CONFESSION OF A PR MAN

The ear and the radio sang, the worn saddle of my SUV slightly creaked, the cork ended. From the street with the bright name Iskra, I drove up to a beautiful skyscraper, on the fifth floor of which my new place of work was located. I am the head of the marketing department of a medical company. Actually, I came to the advertising and PR department, but it turned out that no one is engaged in marketing as such in the company, in the end I had to take it upon myself. And not only him. We did a lot, sometimes even acted as loaders and gazelles - equipment for a couple of exhibitions fit into my tank. Once I heard about myself on guard - "and the young doctor had already taken the keys - he was the first to arrive." It's nice to be a doctor for a little while, take my stethoscope. After all, we even had a staff room - we dined in it.

Naturally, I had to do the impossible, write in a matter of days a plan for promoting the company for the next three years and, of course, implement it ahead of schedule. If everything went more or less smoothly with the creation and approval of the plan, the director and founders looked at me with loving eyes and promised to take me as a share, then there were hitches with the implementation. We have a marketing department (despite the new sign, everyone still called us the advertising department), or rather, there was never money for our tasks. What was done before continued to be carried out, and the payments of new counterparties settled somewhere between the director's office and the accounting department. It has always been like this - my cynically positive deputy Liza noted sadly - they always put a big and thick ... chronometer on us.

The founders and the director naturally wanted the number of clinics working with us, as well as the purchases of each particular clinic or dealer, to grow, but for some reason PR has always been perceived as a second-rate ineffective tool. I was hired precisely because in my practice there were very effective PR campaigns with transparent KPI, but at the same time they categorically did not want to allocate money for promotion. And if they were singled out, then the remnants, for which they had to fight fiercely. Of course, you can understand the leadership in some ways, because the same sales can be easily measured by the profit received: they invested a ruble and received two. And they invested a ruble in PR, but got something not very clear. To be understandable to the director and founders, I began to translate every aspect of our activities into the language of numbers.

For example, our department had big doubts about the effectiveness of mailing to the database of potential customers provided by the sales department. Technically, at that time, oddly enough, we did not see the percentage of letters read. And they did it simply - they began to count the number of downloaded pictures from letters - when the addressee opens the letter, the mail service most often automatically uploads the pictures from which this letter is made up. We counted them. It turned out that there were catastrophically few real views. It became clear that the email addresses of the new clinics that we received were “left”, and the mailing did not bring tangible results. After we made a mailing to the new database, collected by ourselves, the number of hits through the site increased almost three times. Naturally, the management's confidence in our initiatives grew after that.

Expert comment:

Evgeny Kolobov, independent marketing consultant:

As a CMO for large companies, I often encountered the problem of second-rate marketing spending. And often this problem is created by marketers themselves, not deep enough studying the pricing issues of some “snickering outsourcers”. I will give just one example: we received a commercial offer to create an online training system for employees and dealers from a marketing agency for 800,000 rubles. I note that the company is not even Moscow. The agency's presentation was excellent, but it was clear that the company was not specialized and would "resell" the order to subcontractor programmers. We conducted a search, found competent programmers, made a normal technical task and received an offer for 70 thousand rubles. Yes - I had to work with my head, yes - we uploaded and structured the content ourselves. But the savings are huge. And so in everything. If the stand, then the largest with a "rich" building without reference to whether the exhibition will "beat off", if the event, then the event agency. What can we do?!

It is clear that the attitude towards the marketing department in the financial department, accounting and the "salespeople" after that is like "freeloaders". And it is regularly broadcast to the director. How to be? We optimize costs, find "narrow" specialists where it is impossible to do it ourselves (SEO, programming, printing and design, video). We learn how to do SMM, PowerPoint presentations, PR and analytics. We begin to make friends with accounting and finance - we explain to them in detail the effect of this or that item of expenditure, not “on the fingers”, but “in numbers”. We show the director that there will be no catalogs - there will be no sales, there will be no SEO - there will be no sales, budget design - there will be no sales ... We decipher each invoice thoroughly - managers really do not like vague wordings in invoices such as "advertising campaign" or "design services" ". Become a little economist and make economists a little marketers!

Our work was in full swing, we found new contractors, saved a lot of money. However, the phrase “the former head of the department could not build relationships with representatives of related departments, turned out to be conflicting,” the phrase dropped by the director at the final interview, now sounded to me in a new way. How to defend the interests, while remaining a good boy, because it is an old tradition to “score” on budgets for PR?! The surviving remnants of the department - it turns out there was a large-scale purge here before me - were pessimistic. It was read in their eyes - again there will be no calendars, flowers and souvenirs on time, and we will be extreme. I was militant. But I decided not to start with the war, but with a small investigation.

Expert comment:

Evgeniy Tsvetkov, Marketing Director of Telfin

Budgeting as a workflow I divide globally into three stages: planning, execution of work, report. For demand peaks, we invest more in promotion.

