Here’s a simple trick to see if you are spending your marketing dollars in a way that will give you the most bang for your buck: arrange the three main elements of the promotional mix in order of low cost/high reach to high cost/low reach and then see where you are spending the most money.
1. Publicity low cost/high reach
2. Advertising high cost/high reach
3. Personal selling low cost/low reach
Publicity is the lowest cost/highest reach promotional channel yet many marketers don’t use it at all. It seems to hide in plain view, and marketers skip over it time and time again.
Publicity trumps advertising because it’s far less expensive and tells a more complete story. Not to mention media stories are craved by the public while ads are ignored and even actively blocked.
The reason publicity is more effective than personal selling is that it reaches more people. Personal selling is done one person at a time but a single media story can reach hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions. You also get better results when there is a third party, like a reporter, telling your story. It sounds less self serving.
As the owner of a company that has arranged tens of thousands of product news stories for several hundred clients, I can tell you it’s the mid-sized companies that miss the publicity opportunity the most. Small companies don’t have any money so they have no choice but to use low cost/high reach marketing. And the big companies maximize every promotional channel there is so they hit publicity by default.
Nothing will outsell good media coverage about your product. It’s cheap, it tells a complete story when people are listening, and it reaches the masses. Think of all the cities you flew over on your last business trip. The primary way people in each city connect with the world is through media stories. It’s inexpensive and profitable to have your product story be among the daily stories that are streamed into their lives.
To give you an idea of the cost of publicity, clients who use us by the project spend between $10,000 to $50,000, and clients who have an ongoing publicity campaign spend $5,000 to $50,000 a month.
Twenty years ago we broke away from the PR industry and started selling publicity by the story rather than the hour. While traditional PR firms still don’t like our pricing model, our clients love it. With our nationally trademarked Pay Per Interview Publicity® business model, customers know that when they buy publicity from us, they always get coverage for their money.
Why not do what hundreds of other companies have already done and hire us to get your products story streaming into homes all across America? Call us to get our price list, and learn how other companies have used publicity to teach the public about their products and drive up sales.
P.S. Social media is an extension of traditional publicity. We help clients with that too. We have been turning ad messages into stories for over 20 years so we are far ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding how social media fits into marketing.
Social networking is one of those things that sounds good until you try to keep up with writing all the posts. We help our clients by writing the posts for them. Similar to our publicity pricing, we charge per post. Clients tell us how many posts they want and in what channels. Then we see to it that they are written and posted on time.
The way the buying public is learning about products is changing. Our tag line is “the non-advertising, advertising agency.” The marketing support products and services that we sell reach people in ways that are more in line with the way they want to be communicated with. Our many years as a PR firm focused on marketing has made us the cutting-edge agency we are today.
