Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
How To Get Great PR for (Almost) Free
One of the most predictable questions clients ask just before their new site goes live is “How do I get press coverage for my site launch?” My uniform but depressing answer is “Why would you get press coverage for your site launch?”
The harsh reality is that few news outlets are going to cover the launch of a site, because guess what – it isn’t news. New web sites launch daily in their thousands, and no matter how special you think your unique snowflake may be, it just isn’t that special.
Therefore, if you want media coverage, you need to actually make news. Here is how we did that for Ciara Crossan at WeddingDates.ie, where you can search for available reception venues based on your chosen wedding date and location. The hook in Step 2 will be different for every site, but the basic methodology is the same for all the clients I’ve been through this with.
1. Relate your product or service to something current in the news.
We’re diving head first into a recession, and the media has an endless appetite for recession stories. Weddings cost an average of 20K, so there’s probably a news story nicely nestled between big ticket items and topical budget cutting that we can tease out.
2. Find or create a hook that legitimately ties in your business.
To create our news story, we designed the 2008 Wedding Budget Survey using a free PollDaddy survey, and asked brides and grooms if the recession was impacting their wedding budgets. Ciara got a lovely prize sponsored by one of her hotels to lure 100 people in for the survey, and then we crunched all the data to get some nice beefy stats.
3. Write a really good press release.
There are two tricks here. The first is: do not write a press release. Instead, write the story you want the papers to run. (See press release here.) Format it like a press release and call it a press release, but make it easy for busy journalists to see the whole story by writing it yourself – preferably really well.
The second trick is to make the press release about your news story but work your client into it so seamlessly that it is almost impossible to cover one without the other. When done well, you’ll have about a 90% success rate with this.
4. Distribute it to a hand-picked media list.
Ciara’s homework assignment while I was doing 1, 2 and 3 was to buy all the papers and magazines for a full two weeks and start pulling names and contact details for people and editors covering this kind of story. Regional contact details came from the book. We targeted lifestyle, business and women’s sections of national and local newspapers and magazines.
5. Be available to respond to media calls and emails.
Ciara got loads of calls and contacts after sending out her release. Some outlets just ran the press release; others were more interested and called for interviews and sent photographers. Some ran the survey story and some ran more general pieces about her. It doesn’t matter; they would never have run any of these stories if she’d simply sent out a standard new website release.
So the press release did its job and generated several news stories:
- The Sun
- The Echo (full page in Women on Wednesday)
- The Cork Independent
- The Kingdom
- The Kerryman
- The Corkman
Bridal mags print quarterly, so we’re still waiting to see what, if anything, pops up there, but that’s a nice result with a good regional spread.
One thing I would encourage anyone to do before embarking on a campaign like this, however, is to really consider the benefit of traditional press. Because honestly, for a lot of businesses, there is no benefit. Read that again: there is no benefit.
Newspaper mentions and even radio and television coverage will not result in the traffic bump on your site that you expect. Let’s face it - The Sunday Business Post is not The Colbert Report, so if you’re hoping for a Colbert Bump from a mention in the Irish media, you’re likely to be sadly disappointed. Online links are likely to bring you far more traffic, so for most small businesses, time is better invested generating online coverage than offline coverage.
However, there are at least two instances where it is worth pursuing traditional media:
- Investors – If you have a pool of investors or a board of directors, these people just love being handed a big fat press clippings file. It’s a tangible result they understand.
- Stakeholders – In Ciara’s case, the hotels listing on her site are her stakeholders, and all this press lends huge credibility when she goes out to sell to them. As Mulley points out, this kind of traditional PR is about reputation.
I am not a professional PR person and I don’t have the contacts that might have resulted in more national coverage for this story. However, I’ve also seen some of the big PR agency price tags, and I’m pretty confident that with our little DIY press campagn, we got 80% of the bang for about 10% of the buck. If you’re a bigger company or situated more offline than online, it’s probably worth it to bring professional PR on board. But if you’re bootstrapping your online business, it’s worth knowing that like Irish brides, you can DIY it for less.
15 Dec 2008
| In: Boot Camp + Marketing | Tags:Free, Marketing, PR
Excellent post, a must-read for any new startup. Will definitely be diverting some traffic this way…
15.12.2008, 2:30 pmFantastic post, really valuable information. Thanks.
15.12.2008, 2:51 pmI really enjoyed reading this article. Very helpful and insightful. Thanks very much for it.
15.12.2008, 3:44 pmGreat post. I hope it is well read
15.12.2008, 8:30 pmNice ideas – well written release and good results. Also will bet Ciara will be contacted when those wedding seasonal coverage times pop up!
15.12.2008, 11:03 pmExcellent! Finding the time to do all of this is the hard part. Needs to be moved up on the priority list if needed! Thanks.
16.12.2008, 12:33 amNice post. Link to http://www.weddingdates.ie is incorrect though.
16.12.2008, 10:33 amOne thing I really loved about the coverage of WeddingDates in the newspapers was that “mammies” and friends will cut it out and give it to women who are getting married. Old school viral!
The experience for LouderVoice is that newspaper mentions cause minimal traffic increase. Generally it just means that recruiters and ad sellers in other newspapers ring us. By comparison, radio slots cause big bursts of traffic because listeners are often in front of their computers and immediately check us out.
17.12.2008, 9:55 am[...] A great write-up from Sabrina on getting free PR. [...]
18.12.2008, 9:04 amConor hit the nail on the head, newspapers features (http://tinyurl.com/3z9fa8) have never really done much for our website traffic, but the resultant media interest and radio interviews cause great bursts of traffic. A press clippings file is also great to have for potential and existing customers. It’s nice to send out an email alerting everyone to the fact that there’s a write up about you.
I haven’t tried it yet for sending out releases but I have used press releases from http://www.irishpressreleases.ie for magazine articles, so that’s always worth a shot, you never know who’ll pick it up and print it. For traditional type businesses I think it’s also good to use traditional PR methods as your client base will also use them. Then (note to self) stop reading about what you should do and just do it! But check out this interesting tweet first though……….
19.12.2008, 11:50 amI’m dissappointed
02.01.2009, 4:00 am“no matter how special you think your unique snowflake may be, it just isn’t that special” I thought all the ones we made were. ;-( It’s not that bad the annual snowflake season is now closed, but love will soon be in the air with the coming of Valentines day.
Great post Sabrina, with pointers that appear so obvious that everyone should be able to work it out for themselves, but unfortunately we don’t.
What excellent advice and so well written. With this much effort put in yet being able to make it sound like such a doddle, you deserve all the coverage you received ++ and dozens more small biz clients too. Thanks for sharing!
08.01.2009, 11:59 pmSorry, guys, it’s been MANIC around here and the holidays almost killed me so I’m late to come back and say thanks for all the kudos and the nice feedback and excellent points about the advantages of doing these campaigns.
All input very gratefully received!
Fantastic post,
This may be an obvious question but is there a resource out there that has contact details for papers like The Kerryman etc.. or is it just a matter of going to Easons and picking up every newspaper there?
Thanks, and keep up the great work
31.01.2009, 3:35 pm