Lisa Constance: Hello and welcome to sbtv.com. I'm Lisa Constance and I’d like to introduce you to Susan Benjamin, marketing expert, author of a new book on Buzz Marketing and host of her own radio show, The Greater Voice. Susan thanks so much for being with us today.
Susan Benjamin: Thanks for having me Lisa, I'm happy to be here.
Lisa Constance: Great, great. Well, I’d like to talk to you today about some innovative marketing strategies, you know with times being as tough as they are, small business owners may be tempted to cut their marketing budgets but, is that a good idea?
Susan Benjamin: Actually, it is and I’ll tell you why. Because of new media, there are a million things that small business owners and actually live business owners too could be doing that don’t cost a whole lot of money and some of it is down right free.
Lisa Constance: Well can you give us a few tips on inexpensive ways than to continue marketing in these times?
Susan Benjamin: Sure, which one to do? What you want to start by doing is don’t think about marketing anymore and don’t think about pushing your message out there so that people can hear it, think about ways that you can talk about what you do that other people get so excited about, they all want to talk about it and those who will talk about it and that is what you call generating buzz. And where better to do it than online with through your website or through contact blogs or a number of other ways. You can reach not just a couple of people but millions of people who will also reach millions of people. So, boy it’s a whole new universe and it doesn’t cost any money.
Lisa Constance: Definitely and most people have a web 0133 anyway so you're saying that they just need to really take advantage of their web 0136 and get out there.
Susan Benjamin: Yes, exactly I would. Now, the first thing that they need to do is look at themselves and say “What am I really good at? What do I really like to do?” And that will propel their marketing effort. Let me give you an example, I know woman who has a small business. She’s really struggling to get it started and she’s actually been around for a while. One of her problems is she spends an hour or two everyday on her blog. She’s not a good writer. She doesn’t have that much best interesting to say. Don’t blog, you know why? Because I don’t blog, it won’t work.
Lisa Constance: Right.
Susan Benjamin: I think she’s really personable so she should be out there doing things in the public, giving talks, going to adult education programs because you know what? The business is really local. And so she can go out and meet those communities in person. She should be going to fairs and setting up a booth there and shaking hands. That’s what she needs to be doing and not blogging. But, she can still contact bloggers and tell them about a person at the fairs and tell them about some of her other exploits and they can come and they can do the online work for her by talking of that in their own blogs.
Lisa Constance: Oh what a fantastic idea.
Susan Benjamin: Isn't that a great idea?
Lisa Constance: Yes. Well so, now tell me about—there’s a difference between marketing and PR that people may not understand. So how can you create PR opportunities for yourself rather than just marketing your products?
Susan Benjamin: The lines are getting slurred not because of online—let me give you an example. With traditional PR, what do you do? You write a press release or more than likely, if you're a small business owner, you need to hire somebody to write it for you because you're too busy, yeah it’s amazing I could do.
Lisa Constance: Exactly.
Susan Benjamin: And then you send it to an editor. And the editor looks at it and says “I think that I would call this person up for an interview and write a full-scale article or maybe I’ll just take the press release to stick it in.” Or “I think I’ll ignore it.” These days you write a press release and it will go to business owners, it will go to bloggers, it will go to website hosts and it will go to the media and, even better, it will go to search engines too. So you're getting all of this exposure for what was traditionally a PR piece geared only for editors. So it’s a little bit different here. But the fundamental difference I would say, if you really want to narrow it down, you know why? You narrow it down too much. It’s in PR you get newspapers and magazines and these days, bloggers to talk about you whereas with marketing, you go out and you talk about yourself. You want me to tell you what the difference is there in terms of what you're capable of? Okay, thank you.
Lisa Constance: I do.
Susan Benjamin: Well you can tell—0418. One of the things, one of the big differences is when somebody is writing about you, like a blogger or a news magazine, you look good because they give you the credibility. You're not seemingly talking about yourself. And it’s really important that other people write and say how good your product or service is. On the other hand, if you're doing marketing, you have a whole lot of creativity and you can do some really fun, really wonderful things that get people really immersed in your message.
So it’s a 0450 that my opinion, you need both, both PR and marketing and you need to be sure that somehow or other, it’s connecting online.
Lisa Constance: All right well thank you so much for that advice Susan and thanks for being here with us today.
Susan Benjamin: Well thank you. Thank you for having me.
Lisa Constance: Great, great. Well thanks to you for joining us on sbtv.com and thanks for getting your information here. For more stories on managing your business, visit our management channel. For sbtv.com, I’m Lisa Constance. Have a great day!
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