The Marketing Magazine For Smart Businesse
Linda Rastelli is an award-winning journalist, scriptwriter, publicist and co-author of "Marketing: Essential techniques and strategies geared toward results" (John Wiley & Sons, 2007). She enjoys helping businesses sharpen and communicate their marketing messages and the challenge of making complex or technical ideas accessible. Journalism taught her to ask the right questions and to get to the point, scriptwriting taught her to think visually, and writing books taught her patience (but not quickly enough).
During the Great Depression, there was a public figure who showed no talent for public speaking. I’m talking about a woman who began as an embarrassingly bad public speaker, uttering high pitched giggles and wiggling her hands, distracting the audience. She later became a noted speaker and the first American woman to make money as a lecturer. Find out how you, too, can improve your public speaking with expert tips from two sought after speakers.
DonnaLyn Giegerich gives paid speeches nationally as well as locally, and is “one of Monmouth County’s most sought after speakers,” says the president of the Eastern Monmouth Chamber of Commerce. She’s also a producing partner in two insurance agencies that generate more business than she can handle.
Negative stories that won’t die are what keep public relations people up at night. Reporters are tenacious creatures who compete with each other to keep a juicy story going. Not out of malevolence, but because it’s their job to be watchdogs. As I wrote previously, journalists are accountable to readers and editors, not to you.
When you read a blog, a business letter, an email or a web page, do you wish for more text? Only rarely. Yet we mistakenly think people reading our marketing communications will make time to trudge through our complicated thought process and figure out how it applies to them.
A client of mine will soon be featured on a national magazine’s website. She works hard and considers her business a personal calling. She even launched an online portal to match other people who do what she does with customers around the world. How did she get national publicity?
Your product or service is top notch. But alas, you toil in obscurity. You’re not alone. Business writers are inundated with pleas from people clamoring for coverage for their business. Only a tiny fraction of press releases become news. Unfortunately, the story you want told is rarely the same story the media wants to tell. Why not?
Your video needs drama. Not that you must stage a Shakespearean drama to sell your product or service. Just understand and solve your customer’s problem, and if you can capture his or her emotions, the viewer is yours. If not, as my editor used to say, “zzzzz!”
