Evaluating the Range of Publicity Tactics and Publicity Options


Authors and publishing have to rely on communications tactics to do the job of creating public and trade awareness of their creations.


There is a range of choices available and it’s hard to evaluate and decide
which one or combination of tactics will produce the optimum return on
investment.


One thing is for certain, there are very few publicity services that will
place a guarantee of any meaningful nature on what they do for you. The few that do may extract a substantial fee for those services. You will see best professional effort. You won’t see guaranteed placement.


There’s not a whole lot you can do about it either, since very simply, you are paying for specialized communications services. That’s time, people, expertise and technology. The services can’t force a media to run with your message.

These folks are publishers who survive and thrive on advertising and
subscriptions. They are making educated decisions that determine their
livelihood. Quality and content and what’s in it for my audience is all that counts to them.


This is indeed what the publicists have to learn. Pleasing clients means
pleasing media. It comes together when you please media.


So can you please media? Can you hire or contract with a service that can
please your target media?


There is a wide range of skill, experience and documented success out there in the world of publicists, and if you search you can find knowledgeable and persuasive, and successful practitioners who know what they are doing and can do an effective job present media with what they need to make a favorable decision. But not all services and publicist are created equal. Some have special expertise and credibility. Others are simply better for certain purposes and not for others.


I think you have to shop and match the service with the message and purpose. You need to really think through the best way to get the message to the target media. There are consequences to communicating each way. Think the consequences through. Then make your decision to use a service.


If it makes sense, then you use it. If it doesn’t you don’t.


Getting publicity to me is just like selling products or services. The mental processes are parallel but are just aimed at producing different results. But basically the “sale” is the same, and your give them persuasive reasons and they decide to use the product, service, or ideas you offer them.


Compare and contrast direct marketing, which is aimed at producing sales, to getting publicity, which is aimed at producing media hits, which will then hopefully produce sales.


If you think about product marketing you’ll realize that the buying public
often has so much information that they may end up ignoring or not even
hearing most marketing messages. Thus selling a product is often a difficult stepwise process and a direct response campaign will rarely be cost effective unless a significant number of targeted recipients become actual customers.


The same is true for any publicity campaign, where your targets are key media decision- makers, who are deciding what to tell their audience. However, here you are simply convincing another publisher to give you space in a publication or time on a show.


Just like a direct marketer has to create a message and target the best
prospects, a publicist has to rely on targeted distribution and messaging
tactics to get their promotional message or proposal in front of the right
media decision makers.


There are many options and ways to accomplish this task. Each has a cost,
some benefits and some drawbacks.


Public relations firms - Full service professionals at a small or medium sized company who are trained and experienced at providing the gamut of actions needed to conduct a campaign of limited time and duration. They will write the media communications, transmit them and follow up to confirm media interest, placement of stories, booking interviews. Cost may vary but will typically run $5,000 to $10,000 per month for several months. What they do exactly is often times a matter of negotiation.


Pay for performance firms - These are specialized PR firms who will get you
interviews and feature stories but will charge you for success. Costs will
vary on the number and quality of the shows or articles. You can pay anywhere from $100 per interview up to $25,000 per placement on major national syndicated prime time shows. The menu of options also includes things like a suite of satellite TV interviews, where you can do 25 to 50 news time interviews in major metropolitan areas of 1 to 3 minutes a piece for $15,000 to 25,000.


Specialty Book Publicists - will do specialized public relations work on a
task or contract basis. You can hire them to do various tasks or services over an extended period of time. Costs will run from $1,000 a week to $4,000 a week, depending on their reputation and what you ask them to do. Some have minimum project sizes of $4,000 to $6,000. To run a decent three-month campaign will run $12,000 to $16,000.


Publicity Publications


Radio TV Interview Report is a bi-weekly publication that typically contains 50- to 100- quarter-page, half-page or full-page advertisements for book authors. The copy is written by RTIR with varying input and approval by the client. Their style is one of their claimed advantages because it appears to cover a spectrum of important media needs. Cost runs from $877 a month for three consecutive issues for a half page to up to $3700 for a full page depending on placement. They also encourage people to take out the ads for up to six months. Upside - These publications are transmitted by mail to 12,000 media offices and circulated in media offices. Media read the ads and call to book authors and request review copies. Downside - RTIR is a magazine format with 50 to 100 competing ads and is easily cast aside by media during a busy day. The media contact is rarely the prime point of contact. It’s usually an RTIR representative. Any given ad competes with all the rest and size and placement often times overwhelm content.


