Here’s an obvious mistake marketers make. Avoiding it will give you a 25% advantage over your competition. If marketing was a car with 4 cylinders and your competitor’s cars only used 3, who do you think would win the race? Stupid question, right?
Well that’s the case with the promotional mix. It has 4 channels: ads, website, social and publicity. But companies barely give publicity a glance. What a shame.
When I say publicity, I mean media coverage. The history of why marketers ignore media coverage has some deep and tangled roots, but the main reason is the way publicity has been priced. PR firms normally charge by the hour or retainer. You have to pay them whether they arrange any coverage or not. Because the PR firm gets paid either way, it waters down their incentive to perform.
I know a little bit about this because 30 years ago, I started selling media coverage by the story rather than by the hour and clients loved the accountability. I reasoned that if pizza was sold by the hour with no guarantee of delivery, very few people would buy it. So, I came up with a pricelist based mostly on audience size and started selling media coverage like pizza. You pay for it, you get it. Selling publicity by the slice worked wonderfully. The media fragmented and expanded along with us, especially when the internet came on the scene. Over the last 30 years, we’ve arranged tens of thousands of media stories for hundreds and hundreds of clients.
I think you’d be surprised if you knew how many media stories you’ve seen, heard or read over the years that were generated by our publicists. Countless cooking segments on morning shows, cold and flu stories, back-to-school tips, fashion trends, travel, it’s really endless.
If you want to fire up that 4th cylinder, Media Relations Agency is the one to do it for you. Chances are pretty good that when it comes to getting their share of media coverage, your competition is sitting on their hands. And good luck to them after our publicists have made the rounds with your product. Reporters and producers aren’t keen on doing the same story twice in a row. Not only do our clients get the coverage, we help prevent their competition from getting it.
Give us a call at 952-697-5269 or complete this contact form. We will explain how we charge and how we work. We have clients who have been sending us checks regularly for over 20 years. There’s only one reason for repeat business. You can probably figure that one out for yourself.
