I Can’t Afford A Publicity/Public Relations Campaign — Can I?
It’s a phrase I hear over and over again from many entrepreneurs, small businesses owners and inventors: “I’d love to hire someone to launch our publicity campaign professionally, but we can’t afford it, so I’m just going to have to do it on my own.”
Over the past several months, I have been conducting an informal survey among entrepreneurs and business owners who have contacted me about my services. I have found that due to their lack of information or knowledge on the topic, many businesses typically over-estimate or over-budget the cost of a prospective public relations/publicity campaign. During my PR consultation with them, I asked: “How much do you think it will cost to launch a solid, effective PR/publicity campaign for your product/business?” Of the 102 people I’ve queried:
* 11% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost $10,000+ per month
* 32% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost $5,000-$10,000 per month
* 39% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost $3,000-$5,000 per month
* 12% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost $1,000-$3,000 per month
* 6% – Thought a professional PR campaign would cost less than $1,000 per month
The truth is — you can get a publicity/PR campaign in all of those price ranges. What you get for your money and how effective the campaign will be is the real question. It is true that the more you pay the more you get. But getting the most publicity/PR exposure doesn’t mean you have to get most expensive PR agency or specialist.
A good rule of thumb is to align yourself with a PR business that best reflects your business size. Most times their rates will be in line with your prospective PR budget. If you are a small business owner with two employees, you need not hire a high-dollar PR agency with dozens of employees. Find a PR business whose office size and capabilities closely resemble your business.
Case in point — there is a large PR agency in a fancy building downtown a few miles from my office. Frankly, we are not even competition to each other, in fact, we have even referred clients to each other. Why? They typically work with large corporations and implement campaigns of around $10,000 per month. My business works with small/medium-sized businesses. Mechanically, the downtown firm and my business do the same thing when it comes to PR campaigns: professional media release composition; extensive media market research; articulate personalized distribution to the media; months of media relations (article placements/interview scheduling/media request fulfillment, clipping/tracking of media placements, etc.).
Signing up with the big firm doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily get an experienced associate working on your campaign. So are you getting what you are paying for? A friend of mine who works at a major PR firm gave me the following breakdown of billing fees in his office:
* Interns/Junior Executives – bill at $75 / hour
(Very little, if any professional experience)
* Account Executives – bill at $100 – $125 / hour
(1-3 years of professional experience)
* Senior Account Executives – bill at $125 – $200 / hour
(Multiple years of professional experience. Agency decision makers.)
Compare those prices to many small PR shops or individual PR specialists. Many have started their own PR businesses after years of experience in the industry and typically charge $50 – $100 per hour to professionally launch and maintain your campaign. Many times, you can get a seasoned PR veteran who will work directly with you and your staff for cheaper than the Intern/Junior executive rate at a downtown firm.
However, one word of advice — when choosing a smaller firm or individual to do your PR, make sure they have the same tools that the bigger agencies do: updated media lists/contacts; personalized media distribution capabilities; professional clipping/tracking services to get copies of each of your media placements (articles, tapes from TV/radio shows) as well as the intangibles of expert communication/media relations skills and professional pitching prowess. If they are cheaper, but don’t have all the tools to help you in the best manner possible, you are probably better off spending a little extra money to make sure your campaign is launched and maintained correctly.
The major benefits of hiring a professional (individual PR specialist or PR firm) to launch your campaign are:
* Proper Campaign Implementation – Improperly composed or poorly pitched campaigns are the major downfall of many PR efforts. Poorly written, over-commercialized media releases; uncalculated, misdirected mass e-mailing of the release pitch; no follow-up media relations/media request fulfillment; etc.. Your first impression to the media is a lasting one – make sure it’s a good one.
* Media Contacts – Most PR agencies have established multiple media contacts over several years that can lead to much better and more numerous media placements for your campaign. Let their foot in the door benefit you.
* Efficiency and Effectiveness – PR specialists/agencies generate publicity full time, 8-12 hours per day and know the ins and outs, shortcuts and secrets to getting the job done better and quicker. Sure you could hang your own drywall or do your own plumbing, but do you have the tools, the time and the expertise to make it cost effective? I always tell my clients, “You do what you do well, I’ll do what I do well and we’ll collectively move this business further up the ladder.”
