My colleague Philip Anast recently shared some advice from the Wall Street Journal via the Advisory Board regarding situations “where it’s better to slow down at work.”
Let’s be honest: In the hyper-paced world of healthcare public relations and marketing, where there’s a product rollout, speaker submission, or awards deadline around every corner, the notion of “slowing down at work” is downright antithetical. When you’re managing multiple accounts – and trying to make each feel as if they are your highest priority – you instinctively fear that slowing things down will derail your strategic timelines, frustrate your clients, and send your blood pressure soaring. Why make an already intense job even more stressful?
The answer is there are times in PR and marketing where slowing down is essential to doing the best job for your clients, your agency, and your sanity. Here are three situations when slowing down pays off in PR and marketing. These apply to in-house marketing/PR pros, who face pressures similar to those of agency workers.
When you’re the final set of eyes
Marketing and PR pros must create and process high-level, detailed content every day. Thought-leadership bylines, case studies, white papers, press releases, sales sheets, analyst pitches – it never ends. If your client is a life sciences company, you may be writing about concepts that may be ever-so-slightly outside your wheelhouse. That’s OK – you probably didn’t go to medical school, and your yearslong devotion to Grey’s Anatomy will only get you so far.
Still, when you’re delivering content assets, it’s important to get everything right. And no matter how many people look at the “final” draft of a byline, press release, or other public-facing deliverable, someone will be the last set of eyes before the news release is sent to Cision or the byline to your client’s CEO.
Even if it’s the 10th time you’ve read it, do so with intense focus just one more time. Read slowly, scan for typos, and pay attention to flow and impact. This is your last chance! Put another way, if there’s something wrong that you didn’t catch, you may be catching flak from the client, who is paying the agency good money to not mess up content.
When your client wants to do something impulsive and perhaps ill-advised
Clients can be quite emotional. Which is understandable. They’re under pressure on multiple fronts from competitors and investors. They are responsible for executing on product, market, and growth strategies. They’re probably working 70 hours a week. Plus their chief marketing officer just abandoned the company for a new job. And their kids have the flu.
Nonetheless, when the client’s CEO decides what the company needs to do is issue a press release every day for a week before HLTH to carpet-bomb the market into recognizing the pioneering brilliance of their platform (something I heard an investor for a startup insist on), you must slow their roll. Politely but firmly explain how a press release a day doesn’t really align with the rhythm of how the healthcare tech media operates – “Company X made a big splash today. I can’t wait to see what they’ve cooked up for tomorrow!” said no tech reporter, ever – and that it also would be a waste of money. (The money message eventually got through to the investor.)
Similarly, if a CEO wants to confront that editor from Healthcare IT News who omitted the company from a roundup of startups to watch in Sector Z in the coming year and clearly harbors a grudge against us, you must counsel restraint. Emphasize the importance of cultivating long-term relationships with the media, analysts, and others in the industry ecosystem who could help the company down the road. Just giving your excitable clients some time to vent often is enough to defuse a mini-crisis.
When there’s a full-blown PR crisis
Sometimes an actual crisis will arise – your client’s product is the subject of a recall or warning, a customer files a major lawsuit, an investigative article in the mainstream media that mentions the company in a negative light blows up on social media, etc. You’ve got to move fast or things will quickly spin out of control!
Making a public statement that can be easily contradicted, however, will only worsen the problem. Thus, it is imperative that you know the facts. Make sure you take the time to gather all the facts surrounding the issue and are interpreting them correctly. You only have one chance to respond the first time to a crisis. Make it count.
Conclusion
In the PR and marketing biz, you need to think fast and move fast. Sometimes, though, slower is better.
Leave a Reply