By Mark Macias
All publicity is not good publicity – contrary to the popular myth. In fact, sometimes even good publicity is wasted when it’s published on the wrong avenue.
I recently had a conversation with a NYC hotel marketing director who was trying to attract business travelers to her downtown hotel. She told me about her recent media campaign that targeted “mommy bloggers.”
When I asked why she was targeting stay-at-home mothers when her targeted clients were business travelers, she repeated that popular PR saying – “all publicity is good publicity.”
It’s important that every media campaign target its audience or you risk wasting valuable money on publicity that doesn’t bring a return. Yes – that publicity with mommy bloggers helped the hotel with exposure it didn’t have, but it would have been more effective if they would have devoted those same resources to business or travel writers.
If you’re a tech startup, dig deep to identify your targeted audience. What news outlets are your customers or clients reading? If it’s a tech B2B, it’s even more important to target the publications and trade magazines to ensure your campaign is successfully helping with your new business outreach.
So the next time you get publicity for your business, take it a step further – ask yourself: did this reach my targeted audience? If it didn’t, you might as well have posted a big billboard on an alley that no one sees.