Internet Publicity Services


PR Web an online service that takes a news release and transmits the title
with a link to the text of the news release to a wide range of online
sources. The text is searchable for two to three weeks on the most common search engines. Media allegedly can see the title and view the news release. Cost varies from $0 to $150 or more and will determine the scope of postings on the Internet.

Upside your release goes out on the Internet and is searchable for all of two weeks.

Downside - Internet black holes. Who actively uses the news search engines anyway? You'll get very few meaningful media hits that you’ll be able to truly attribute to the effort. What are these vaporous hits worth? Can you believe the data if it really translates into nothing tangible?


Broadcast Interview Report Experts Yearbook popular with speakers, presented in an ezine format with leads and paragraphs with links to more detailed web page releases.


PR Leads operated by Dan Janal. Provides email notification of media and
journalists looking for stories and experts on various subjects that have been assigned by magazines or news services for research, analysis, and
commentary.

Best response is to pitch back your expertise on appropriate topics with a
timely and colorful sound bite that catches their attention. Cost depends of your topic but runs $99 a month or $1200 a year. Upside lots of journalists writing on lots of subjects. Your Rolodex will grow. Downside - not many media takers for what could be a lot of effort. Lots of freelance writers working on contracted articles with narrow subjects. You are in competition with lots of people responding and don’t get to pitch your own agenda, it has to fit in with the media agenda. It’s just that these are media leads, and these media are usually on a tight mission, and it will be hard to align their mission and yours. You can get quoted in media frequently if you get good at being a quotable expert. That same brevity may not be what you want in terms of effective personal branding.

Want to learn about Expertizing? Call Fern Reiss she’s the master at this fine and useful art.


News Release Distribution Services - There are a number of these and it is
virtually a cottage industry that was created ten years ago when the Internet was born.


Business Wire and PR News Wire - both offer targeted news release distribution via fax and email, both now average about $1.00 per media. Neither offer meaningful interaction with a professional publicist and neither give you contact information on the actual media targeted. Both transmit a lot of news releases nationwide and post widely on the Internet. Their volume and breath of make it difficult to differentiate your offering from the masses. Do media read these in any depth? Do media research these in any major way?


Direct Contact PR - My own service provides custom targeted publicity services via fax and email. Costs begin at 25 cents per fax and 15 cents per email. I offer discounts with quantity, provides professional copywriting and consultation, and you receive the names and phone numbers of the media on your custom targeted list. Upside You can send full articles with graphics mail merge via email to custom targeted media lists in just about any category (print, radio or TV). You control the message, the content and help the targeting process, and the timing. It’s perhaps the least expensive and most cost effective method for reaching the right media. Downside there are lots of media in this country and when you prioritize by reducing a budget you end up targeting the most competitive media. So even when you target, the average national outreach will hit 3,000 to 5,000 media and cost $300 to $500. You can do geographic targets by city or dma to support events or road tours and the average will be $75 to $100 depending on the size of the city.


Ereleases & Emediawire - Two of the many email news release services and the Internet that has sprung up in the cottage industry over the last ten years. Latest prices are $399 for a news release distribution and $599 for
distribution and copywriting. Upside - Ereleases claims they send your
release to an opt-in database of 30,000 journalists, and that it includes a
distribution through PR News Wire. Downside - They do not appear to provide you with an actual list of media on their list. So you have no control and actual way to target carefully.


Media Databases & Do It Yourself - if you know how to write your own news
releases you can buy media lists


Bacons Media Source the mother of all media databases. Upside for
serious PR practitioners there is no better media database. They report that they now receive over 6500 media corrections a day. Downside - $2800 a year to become a licensee. You can also purchase custom media lists if you wish average cost will be $1.00 per listing. The database is also difficult to learn how to use and targeting well takes a lot of learning and skill. Even with all ongoing attempts to keep Bacons current and up-to-date, the task is a monumental one and there is a 6 to 10 percent error rate. Still that’s not bad in a nation with an estimated 650,000 media contacts.