One caveat when it comes to choosing a professional PR agency or individual to work with — signing up for a higher priced campaign doesn’t necessarily mean you will get better results than a cheaper campaign. And the inverse is true as well. Over the past year or so, many low-cost PR/publicity services have begun to pop up all over the Internet. Ones that promise to write and launch a press release for as low as $99. They are low in cost because frankly many are low in quality. Bigger is not necessarily better, and cheap does not always mean a good bargain.
If you have the time, tools and talent to launch and maintain your own campaign, you should definitely do so. If not, there are a number of public relations/publicity firms, specialists and services out there. Research to find the one whose services and fees match your business plan. Once business owners, entrepreneurs, and inventors learn more about their options when it comes to launching a PR campaign — many find that they can’t afford NOT to have one.
Todd Brabender is the President of Spread The News Public Relations, Inc.
His business specializes in generating media exposure and publicity for innovative products, businesses, experts and inventions.
http://www.spreadthenewspr.com
todd@spreadthenewspr.com
(785) 842-8909
Book Marketing –How to Make More Money With Your Books By Finding New Markets
Targeting new markets is an easy and profitable way to repurpose your content. Want to put more cash in your pockets? Of course you do. Looking for ways to repurpose content to make it happen? Of course you are.
Here are four ways to score a bull’s eye by targeting new markets through repurposing.
1. Rearrange content by different demographics.Any given group of people is composed of different demographics. Those demographics have different interests and needs. Sounds like marketing 101, doesn’t it? Guess what, it is.
Look at who’s buying your product now and who you want to add to that list. Many people look at repurposing the book. I don’t look it as that. I look at it as repurposing the message. You custom tailor the message to appeal to sub-groups, either male or female, younger or older, affluent or budget conscious or any of dozens of other criteria. Discover who you want to appeal to, what that target group wants to see, and then juggle the content to give it to them.
2. Offer different versions to the audience by step and level. You’ve created this brilliant teaching tool, now break it into segments and open new markets for each segment. Content arranged for a 20-year veteran business owner can be condensed and the presentation order changed to appeal to the just-hired employee, thereby opening that new market. You can even create multiple versions of content specifically targeted to varying skill or experience levels. Each level opens a new door for sales to walk through. Build those doors and watch the profits roll in.
3. Offer different formats. People have their preferences–use those preferences to open markets for different formats of the same content. In addition to the hardcover book, create an entire product line including a soft cover version, eBooks, audio CDs, MP3s for download, just to name a few options, and previously closed markets are suddenly open. The guy who’s too busy to read a book might have a one-hour commute. So, he’s the perfect candidate for an audio CD. This is one place where the shotgun approach works. Offer the greatest number of choices and you will be surprised at how many people buy the same content in more than one format.
4. Package makes perfect. Offer bonuses and freebies to close the deal. Give them the content and that repurposed content, even if it’s free, will lead to your message. Get the message to them and they will buy. It’s not just a book either, but all these other repurposing ideas that we’ve just gone over.
I hope that makes sense to you. Remember that all these market identifiers are related. Use them together to open even more markets and watch the sales pour in.
Online Marketing Expert Alex Mandossian helps authors, speakers, consultants, entrepreneurs and small business owners maximize their online profits with minimal time and effort. To learn more online book marketing strategies, log on to http://www.AlexMandossian.com
Integrated Talents – Creating Compelling Digital Marketing
I have a secret I feel I need to share with the world. I am a creative geek. There – I’ve admitted it. For years people like myself have been forced underground, afraid of revealing our true identity. Well today I’m coming out.
Suspicious Characters
As I’ve gone through my career in Marketing (Advertising, DM and now Integrated Marketing), I have found that many people are suspicious of anyone who displays a flair for things both creative and technical. It’s like you’re not allowed to be good at both – something about different sides of the brain is the normal reaction.
