging, it needs to be holistic. You need to look at every aspect in terms of internal communication, in terms of the way your packaging works, in terms of the way you talk to your retailers, in the terms of the way you think about trusting your customers, and bringing those things together. You can’t bolt on PR and say here I am, you’ve got to involve them in the process of getting a meaningful communication package together. Too long, you know PR has been the slave to advertising, let’s get an advertising campaign and PR can amplify it or get involved, that’s failing, it’s a fragmented world with multi-layered conversations going on, and there’s a fantastic opportunity for people to intersect that, so that’s where you’ve got to understand how your product gets people talking about it. I will tell all of us about a great experience I’ve had, or a bad experience I’ve had. Great restaurant, great cobblers, whatever it is, can you deliver that – because that is what the recession’s about, the delivery and service and the absolute transparency and the truth of the product

H: Now I mean what’s interesting for me there Dan is the opportunity to use some of these channels, and one of the old channels is using the news networks to get your message out. Does that make sense from a journalistic point of view?

D: Yes absolutely. I mean you’ve got to see what works for you. Social media has come to the fore, and it’s a very useful way of spreading a message if it’s done right, but these old media outlets are still there, you know there’s still TV, there’s still radio, there’s still newspapers. They’re arguably harder to get into, but if they’re done right then you can create a message which is stronger because there’s less white noise. Social media is full of people shouting, so yes you can refine your message much more easily. The trick is, as we said earlier, is to refine your message, target your media and make sure you get the right return in terms of sales for your business, because that’s crucial

M: It’s interesting you talk about – I think everybody’s saying, calling, you know looking at the obituaries for the traditional press, I mean forget it, you know. There’s a very interesting blog I read today called Inkspot, which talks about saying absolutely newspapers are going to be here in ten years, smaller and more refined. I was talking with a major national newspaper yesterday, you know and we were discussing partnerships, which never happened before with a PR person. It was very much a demarcation line, where they wanted to invest in the product. You know and that could be a very small product, that if they think it has value for their readers, you’ll see them across all the red tops, the tabloids, you’ll see those offers to be had, that entice a circulation, so it’s that – you can now look at getting involved with deals where you’re not spending money, you’re involving your product with the editorial process

H: So there’s a whole new approach then to engaging the journalists in partnership and cooperation, sharing information

M: It’s fragmenting, it’s fragmenting. Everything is up in air at the moment, nothing will settle. People are grabbing on ideas Twitter, of social networking, you know digital messaging or whatever. No one truly understands and the people who will win will be the people who will stand back, consider what’s on offer and not slavishly going into it because they’re frightened of grabbing it as a tool to sell PR to a client. That’s what’s messing this whole scene up for us at the moment, we’re seeing the demise of some very useful communication tools

H: I mean the classic communication tool clearly is being able to push it out through the press and the media. Dan what do you look at / look for when someone is approaching you with a PR story, what are the hot buttons that work for you?

D: The critical thing to remember, you’ve got to put yourself in the journalist’s shoes basically. If the journalist works for a trade journal, then they’re going to want very specific news which is relevant to their audience. You also have to remember that they get a heck of a lot of emails, and that’s really, really critical, and just like there’s white noise in social networks, there’s white noise in my email inbox when I go home, or back to the office later on I know that I’m going to have tonnes of emails, some of which will be relevant, some of which won’t be. And journalists very quickly learn a skill which is to cast their eyes over press releases that have come in, and very quickly identify what’s going to be relevant and what’s not going to be. You can get rid of kind of 80 or 90% of press releases before really even reading them, you know just from the summary bar in your email, so -

H: So it’s really a question of grab their attention first off?

D: Absolutely it’s got to be relevant. What a lot of PR people do to me is they send me an email then they follow-up with a phone call and say “did you get my email?” which is slightly annoying but it just works

M: I don’t – I think – I think more importantly is number one, half the PR business don’t even know what the magazine stands for, and certainly has no idea what the journalistic agenda is. Believe me that is true. Secondly I think in the old days and in the analogue days, more rain forests were destroyed by meaningless paper mill press releases, of blanking it out, because actually what they’ve done is ticked a box to the client. The bottom line is your relationship with the journalist and the relationship with the publication. Journalists come and go, magazines sometimes stay put, and you’ve got to have that trust of what you’re going, and build that trust, and by just throwing stuff at them, well I’ve done the job to the client. And be careful of that, if you employ someone who says “oh we sent a press release to them” – that isn’t good enough

H: It’s quality in targeting then?

M: Absolutely, it’s a process of hand-crafting your message

D: When you employ a PR company always ask them what they’re going to do in the real world. If they say things like maximise your exposure, that means absolutely nothing. What physically will they do? Will they chase up journalists, you know will they actually do some leg work and what will it be and how much time will they devote to your brand?

