Go For the Low-Hanging Fruit: A Valid PR Strategy for Small Businesses
You know what? Not everyone gets to be on the Today Show or Oprah…and that’s OK.
Example: You’ve got an awesome new product/service etc. so naturally you write up a press release. Now you can either submit it to Oprah and wait for them to find and notice yours out of the thousands they receive daily and call – OR you can tweak your release to be SEO-friendly and submit it to a distribution service. Ensuring that your press release reaches a wide variety of search engines, blogs, websites and even journalists who are actually very interested in your product/service and will write about it.
Maybe you do both, but the point is that you’re going to be better off diversifying and letting a larger number of people find you, even though they may be in smaller niche markets. David Meerman Scott had 2 ideas on how PR is evolving that are particularly applicable to this strategy (from his blog):
- The old ways to get noticed were to buy expensive advertising and beg the media to write about you and your products. The best way to get noticed today is to publish great content online.
- Don’t talk about what your products and services do. Instead talk about how you solve problems for your customers.
PR and the world of the press release is changing, traditional media sources are on the decline and online distribution methods are more accessible and producing better results than ever. That is why we say go ahead and reach for that low hanging fruit. While all your competitors are fighting each other for access to the top you’ll be building a solid base of customers and attention. And who knows, maybe if enough of the small-time players are singing your praises the big media outlets will take notice eventually anyway.
Tags: distribution, Oprah, pr campaigns, press release, promotion
January 21st, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Wow. Thanks for pointing to my stuff. What’s so interesting to me is that when you create something valuable on the web people are EAGER to consume it.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Do you have any suggestions for quality distribution services to use for a Press releases?
January 28th, 2009 at 9:48 am
I completely agree with this. I think it goes hand in hand with, when pitching, knowing realisitically who might take interest in the story and going after them. It’s our job as counselors to manage the expectations of clients as well.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:51 am
@Learning – Sure, there are a bunch of free distribution sites and some that are paid – there are also distribution sites that focus on a specialty i.e. european, christian, hispanic etc.
We have a pretty comprehensive list on our dashboard here: http://www.prchannel.com/dashboard/pr.html#distributionservicesfree – so I would start by taking a look at those sites and see what makes a good fit, PR.com is also a good place to start.