While it’s true that creative and technical thought requires different processes, haven’t we all at some time solved a technical problem in a creative way and vice versa. Personally, I believe people who only use one side of their brain are missing out on something. I generally try to use both.
Time for New Partnerships
In this world of increasing technological dependency, creatives and technologists both need to embrace and have an appreciation of the other side. For creatives, technical understanding and partnerships are now just as important as art director – copywriter partnerships have been since the 60’s. You wouldn’t expect an art director who didn’t understand the writing process or be able to contribute to it to be worth much. Equally, art directors now need to forge similarly close partnerships with technologists.
Because the web is predominantly a visual medium, both designers and developers must have an exceptional understanding of good design, usability and functionality. Developers now must pay more attention to design details and see them as important as making it all work. Designers need to understand the process of web development and work in partnership with developers to find the best design solutions.
The Web is Bringing Creatives and Technologists Together
The internet is still a young child – growing up and learning to make its way in the big bad world. Designers, writers and developers have been working out how to work together with mixed results. In the past all three have been guilty of just doing their own thing and have been able to get away with it. But, this is no longer the case. As web users become more savvy they’re quick to weed out poorly designed, written and built websites. We need to see things from a different perspective:
1. Developers need to care about the visual look and how easy it to navigate because the web is mostly a visual medium.
2. Designers need to care about the functionality because the web is interactive.
3. Writers need to care about search engines because websites need to be found and easily digested.
Also, clients now have a better understanding of what their online activity should be achieving and want to make their budgets work harder. That means all of us need a much greater appreciation of strategy and planning.
To achieve all of this requires a change of mindset. Individuals who can specialize whilst having a broad understanding of the digital marketing world are the ones who are best placed to benefit. So – by getting both sides of our brains to integrate, we can start integrating our talents, which will lead to better integrated digital marketing.
Peter O’Flynn is Creative Director of Marketing Team Direct – the through-the-line integrated marketing agency that fuses online and offline marketing effectively.
Visit http://www.marketingteamdirect.com
Secrets Of Multi Level Marketing Training
There are a number of different websites around that offer training in different programs that are related to multi level marketing. There are a number of different sites around because the concept of MLM is a relatively popular one and when there is demand in a free market for something like MLM, more websites are naturally going to pop up in order to fulfill that need. The internet is the worlds true free market and the proliferation of programs such as multi level marketing plans is a testament to that very fact.
MLM training websites can be very different in nature, with some requiring a payment in order to join an exclusive program that in itself is also an MLM operation and others requiring no payment whatsoever and just displaying information that they think might be useful in helping you decide what to do when you are next confronted with an MLM situation. There is also a middle ground of websites that require you to sign up for a mailing list, with that mailing list then also being used to send you further offers for MLM marketing programs.
There is certainly no dearth of MLM training opportunities out there should you be interested in pursuing those opportunities but the question really boils down to this, should you do it? This is a question that can take a long time to answer, because figuring out whether MLM is your secret weapon or just not worth your time is something that is not only time dependant but at the same time it is also situation dependant. While one person might not benefit at all from a particular MLM training program, at the same time another person might find it to be the best thing they have visited in a very long time.
Here are some pointers for you to take to the bank when it comes to deciding on whether a particular MLM training opportunity is good for you. If the opportunity makes you immediately enthusiastic, then the opportunity is definitely something that you should take a closer look at. Now, in order for this point to be useful for you, it is important for you to differentiate between something that makes you enthusiastic and something that makes you think about money.
Any good marketing pitch can do the latter but if you actually feel good about what the pitch page says in a way that transcends what you think you can make from it, then you are much more likely to put your full effort into learning all of the training that they have for you. And of course, cost is also something that you need to consider. There is no point signing up for an MLM training opportunity only to discover that once you get to the end of the training, you have no money left to put what you have learned into play.
It is better to sign up for a free MLM course, get the basics and still have money left over than it is to sign up for an expensive MLM course, become the worlds greatest expert but have no money left over to make your dreams a reality.
Obinna Heche:
Delivering the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home successfully..
http://weneversellyourtraffic.com/go/obhmy365/home