THE ART OF PUBLICITY

This would be extremely useful for those who work with the marketing and publicity units of banks, organisations, churches and fellowships.

What is Publicity?

Publicity is gotten from the word ‘Public’.

Publicity is any activity that is done and designed to increase awareness in something or somebody. It could also be designed as personal branding to gain more exposure and essentially, more public awareness. Publicity takes you from the unknown to become known.

What are different means of publicity?

·         Mouth to Mouth

·         Paper based – cards, posters, banners, brochures, newsletters etc

·         Electronic (static) – television adverts, radio jingles, etc

·         Mobile Media – a procession,

·         Internet based – blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc

How to create a Publicity Plan?

1.       Define You.

The foundation to creating a publicity plan is to define who you are and what you stand for. What are your core values? Enumerate the things that make you unique. Your logo, company colours et al must be clearly specified. These would be your unique selling points. Also, you need to understand to the fullest what you are trying to publicise. You must not be caught trying to market a product of which your customer has a more in-depth knowledge than you.

2.       Define and understand your target audience.

Some of the biggest publicity and marketing failures always arise from an underestimation of this phase of publicity. Since the recipients of your publicity and marketing are humans with a brain and a will, you must take time to understudy them and understand their needs and how your products and programs would meet up with their needs. What are the things your target audience wants to see? What are the things that catch their attention? Gauge the literacy level of your target audience. Are they visually influenced or acoustically influenced? What are the things you would do that would turn them off? I read somewhere that a diplomat is someone who would advertise hell fire to you and you would look forward to going there. Same thing goes for a publicity representative or marketer. You must know your target audience inside out so as to package your product to be marketable to them. Included in the understanding of your target audience is the realisation of the purpose you want to achieve with your publicity. Trying to create a city wide awareness of a product or program is very different from trying to make people buy a product or come for a program. The way you should go about the two publicity plans would be very different. A deep understanding of the psyche of your target audience and the purpose you want to achieve with them would greatly help you with building a very good publicity plan for your program and product.

3.       Understudy your environment.

While it might not be ethically proper to go on duplicating all the publicity styles around you and in your environment, it would definitely be unwise to altogether ignore your environment and proceed to fashion out new ways. You must take a careful observation of the various publicity profiles around you. Assess their impact. Mark out their strengths and extract the reasons for their failures. Understand the reason why they do what they do. Look at all the brands, successful or otherwise and pick up holes in their publicity and marketing and determine ways you could do better if you were in their shoes. This will help you avoid repeating the mistakes of your predecessors. A very big part of understudying your environment includes deciding what creates an attraction in your environment, and basing your publicity technique on that attraction.

4.       Decide your strategy.

After considering the three points above, it is now the perfect time to decide your strategy.

-          Consider your budget allocation and maximise value derived per cost. You must consider your technique and budget and ensure you make the best advantage of your resources to ensure you have the best technique.

-          Diversify. Bear in mind that it would be suicidal to develop a publicity technique that is singularly directed as there is not one single technique that will reach everyone at the same time; therefore, you must develop multiple techniques within your strategy that would reach out to a broad spectrum of your people. For example, it would be improper to paste posters alone at the halls of a residence in a university where a bulk of the students reside off campus. You would have to paste it at the academics area too so as to capture those who would have nothing to do with the halls of residence for that period.

-          Prioritise your techniques based on the audience you are targeting and the number each technique would reach. Your chief technique must be the one that reaches the largest number of your target audience. In an environment where the poverty rate is high and the electricity supply is not stable, the most wrong means of publicity would be an electronic media advert, especially the television or internet.

-          In whatever technique you eventually choose, you must make a habit of laying the greatest emphasis on your strongest points and the values for which you hold an advantage over your ‘rivals’. People would want to know what makes you different and what makes what you are marketing or publicizing any different from what they’ve seen or encountered before. A great bane in the art of publicity is to abandon your main cause and start chasing shadows by emphasising points and grounds that do not directly reflect the status and reasons for your publicity.

5.       Internet based Publicity.

This is broadly specific for our own niche. It is a common saying that the world is going global but it seems publicity techniques we adopt are still slowing down to attaining these global standards. At the stage of our technology and with the advanced stages still to come, the best way to reach out to a broad spectrum of people in a very large geographical area is to adopt the Internet based publicity – create Facebook events and invite your friends, blackberry broadcasts, YouTube videos, twitter reminders, blog sites adverts, electronic mail et al. You would have to take advantage of these internet based techniques if your target audience are literate and internet savvy, not with the enabled feature on the internet to restrict your adverts and broadcast to surfers from a specific location.

6.       Partner with related bodies and organisations to extend your promotional reach.

It is not a misnomer to attempt to curry favours from people you had at one time or the other extended goodwill. Remember, one good turn deserves another. So, think up on your friends, former business associates, family members, rivals (yes, rivals!) and all those who you think owe you one and bring them in on your plans and extract a commitment from them to help you in your publicity. The advantage of these is that you are leveraging on their wide sphere of influence and using it to reach out to the largest audience you could ever dream of.

7.       Prepare for a last minute publicity surge.

This is one of the most ignored phases of publicity plans that have the capabilities of destroying all the good work you had done for the whole months or weeks before then. No matter how successful or far reaching you think your initial publicity outreaches and efforts have been, you must realise that humans have a tendency to forget, not with the many other publicity stuffs and stunts they are exposed to. Therefore, always make plans to have that last push, a surge that brings you back into everyone’s consciousness and helps those with an indecisive mind to deal with their hesitations and uncertainties and reach a compromise in their hearts to either try out your products or attend your programmes. This last minute surge must be carefully planned and executed with utmost efficiency.