M: And will they understand the brand, will they understand what they’re saying to the journalists as well? I mean I judged the media Guardian awards about a month ago, and I looked at all these fantastic campaigns, glowing, everybody was fantastic, everybody’s delivered – what? What have they really delivered? They delivered a process to keep the job and that’s what every small business has got to be aware of because they’re spending vital amounts of money, as Dan said actually looking at economically how they’re doing it. You have to be in the driving seat, and if it’s your costs – do – in a way, I hate to say this, but you can’t trust the process. You’ve got to be inside that process and build a relationship, and if you don’t get on with that PR person you’re employing, cut it out. There’s got to be that symbiotic understanding that you understand when it’s tough for them and vice versa when it’s tough for you

H: And I suppose at the end of the day it’s your brand and your reputation, but gentlemen I just want to pause things there because I’d like to cross over now to Sara Beirne whose in the news room for the latest business news headlines. Sara

Sara: Thank you Sean, here are the latest headlines. With the economy on the brink of deflation, the British Chamber of Commerce is urging the government to pursue aggressive policies to tackle the impact of the recession. BCC chief economist David Cairn welcomed this week’s news that the retail price index had fallen more slowly than anticipated, but warned only strong action would prevent it from falling further. Switching to rising unemployment figures, Mr Cairn predicted that jobless totals would top 3.2 million by 2010. The BCC is warning that even if small firms impose pay freezes and cut working hours, they are still facing significant financial pressures and will have to review their head count. And finally Chancellor Alistair Darling is being urged to come up with a credible plan for reducing debt and borrowing over the medium term in next month’s budget. The BCC wants to see more emphasis on abolishing or suspending what they describe as onerous labour market regulations. In order to support jobs without adding to the national deficit. That’s all for now, back to you Sean

H: Thanks very much indeed Sara. Some, well more depressing economic news there in the headlines gentlemen which means that there’s more pressure on budget and expenditure. Now where can we really make some savings and get some efficiency going in terms of using some of these new channels? Mark you mentioned Twitter – what’s the value of something like that do you think?

M: Well I would urge caution on this. Just because everybody’s talking about it doesn’t mean to say it’s relevant to you. First of all, is it relevant to you? Can you use it properly, meaning can you have your business online, roughly 24/7? And if you’re online what are you saying? What are you saying? The basic issue is what Twitter is – sourcing a crowd, I would call it the old getting yourself a fanbase. Getting a group of people together that understand you and communicate. For me in the celebrity world it’s no surprise that Jonathan Ross got an award for a BAFTA yesterday because he’s such an amazing user – no one else is Twittering for him, he’s doing it. So what are you communicating? Do you have something to say? That – and the same in terms of social networking on Facebook, there’s a fantastic platform where you can actually tailor an advertising campaign, you could say I’ve got £50 to spend, can I get an advertising campaign? For a group of people interested in model railways, whatever your business or walking stick manufacture, you could talk to Facebook and Facebook can actually hand craft an advertising campaign for as little as £100 to target people, and they need support of that conversation. We brought the Cadbury’s Wispa back purely through Facebook, and that was having a conversation with an audience of fans of confectionery and getting them to talk about it, and I think that it is not the crucial thing now about all these tools is to pull people towards your brand, pull people towards your business. Gone are the days where you’re pushing out a message, a local press advertising, an email, it’s much more interesting for a journalist to call you up because they’re intrigued by what you are doing. But make sure you know what you’re doing when you play with these things. So pull is the whole essence of the game at the moment

H: I mean you make it sound very attractive Mark, you know for £50 I can get a campaign going, that sounds very good. Should I be doing that myself or should I actually be employing somebody to do that who knows what they’re doing? How effective is it –

M: I think if you’re spending £50 that means you’ve got a very small budget and I think you need to trust it. You do need to understand it. People say to me can you teach me about social networking? No – you have to do it. I say to people here are the URLs, go and look at it, understand it, and then come back to me and perhaps we can have – because they all think it’s different, but blanketing as Dan was saying, blanketing press, there’s no difference in this space at all, it is truly understanding – what – I always gave this story about – we won Gordon’s gin many, many years ago and the brief was good, and Stan Gordon – I always loved to go to factories and before the pitch I went to the factory and there at the factory was a man who was the 13^th person to know the recipe of Gordon’s gin. You know he chose the botanicals, he went down – not some fake Mr Man from Del Monte, an absolute guy who actually believed in what he did, protect his nose and eye – what a story because when you get that story out, a real story out, go and look at the juniper harvest, all of a sudden – so is your process of making something interesting? Do you have a unique way of making it? Do you have a unique way of selling it? Do you have unique characters who merchandise it?

H: And it’s really about interesting contact – I mean Danny presumably you’re using some of these new channels, I mean what success have you found?

