Headlines & Topics From This Week

Headlines & Topics

What Is Media Training?

Media training is a specialized form of communications training that helps media-facing individuals to anticipate reporter behavior, avoid common traps, and confidently focus on their messaging.

It is NOT about lying to the press and others but rather preps the interviewee to maintain poise, calm and anticipate important questions.

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A little media training goes a long way, and is something you should consider as an investment in yourself and your brand(s).

In the meantime, here are 5 tips for your next interview that will leave the best impression with the media and help ensure that the final interview whether it be in print, audio, podcast and/film be beneficial for your brand.

1) Make a plan for your interview. What would you like to see in the resulting media coverage? What two or three key messages do you want to relay? If you go into an interview and just answer the questions you’re asked without a thought for what it is you want the audience to know, you are yielding total control of the interview to the journalist. You need to be prepared by knowing in advance what your own goals are for the interview.

2) Be aggressive and make sure the question you want to be asked is asked, even if you have to ask it yourself. Don’t wait until the reporter asks you the question you want to answer. The question might never come. Instead, use another question to segue into the topic you want to discuss. For example, “What really matters is ____.” Or “The most important issue is ______,” or “The more interesting question is______.”

3) Stick to what a reporter asks and what you want to say. There’s no need to volunteer additional information. This goes back to planning what your goals are for the interview. You should know what it is that you’d like to communicate from the start, and stick to that information as much as possible. More is not better. Answer questions briefly. Long-winded answers give the power to the journalist to choose what parts of what you said to use and what to omit.

4) If you don’t know the answer to a question, just say so. There’s nothing wrong with saying you don’t know, that there hasn’t been a decision yet, or that you aren’t sure of the answer and need to check and will get back to the journalist.

5) But also don’t answer “No comment.” There are very few exceptions to this rule. When you say “no comment,” it almost always makes you look like you have something to hide. You should realize in advance that difficult questions come up and anticipate them, and plan in advance how to answer in a way that won’t hurt you. Advance preparation of likely questions and possible answers is the job of your PR team, with your input, of course.

BONUS: Don’t ask whether you can approve the story before it’s published. This will make you look unprofessional. Leave the follow up tasks to your PR team, or if you do not have one, at least wait until you send a thank you email/letter to inquire about a publication date. Journalists (especially in the traditional trade media) will sometimes provide information to you for fact-checking, so you can volunteer to be available for any further questions or for fact-checking if the journalist wishes.

Improve your news interview skills with a customized media training program, email us today at hello@elyagency.com to schedule a consultation.

Industry News: Bureau of Cannabis Control Just Published: Notices On Cannabis Advertising & Promotion

The following press release and materials were originally published September 17, 2019 by the Bureau of Cannabis Control based in California:

To All Interested Parties,

The Bureau of Cannabis Control (Bureau) recently published two notices outlining the existing statutory and regulatory requirements for all advertising or promoting of commercial cannabis by licensees and non-licensees in the state of California. Failure to comply with the requirements for advertising may lead to significant financial penalties, as well as suspension or revocation of a license.

Both commercial cannabis advertising notices can be found on the “Licensees & Consumers” page of Bureau’s website, or on the “General Resources” page of the California Cannabis Portal. The notices may also be accessed by clicking the links below.

Notice Regarding Advertising of Commercial Cannabis:

https://bcc.ca.gov/about_us/documents/19-290_advertising_cannabis.pdf

Notice Regarding Advertising of Commercial Cannabis by Non-Licensees:

https://bcc.ca.gov/about_us/documents/19-289_advertising_cannabis_nonlic.pdf

What This Means For Your Brand:

The ever changing political view towards cannabis can sometimes feel like it’s taking a step backwards, but not in this case it just means that prospective cannabis entrepreneurs must invest in serious planning. Here’s a few times on how to create and executive a clear marketing plan while still adhering to restrictions and limitations.

Know Your Customers By Knowing Your Numbers

The most important thing a company can do in order to accurately target new and existing consumers is to understand who its current customers are and how they are interacting with the brand.

This means finding ways to capture customer demographics not just emails at applicable touchpoints a customer has with a company, both online and IRL. These kinds of interactions include purchases, brick and mortar visits, social media interactions, website visits, and participation in loyalty programs or other offline events.

Understand the Power of Market Research and Lookalike Audiences

In order to grow your business you will need to reach people who are not yet your customers. Constant market research and studying “lookalike audiences” enable you to identify and market to people who most closely resemble your best existing customers.

By tracking real-world cannabis behaviors, like purchase history and dispensary visits, and marrying these attributes to a larger demographic profiles, including financial and lifestyle attributes, you can use your current customers to identify prospective customers through advanced lookalike modeling. By reaching people who are most similar to your best existing customers, you are much more likely to find new customers in a much more efficient manner than trying to reach the entire online universe.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

As you begin to run your digital advertising campaigns targeting your different audience segments and lookalike audiences, you will start to collect enormous amounts of data on how effective and efficient these campaigns are.

Measuring the success of these campaigns requires the ability to track engagements beyond simply clicks. It is necessary to receive full attribution data on your media so that you can understand if your ads are driving sales. Once the proper measurement is in place, experimenting with slight changes to your targeting parameters, ad design, and calls to action can have significant impacts on how effective your digital advertising campaigns are.

By collecting and comparing data from all these minor variations you can identify the optimal combination of ad attributes and targeting parameters to dramatically improve the performance of your campaigns and reduce your customer acquisition cost. 

Looking to streamline all of the above? Schedule a complimentary consultation today to create a clear, compliant and successful marketing plan for your business: ely@elyagency.com or 805-201-8050.