What follows is the most profitable headline and story you may ever read …
“No matter how many millions are spent on advertising, nothing sells a product better than free publicity.”
The headline for this article was not written by me. It is a sentence I copied verbatim from a popular college marketing text book entitled Marketing, by Lamb, Hair and McDaniel.
The only reason I’m going to tell you what I’m going to tell you next is that it is buried in this targeted newsletter that is sent only to marketing experts like you who have no motive to disseminate it.
We’ve made a bundle selling publicity over the last 23 years, and here’s the secret to our business model. It’s only slightly complicated so you’ll get it:
Media outlets have substantial overheard. They pay for that overhead, and make a profit by selling ad space and in some cases subscriptions. But they can’t sell their stories because that would ruin their credibility. But we can sell their story space, and here’s the kicker: not only don’t we have their overhead, they won’t allow us to pay them a cent. That means that we can price their stories at about one tenth of the price they charge for ads.
That’s good news for us but it gets better. The ad space they sell is limited to their publication or broadcast. We have no such limitations. We can sell every media outlet’s story space. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. Our inventory is all media stories everywhere and we don’t have to pay a dime for it. In addition to that we have none of the media’s overhead.
Could it get any better? Well, yes, as a matter fact it does. Just go back and read the headline again. Our product, media stories, outsells their ads every day of the week.
You might think the media would have a real distaste for companies like ours but that’s not the case. The media actually likes us because they use us to keep their costs down. You see, we act like producers who work free and provide them with a never-ending stream of low-cost stories. Many of our publicists worked as paid reporters and producers before they came to work for us so they know exactly how to package up a story for them.
Some marketers sit on their hands and wait for news stories to come to them. Or they take the watered down approach of just sending out a press release or worse yet, put it on the wire.
The smart companies hire us. Our team of full-time publicists takes an aggressive approach to arranging publicity: they hammer the phone. And if you don’t think that’s hard work, try it for a while. But we sell publicity by the story, not the hour, so if we don’t kill something we don’t eat. So we dial like crazy.
If you can’t honestly say you have the top news story of the day, and you can’t, calling reporters and producers relentlessly is the only way to get their attention. But there is much more to it than smiling and dialing. After twenty years of contacting them, reporters and producers love us because they know we serve up stories on a silver platter. We give them all the tools, props and spokespeople they need for a turnkey mediagenic story. Who wouldn’t love hearing from someone who does a great job doing your work for you?!
If you want to dominate the publicity promotional channel, hire us. One of our customers has about a dozen paid spokespeople we have arranged for them and they get nonstop coverage. Another just topped one billion media impressions. We have been doing this for over twenty years and know how to shine the media spotlight on a product or company.
If you think you can buy publicity services from you local PR firm, you are mistaken. They are too soft. I don’t run this company like a PR firm; I run it like an ad agency. Our only job is to help clients sell product and increase revenue. Call us to get more information about our services.
Go back and read the headline again. Publicity is the least expensive and most powerful promotional channel, period. Use t. Dominate it. Milk it for all it’s worth.
