Working with the PRess

I’ve written a bit (and spoke, and put on events with fancy speakers) about how to find the best PR/marketing consultants for your music project. What I haven’t talked much about, and some of my colleagues have raised recently, is what a client (artist, entrepreneur, etc) can do to make the project successful. I recently had to learn the hard way what happens when the elements needed for a successful campaign don’t line up, and I hope I can share some lessons learned to help you avoid putting money, effort and heartbreak into a project that doesn’t meet your expectations.

1. Communication. This is a broken-record sort of thing. There are eleventy billion PR and social media and marketing pros talking about communication on their blogs. It can’t be underscored enough. If you have expectations of what your consultant/publicist/social media guru should accomplish, communicate. If you’re not sure what they are doing with your money, communicate. If you think that a comma is out of place, communicate. If you want to know who they are talking to, communicate. If they didn’t ask you enough questions at the beginning, communicate. It’s pretty simple. I hope.

2. Define your goals and expectations. Before you can communicate, you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish. Publicists (and marketing consultants and social media gurus and whatever else people call themselves) are not mind-readers. Especially if you don’t know what you want out of the project. If you want to be “surprised” by their results, it’s probably not going to be a good surprise. There are a lot of different ways to promote projects, and unless you know what you want, you might not get much.

This is not to say that you have to know exactly which publications you want coverage in, or the ins and outs of how PR works. Sometimes goals can be “we want 50 people to buy our album,” or “we want 25 clicks on twitter,” or “we want 3 stories in print” and the consultant can say “here are some ways to do that.”

3. Know how your project is different. In today’s flooded media landscape, just putting on a concert is not enough to attract an audience. No one will buy tickets “just because.” Extra perks can help, but more important is having a central theme or purpose to your work. Know why you are putting on a performance, or recording an album, and be objective and clear in communicating this to your marketing/PR consultant/team. The best and most effective marketing materials or pitches are driven by an authentic understanding of the core art and what makes it special. Consumers are smart, and they want to know what makes your offering different from something else. If you can’t articulate this, you aren’t ready to promote your work.

Sometimes a PR or marketing consultant can help you with that. This is called “brand strategy,” and usually entails a process of interviews, research, and questions to help define and refine the mission/intent (sometimes called “competitive advantage” by fancy corporate marketing types) and how it’s communicated. This involves a great deal of work, often because the people involved don’t know how to share their ideas or expectations with the consultant leading this sort of work. It’s very easy to burn hours (and money!) when you don’t communicate. I often put a little bit of brand strategy thinking and Q&A into the beginning of every project I work on, because I want to make sure I’m communicating something meaningful to the target audience.

4. Don’t spend money that you can’t afford. Working with any new consultant involves an element of risk. The personality fit may not be right, acts of God may interfere, and sometimes, no matter how good the communication, product, and brand strategy are, the audience might not bite. Maintaining your composure when things go wrong, remembering that your consultant is a human being just like you, and taking your experience as an opportunity to learn all help to create a more positive experience for everyone involved.

Happy music-making!