D: Well the important thing to note is while the medium’s changed the essential message is always going to be the same – you have to be interesting, and social media is all about conversations like Mark says and you have to be interesting. Just like if I came on this program and started barking on about products and services, people would switch off pretty quickly. You’ve got to say something that’s worthy. Launchlab has a Twitter account, we’ve got about 3000 followers, a few more, and we follow back as a courtesy kind of thing, and the point is that means that I see a lot of businesses who use Twitter really, really poorly. They have say an online shop and they use it just to bung their offers out constantly, so buy, buy, buy, buy – and there’s nothing to pad that out, there’s no message to pad that out. No one’s going to click on those links -

H: So I guess it’s what Mark was touching on, it’s not pushing out information, it’s actually getting a conversation, a two-way street going

D: It’s kind of connecting with the people who are likely to buy from you

H: Yes connecting I guess –

M: I mean it’s the same thing, if you had a bag load of products and you’re a door-to-door salesman who went into a pub and stood up and started just showing things in the middle of the pub, people would treat you as completely insane, but if you sort of went to a corner of a room and started demonstrating in a unique way, people would be curious to find out what it is. Nothing goes on. The great, original viral markettier was a circus huckster, PT Barnham who didn’t say there was a sucker born every moment, he did say “every crowd has a silver lining”. He understood the – he understood what he did on the streets was not taking things into the tent, taking things out of the tent and amazing people. Very different times in the 1880s but the message is the same, it’s respecting your customer and exciting -

H: Content is king

D: Absolutely. And turning back to Twitter, one person whose doing very, very well indeed in Twitter is Stephen Fry and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he does a lot of advertising for people, you know he does Twinings and insurance companies and just tonnes of stuff because when people hear his voice or see him, they associate him with interesting stuff, with comedy, with good writing, things like Blackadder which is very, very popular. That’s why he’s gold dust for these big companies. Now you’re a small company so you can’t afford Stephen Fry but you’ve got to try and replicate that in some way, in some sort of small way

H: I mean I’ve got a question in here, just come in from a chap called Darren, he says “I keep hearing and reading about the advantages of online social networking. How can I actually measure its effectiveness for my business?” Any of you guys want to have a go – Dan?

D: Well it kind of depends on your business, if you’ve got a website-based business, and you’ve got an analytics package which tells you where your traffic comes from, for example and you’ve got a Facebook group and a Twitter account and you know linked in account and all those different kinds of things, you can gauge exactly where that traffic is coming from, so if one’s doing really really well, for example our Twitter account, 3000 people generates about sort of 60 visits a day which isn’t bad for a relatively small amount of people, so it’s worth doing, you know. Facebook may be more or less than that. So you’ve got to kind of gauge it and see. If you’re an offline business obviously it’s a lot more difficult but you can gauge the buzz, and that’s important. When it comes to Twitter you can see how many people re-tweet what you’re saying, how many people respond to you. On Facebook you can see how many people write on your wall, if you get complaints on your wall, and you’ve got to manage that

H: Indeed and it’s not just, I mean we mentioned a lot about Twitter because that’s kind of gone – the buzzwords of the moment Mark isn’t it – but again there’s value in doing some of the old traditional things well. You know getting your message out succinctly out to the newspapers, out to your local press as well

M: Yes you’ve got to – always refresh your thinking, always understanding, always having some feedback from your customer

H: Because there are various channels aren’t there, there’s local radio there, there’s local TV, there are different channels that sometimes get forgotten –

M: As I said earlier on it’s building relationships up, making people understand and at this time I think people are going through a huge amount of difficulties. Being honest about that, you know and looking for help. You know not being seen as sort of trying to ride above it and I think that you know, particularly local media are very sympathetic to helping things that are vital for the community

H: So your local radio station, your local newspaper – they’re part of your community?

M: Absolutely, do not shut anything out. It’s a 360 degree vision that every part interlinks like a jigsaw puzzle in terms of making that – you can’t strip out one thing and not the other. Effectively you can spend money wisely but they all do need to mesh together to give you that sort of marketing blow

H: Indeed. I mean it’s difficult times now for small businesses out there, just coming up to wrap up now gentlemen – very briefly are you seeing anything in your crystal ball in terms of marketing or PR tricks or techniques that people maybe ought to be thinking about adopting?

M: Well I’ve come back to what I’ve originally said and I think Dan touched on, the 21^st century’s going to be the power of the story, you know content – it’s that cliché – you know content is always going to be king and I think we can be careful – but actually you know the brands that are surviving at the moment have very, very powerful stories but also powerful delivery and value

H: Well I guess Dan value is the key isn’t it?

D: Value is the key and old media and new media aren’t that different you know, it’s different mediums through which stories are told but the same rules have always applied

H: Ok gentlemen we have to leave it there, thanks very much indeed for a great discussion today. Well finally I now have the pleasure of announcing that Andy Upton from Hockley International is the winner of the Dell Vostro laptop and here it is, and we hope it gives you great fun and great value. Congratulations to you Andy. Well that’s all we have time for today, I hope you’ve enjoyed the program, and if you’d like help on any issues faced by your business then please make the website your first port of call, that’s smallbusinessadvice.tv. Our next show is on the 23^rd April and that’s a budget special, so make a note of that in your diary, the 23^rd April. Thanks very much indeed for watching and I look forward to seeing you then. Goodbye