Marketing - Publicity
Streetwise Tips

Streetwise Tips on Publicity

Better than advertising
Consumers tend to pay a lot more attention to feature coverage in newspapers, television, and radio than they do to advertising. A full-page feature article on your business in your local newspaper may generate several times the amount of inquiries or sales as a full-page advertisement.

For example, many years ago the New York Post ran a small feature article in their business section about one of our books, The New York Job-Bank, headlined "Here's the book for your job hunt!" Even though the story was only about three column inches, hundreds of books were sold as a result. Over the next few weeks I ran an exact copy of the article, several times in the same newspaper as an advertisement. the only qualification to printing the article as an ad was the small "disclaimer" at the top of the piece reading "Advertisement". No sales could be traced to the advertisement even though it was virtually identical to the highly successful feature story.

In advertising
Publicity can also be used to make your advertising copy more effective. For example, movie reviews almost always contain quotes from reviewers. Even if you are not selling movies you can use favorable quotes from print, radio, and/or television interviews in your advertising copy. You may even want to reproduce the entire interview, frame it, and place it in your place of business. And definitely consider sending copies to your customers.

Keep in mind, though, if you are reproducing all or part of an interview, you should contact the publication or media outlet where the story appeared to get reprint permission. Even though the interview is about your business, the publication or media outlet has copyrighted the material and effectively owns it. Very few publications or media outlets refuse "reprint" permissions or levy a charge for reprinting. There are exceptions, however. Consumer Reports, for instance, is concerned about maintaining the fairness of its image and completely prohibits the reprinting of any information from that publication.

Like selling
Getting publicity is like selling in many ways. You usually need to make a lot of phone calls to get publicity. You need to make a presentation, overcome any objections, and close the sale. In making publicity calls you will get a lot of voice mail or be stalled at the receptionist's or assistant's desk. You will certainly experience a lot of rejection.

But if you can succeed in getting publicity for your company, it can go a long way toward making your business succeed.