There’s an old marketing product that is being sold a new way and it could send your sales soaring. Publicity is the most underused marketing tool in the box, primarily because of the way it is sold: by the hour with no guarantee you will get media coverage. We changed that. We sell publicity per story we arrange, and clients love it. Clients love it because they are sick of wasting money paying PR firms to “try”.
Kevin McCallum, of 1-800 CONTACTS, told us, “I decided to work with Media Relations for one reason: pay per performance. Typically public relations is like this black hole. You put money in and most times you get nothing in return. I liked the idea of guaranteed results.”
Publicity, the way we price it, is also inexpensive. We had an ad buyer measure a month’s worth of PR we arranged and compare it to what it would have cost to buy the same amount of ad space. It turned out to be 1/10 of the price of advertising. Here’s a real example: We worked with Delco Electronics. Some of Delco’s placements were Home & Away Magazine where an ad would have cost $14K, and the Gadget Guru, on the Today Show, on which it would have cost $180K for their three minutes of airtime. From March-May, Delco’s PR bill with us totaled $13K. The same amount of advertising would have cost $257K. In this case our price was about 1/20 of the advertising cost.
The one thing ads have over PR is word-for-word control over the message. But where would you rather see your product, as an ad or featured in a story at 1/10 the cost?
Because we are only paid for placements, we sometimes do a lot of work that we don’t get paid for. But we like having a little skin in the game. It toughens us up, makes us smarter, and gives us a huge advantage over firms that make money by racking up hours.
Buying publicity the way we sell it and using it for sales lift is close to a no-brainer. Call Heather Champine, our VP of media production and she can assess how much coverage you have been missing. We can change that pretty quick. Heather’s number is 952-697-5269.
