How To Harness Publicity to Benefit Your Company
By Bill Smith
Your organization should have a strategic public relations (PR) program. If you don’t, your marketing and business development efforts aren’t nearly as effective as they could be, and you are likely losing out on business opportunities. Unfortunately, most parking organizations don’t have PR programs, and many that do don’t have effective programs.
An effective public relations program can help establish your company as an industry leader and your products and services as indispensable.
Why is PR so important? Because it’s the most efficient, cost-effective way to reach your most important audiences. A strategic public relations program can help you consistently reach large numbers of prospective and current customers, strategic partners, and prospective employees to demonstrate why they should hire you or work with you.
Most parking leaders with whom I speak understand in general terms the benefits of raising the profiles of their companies. However, they fail to consider the extraordinary power of stories in national media outlets that are read, viewed, or heard by tens of thousands — often even hundreds of thousands or millions — of people. An effective PR program can help establish your company as an industry leader and your products and services as indispensable.
The Reach of Publicity
Public relations can include several different elements, but the most important is publicity. By publicizing your organization through earned media, you can reach huge numbers of people with key messages, demonstrate the benefits of your products or services, and position your company as the best choice for customers looking for what you offer.
Publicity revolves around generating coverage in the media. Unlike advertising, where ad space is purchased, stories in newspapers, magazines, and online publications, as well as on TV and radio, don’t cost anything beyond the time and resources required to arrange and complete them. In addition to its cost-effectiveness, earned media carries much more weight and credibility than ads.
When developing a publicity strategy, you first need to determine what you want to accomplish. For example, a parking operator can use PR to attract drivers to its parking facilities or demonstrate to owners why it is the best choice to operate their facilities. A parking technology vendor, on the other hand, may want to inform the industry and potential customers in target vertical industries why its technology is superior and describe the unique benefits it can offer. Or a consulting firm may want to raise its profile among potential clients or strategic partners.
In addition to offering opportunities for free coverage, publicity has the added benefit of providing extraordinary reach. For instance, a feature story in an industry publication will be read by thousands of prospective customers and strategic partners. These readers care about parking, and they already have an interest in what you have to say. Likewise, a story in a local newspaper or a broadcast piece on local radio or television can be an effective way to disseminate information throughout the community. And a story in a national media outlet like the Wall Street Journal or NPR can literally reach tens of millions of people.
Additionally, when stories run in a publication or on TV or radio, online versions also tend to run on those outlets’ websites. There’s no better way to reach many people to raise awareness of a parking organization, product, or service.
Obtaining Publicity
How do you arrange this coverage? Everyone is familiar with press releases, which can be a great way to get news out. However, they are just one of several tactics for generating coverage. Pitch letters, source sheets, and media briefings are also powerful tools.
Every parking organization has news to announce. It could be a new policy or facility for a municipality, a new client or project for a consultant, a new product or service for a supplier, or a milestone such as a new hire or an award. Press releases are the perfect tool for getting basic news out to the public. If your organization has in-house PR staff or relies on PR consultants, they will know how to use a press release.
One of the most effective ways to use publicity is to arrange feature stories about your organization, someone within your organization, or about a product or service. Feature stories can revolve around industry trends, common challenges and solutions, or timely and interesting issues. Such stories should always be presented in terms of why the reader (or listener or viewer) will be interested in the story.
A third type of publicity that can raise awareness of an organization or its product is the bylined article. Bylines are stories written by an expert and printed in industry press or general or business publications. They typically offer overviews of common challenges and solutions, examples of best practices, or case studies demonstrating a particular solution (often they include all three). They can’t openly promote the organization or its products or services, though. These aren’t ads. They are articles designed to provide tangible value to readers. However, they provide enormous benefits by demonstrating the author’s (and the organization’s) valuable expertise.
In this age of digital marketing, social media and other digital strategies enhance the effectiveness of publicity by enabling you to share articles you’ve written or stories in which you are featured with your network and, often, with the networks of your connections. By integrating digital marketing into your public relations program, you can significantly enhance its effectiveness.
Avoid Common Mistakes
PR can be managed in-house, but most parking organizations seek help from experts. After all, you wouldn’t expect someone off the street to be able to design new parking technology or create an urban parking plan. Likewise, it’s unfair to expect your staff to know how to generate valuable publicity and fully exploit stories when they run. Successful PR requires relationships with editors and reporters, excellent writing and pitching skills, and an understanding of parking issues and how they affect the people who are reading, viewing, or listening to the outlets you’re pitching. Being a PR professional is just as specialized a skill as designing parking technology, creating parking plans, designing parking facilities, or operating parking lots and garages.
This leads us to one of the most common reasons that PR programs fail. I’ve spoken with numerous parking leaders who feel burned because they’ve tried PR in the past and their efforts failed. Most often, the failure arose because the PR consultants they hired didn’t know parking. Parking is a highly specialized industry that plays a vital role in the communities in which we work, and you need to know how to present that specialized role.
If you hire a PR consultant who doesn’t know parking, who doesn’t understand how all the different technologies, planning techniques, and operations approaches work together, how can you expect that consultant to create a PR plan that will effectively promote your organization?
I can’t tell you how many parking leaders have expressed frustration about past programs that targeted the wrong audiences or required too much time to rewrite materials that were originally written by someone who didn’t understand parking. It doesn’t matter how many campaigns the consultant has run promoting automobiles, or ice cream, or healthcare. If the consultant doesn’t have parking experience, you are going to spend too much time and money trying to bring that consultant up to speed. So, rule one in hiring a PR consultant is to find someone with a proven, successful track record in the parking industry.
Every parking organization should include PR in its marketing and business development. If you don’t, you won’t keep up with your competitors that do, especially in our rapidly evolving parking industry. If you do pursue a strategic publicity program, and partner with an experienced and skilled parking publicist, you’ll find that your marketing and business development efforts
will flourish.
Bill Smith is a marketing strategist and public relations professional who has served the parking industry for more than 30 years. He can be reached at bsmith@smith-phillips.com.