The second stage is direct work with the budget. This is the task of all employees of the marketing department. Everyone has their own area of ​​responsibility and their own KPI indicators, the fulfillment of which is required for the successful implementation of the entire promotion plan. Invoices do not live a lifetime before they get to the accounting department marked "for payment", because the appearance of invoices is pre-agreed and noted in a special budget file. We are democratic and professional. There has never been such a thing that we did not pay bills because of the queue.

However, marketing is always about flexibility. And we are not bureaucrats: if an expense item is not included in the budget, but it is urgently needed “here and now”, we make a strong-willed decision and change plans based on priorities. We replace one item of expenditure with another, and the rest of the projects go without changes. At the reporting stage, we combine the plan and the fact - everything is simple. Careful work in the previous two stages helps to avoid mistakes. For me, the reporting period is an occasion to rejoice at the successes and great work done.

As it turned out, all our payments were signed in the accounting department. But with each arrival of the ladies from the sales department in the stack of the chief accountant, they went lower and lower. Taking this paper heap, I went to the CEO. Our company was from the category of “all the children were attached”, but the guys in the leading positions were reasonable and adequate, and, most importantly, our peers. After a short conversation, the director agreed that our tasks are important, and if we want to increase awareness, improve the company's image and, ultimately, increase sales, they must be completed in the first place. The director, Yegor, shook my hand and said - put things in order here, San, it's time to build a system. You can count on my full assistance. By the way, what do we have with educational booklets? ..

Expert comment:

Podorozhnaya Anastasia, General Director of MIR24 Laboratory

First of all, we lay a budget for advertising our own events with two goals - some educational content and the actual advertising itself. For example, if this is a sporting event, then first an article about the benefits of this particular sport and only then an invitation. If there is no educational content, there is no advertising budget. The next most important expenses are for co-branding and joint (partner) events. I don’t see the point in advertising head-on (“We are such and such a company, we do this, come to us”). People are not interested in who we are and what we are. But if they have tasks for us, then we monitor, hear, see - and offer ourselves. Not immediately and not directly. The first suggestion - always - first train employees and only then invite our team to solve the problems of a particular company. Soulful texts and pictures will get their share of the budget if the PR manager knows how they make the viewer (reader) feel and why. In other cases, stopping advertising campaigns does not scare me.

So, I have a very important ally, the work has accelerated significantly. We abandoned the dubious projects adopted before us, such as spamming on the forums, and concentrated on the most effective channels of communication with customers. To do this, we conducted a survey of our existing customers through dealers about the communication channels they use, read business and industry media, websites, exhibitions, seminars, and so on. It turned out that there are not so many options, but at best 20 percent are used. Mastering the remaining 80% turned out to be not so difficult, and it did not necessarily cost a lot of money.

Our payments no longer flew somewhere down, and if this suddenly happened, then the head of the marketing department, i.e. I. But with the sales department, and some other departments, a real war began. in which we won. Because we proved our effectiveness, and the general (and he was the husband of the daughter of the main founder) was with us ... No one else encroached on our rights, payments from the accounting department flew like carrier pigeons.

Expert comment:

A spokesman for a large transport company declined to comment on the topic, but in an email correspondence noted that "the department of "marketing" - and even more so "PR" - is not the key to maintaining the viability of the company. And if the company is really on the verge of a crisis, these departments will go under the knife in the first place. And if the company's management decided that there is no money for PR and marketing, then it would be strange to see that this management continues to pay salaries to employees responsible for these areas of activity. If the company runs out of money for PR, the PR person should start looking for a new job, because it is stupid to promote something that does not want (cannot) be promoted. A PR manager is a person dependent on the leader. Not vice versa."  

So, unfortunately, it happened to us. Time passed, the laws changed, and it turned out that it was no longer legal to advertise our product. Accordingly, the entire department, including me, came under the knife. Only the most necessary specialists remained - the silversmiths. After a while, the laws changed again, and I dropped into the clinic to treat my teeth. They are looking for a replacement for you, the secretary whispered as I walked past the reception. For some reason, the door to the director's office was open. “You see, director Yegor spoke confidentially” - the former head of the marketing department showed himself to be a conflict person ... ”. I stopped and would have listened further, but the secretary Svetochka prudently closed the door. A year later, I learned that the new staff of the department had also been disbanded. Perhaps they are also in conflict. Or the laws have changed.

Most PR people refused to participate in the preparation of this material. The directors spoke mostly. The head of the press service of a major automaker, refusing, said: “Sorry, but the topic is ... how to say more precisely ... slippery.” IT people simply unsubscribed - "Sasha, we do not participate in such materials." Be careful, gentlemen PR people - the main thing in our business is not to mess things up!  

Author: Alexander Udikov