To make headway against an established market leader or bring a new product to market, you need to reach a large number of potential customers repeatedly with your message. To accomplish this task, Power PR employs advanced marketing publicity techniques to take each client through the following 5 steps. Through a sustained program, many of our clients achieve record expansion.
Impressions
Like launching a rocket into orbit, it takes a tremendous amount of initial energy to launch a company or product from obscurity to a state of recognition.
The first goal of a marketing publicity program is simply to drive up the number of impressions – or number of times your potential customers receive your message – as quickly, broadly, and inexpensively as possible.
Of course, the message is of utmost importance.
You will waste time and money if prospects don’t believe your message. To increase the credibility of your message, we utilize the power of objective, third-party endorsements by interviewing and including testimonials in our articles from your customers and industry experts.
As a result, Power PR is able to carefully construct powerful feature articles, customer testimonials, and new product press releases that deliver your key message.
Steve Johnson, Marketing Director, DPI Labs
Power PR has shown a consistent ability to place within industry-respected publications various high-quality, detailed articles about our products and services. The result has been increased exposure into the minds of prospects and customers–hundreds if not thousands of major decision-makers interested in our products.
Power PR tracks impressions by considering the quantity of published articles (we guarantee 60 per year, the minimum for our full product publicity program) as well as the circulation of those publications. These statistics give you a good idea of how many potential customers we reach with your message.
If you aren’t generating 60 or more published articles per year about your company or products, you are not creating the quantity of credible, persuasive impressions required to influence your prospects.
Increased Brand Awareness
Getting your message out to your potential customers and then reinforcing the message through repetition is the only way to increase broad market awareness for your product. As long as the publications are appropriate and reach your target audience, the concept is to drive up published articles in print and electronic media month after month until it reaches the maximum sustainable level.
The message must then be repeated – over and over – to generate an increasing awareness of your product.
Why is repetition so critical to creating brand awareness? How many times do you have to see a promotion before you really get interested in a product? 3 times? 10 times?
Maybe a better question to ask is: “have you ever purchased anything the very first time you heard about it?” If you’re like most people, the answer is “no.” In fact, studies have shown that prospects don’t even register the message until it has been repeated 3 times or more.
Eric Rosenthal, Magnet Paints
Seeing your product over and over in multiple places gets people talking. That’s what Marketing Publicity does. I get calls from people saying, ‘I see you everywhere, so I finally decided to call you
Power PR works to repeat your key message through a series of article formats including:
- Full-length feature articles
- Customer testimonials
- Application stories
- New product releases
- News announcements
- “How To” articles
Each of the articles we write is then called on by one of Power PR’s dedicated Media Relations Specialists (MRS). The MRS contacts each editor, in person, which stands in stark contrast to the “blast fax” technique employed by most PR firms. With over 15,000 articles to our credit, we have found our technique generates a higher number of published articles.
By sustaining a high volume of credible articles in the media, your prospects are sure to encounter and read the articles several times, allowing the message to register and impinge. In this manner, you can potentially communicate with millions of prospects at an extremely low overall cost per prospect.
Sales Leads
Compelling, persuasive news articles and feature stories about your products, published in volume, in front of potential customers, will generate qualified sales leads.
Once the leads begin to roll in, it will be up to your sales staff to quickly and expertly follow up and “sell” these prospects.
Fortunately, marketing publicity will not only bring in a volume of qualified sales leads but also improve the quality of leads – so the sales staff spends more time with prospects inclined to buy your product or service.
Doug Commette, Gusmer Corporation
I was speaking to one of the salesmen recently, and he told me that the phone was ringing off the hook and that a lot of the responses were coming from articles that they knew were only from your efforts. Keep up the good work.
These sales leads are often superior because:
- As opposed to ads that can communicate very little about a product, published articles can educate the prospect about a “difficult-to-explain” technology, provide the prospect with a contextual explanation to establish the need for the product, highlight industry trends, etc. This means that prospects are typically much more educated about your product upon first contact.
- As opposed to most forms of promotion, marketing publicity is more credible with prospects because it comes from a third-party source (a publication) and includes powerful third-party testimonials and endorsements.
- When there is a large quantity of published articles, the prospect often feels more comfortable that the company is a legitimate player. Without this market awareness, prospects may have a healthy dose of skepticism because “they’ve never heard of your company or product.”
With the quantity of published articles generated and repeated over time, you begin to build mass awareness for your product(s) in your target markets and a large quantity of superior leads will result.
Sales Generation
If you want strong, steadily increasing sales, improving profit margins, and decreasing cost of sales throughout the life of your company, the Power PR marketing publicity program is the answer.
Ann Price, Motek Information Systems
Power PR produced many large, feature articles in high-profile industry publications that have favorably impacted our bottom line via substantial increases in lead and sales.
Marketing publicity has a major impact on the sales cycle, including:
- Marketing publicity improves the efficiency of sales staff so that they can spend more time speaking with qualified prospects about bids, quotes, and proposals instead of making cold calls or circumventing gatekeepers.
- Marketing publicity shortens the sales cycle length because the prospect is typically more educated about your product.
- Marketing publicity “pre-sells” the client – moving them closer to a sale prior to first contact.
- Marketing publicity can remind a past customer that they need a new or improved product and stimulate a call-in.
- Published articles generated by marketing publicity can be shown to the client during the sales cycle to further the sale and add credibility and weight to the sales presentation.
Sales will result as sales leads accumulate and your sales staff follows up.
Market Expansion
As sales increase to new heights, market expansion will occur.
Here are some examples of Power PR clients that have achieved expansion through marketing publicity:
- Our client, Gusmer, announced record sales last year after 2 years with Power PR.
- Our client, the National Food Laboratory, announced record sales last year after 2 years with Power PR.
- Our client, Spiralock, announced a record sales year after 1.5 years with Power PR.
- Our client in the electric power market set record sales in 2002, 2003, 2004 with Power PR.
- Another client went from $15 million annual gross to over $100 million annually over 7 years – setting record sales at least three times over that span.
- Our client, Magnet Paints, experienced 600% growth and set a sales record after 1 year with Power PR.
- Our client, DynaCon, set record sales in 2003 and outdid themselves in 2004.
What is their secret? These companies launched an aggressive, sustained marketing publicity program to deliver their message, and it led to the generation of leads and sales. And expansion occurred.
However, expansion and growth can also be fragile. Expansion must be maintained by continuing to communicate and repeat your message through marketing publicity.
Just as it has already been proven for these and a large number of other companies, a well-crafted marketing publicity program is an increasingly vital element of any marketing plan. Look for marketing publicity to gain increasing acceptance as the millennium’s newest tool to help any organization expand its business.