Gebbies This is Mark Gebbie’s well-known database of newspapers, radio and TV $375 on CD, $550 online. Upside - his addresses for the media. Downside - his relative lack of current specialty editors and current data.


Gordon’s Radio Database A self maintained database of radio talk shows and
stations. Upside - Gordon’s radio list is well maintained and is a useful
cut, and produces well for many people. Downside - His list isn’t comprehensive. There are over 8500 radio talk shows and stations in the US & Canada. Gordon’s emphasis is on the top 100 media markets. Some publicist believe that this is all that matters. In my experience, book sales appear more to track with the quality of the interview and less the market size, arbitron rating or wattage.

I continue to see small station interviews in captive markets outsell major station interviews in major markets. I attribute this to the limited
attention span big city listeners have for radio programming when they have so many available listening options. Of course, a good interview in a major metro area may do quite well. Cost varies but is $250 at latest report.


Online research There are lots of online media databases to choose from, and the longer they’ve been online the less accurate the data. Upside - Cost - $0 free if you have the time. Downside - Cost per unit effort is low. Quality and effectiveness will vary but the bottom line is that you won’t be able to do much more than dabble even with concerted effort. There are simply too many media and media often times simply don’t respond to email from the web sites.


Discussion:


Most of the successful publicists are cutting back on expensive advertising
type publicity campaigns and switching to targeted direct promotional control and command programs to convey their messages.


This is because you get to control your message, the media targets you send
your message to, and when and how you send it, and you can manage the effort carefully.


Reality is that the cost and effort required to achieve PR success has
increased dramatically and continues to rise.


Therefore you must select which method is best for you to reach your
particular target.


You need to decide to place your message where people will look for your type of product. To do this you have to become aware of the customers changing habits and lifestyle.


The RTIR ad may not be the right medium for books and products that are best suited for trade magazines and specialty publications where people are reading for information on specific topics.


Newspapers work best when you have a hot topic and a call for immediate action that produces an immediate impact on lifestyle.


The RTIR ad approach may be a good choice when you have a topic that is
easy to educate or entertain with in a short period of time. The audience is radio listeners kids, teens, housewives.


The drawback of targeting your audience through the wrong medium is that you don’t get back a significant enough return on your investment.


Press releases and news releases give you the opportunity to announce new
products, services, big events, just about any major activity or interest.
You can pack them with informational stories to build an expert image, attract prospects to your ideas or products, and build credibility.


If you hit the right media with the right message you can get a reasonably
good response which parallels the level of interest you will see in a comparable direct marketing campaign.


However no matter what you choose, you cannot afford to be passive about it. You should not rely solely on the single and for the most part passive
communications tactics.


To produce real tangible results, to kick passive media over the line, and
trigger action where there is none, it may be that a human being must simply get involved.


Just like closing sales will be dramatically improved by personal contact
between a sales person and the prospective customer, a publicist can
dramatically improve the response by calling and following up with media to
investigate and ascertain media needs, address possible objections,
strategically identify the information that can be brought to bear to satisfy the media’s needs or desires.


Thus in addition to an effective targeting and messaging program, every smart publicist also needs an effective follow up program because the cost of obtaining a lead and confirming a feature article or an interview has
increased dramatically over the past few years. Following up and getting personal is the only way to complete the communications outreach process and receive that crucial bit of feedback and intelligence that allows you to achieve closure one way or the other.


So be prepared to shake things up if your promotions and publicity efforts are not performing up to your expectations or desires. These costs can be
considerable and the effects of these expenditures need to be carefully
monitored to ensure break even plus.


The bottom line is that the passive publicity outreach techniques may simply not cut it any more. You may have to integrate it with other things you do.

You may have to get active in new and uncomfortable ways -- call media, send them questions, follow through with more information, visit them, implement a host of radical tactics to bring their attention on to you and develop mega-credibility.


So after you’ve sent out a news release, get out your targeted media list
and a pad and paper, and create an outbound marketing script that brings your topic into sharp focus.


Then call your key target media and give them a memorable marketing message
that reinforces your competitive entertainment, educational and informational advantages.


Often what will happen is that you’ll buy yourself a whole lot of credibility and they will then choose to use you because you’ve finally given them a good feeling that they can place their trust in you.


And that’s when you’ll get the publicity you seek.