Public Relations: The Unsung Hero of Marketing

I have often referred to public relations as advertising in disguise, because it works so hard to build brand preference but looks for all the world like innocent product and service messaging. That's because there are rules for public relations that provide guidelines on how commercial a message can be to be accepted by a respectable media outlet. However, those rules tend to be somewhat elastic, particularly nowadays when just about anything you throw out at the Internet will be picked up word-for-word by many sites looking to build content to improve their competitive ranking.

The SEO Benefit

And that brings me to the first of many benefits of public relations: Search optimization can be accelerated dramatically through the use of regular news announcements, articles and other PR deployments. As media resources publish your item, they create links back to your site; and the more incoming links to your site, the more favorably Google values your site, bestowing it with an increasingly higher page rank as the number of links grows and, ultimately, a higher search term ranking. This doesn't happen overnight (nothing with Google does), but it's a great way to gradually build a web of internal links that Google judges to be of high value. For more on this, see Jeb's article this month on Links.

What's the best way to disseminate your news? That depends on your goals and price tolerance. There are a number of PR news wire services ranging from free to fairly costly, and as with most things, you get what you pay for. The free or low cost services will allow you to embed up to three anchor links in your press release that point back to your site, but many of the services only post the release on their own site, instead of distributing it to a potentially vast media list. The high end resources will handle distribution to all the most important outlets, which is really the point of the exercise. Assuming you pay PR Newswire $600 - $700 to distribute your release, you may want to be somewhat discriminatory and just use it for important releases, like launching a new product. For everyday news, you might research and assemble your own trade list of editors in the markets you serve. While it takes a little time to do this, once you have it, it's free, and updating it is pretty simple.

The Exposure Benefit

No marketing tactic compares with public relations for the value it delivers in generating exposure for your product or company in both primary and secondary markets. Whether you create your own distribution list or pay someone to disseminate your news, relevant publicity will typically be picked up and published in both print and electronic media by many outlets for a single low fixed cost. Furthermore, the number of venues interested in publishing it will increase if it's really well-written or relevant to that industry. Beyond that, customizing your news to the specific market or media outlet is a great way to get published in underexposed markets, if you can afford a little more time to do that. For instance, your product may be useful in a lot of vertical markets, but if you use keywords in your news release that relate specifically to each market, the editorial recipients will judge that item to be better suited to his/her online magazine or newsletter than if it were simply written for a generic audience.

Brand preference is built in no small way by exposing your company's core value message repetitively to multiple markets via multiple media. Public relations can be a catalyst for a dramatic cross-fire effect of exposure activity, particularly in second and third tier markets which most companies don't have enough budget to reach through paid advertising. Over time, in the most important markets you serve, your brand message will be seen and absorbed by countless decision-makers whom you are unwittingly influencing little by little to think of your company as the go-to expert in your field.

And nothing compares with public relations for cost efficiency. You can write your own news and distribute it for free, if you have the time to develop your own media list. If you don't have the time or the expertise, you can hire a marketing or PR firm to handle it for you for a reasonable fee. And you can raise the stakes even further by employing a news distribution service to reach all the markets in the world for a little more cost. Now compare all this value to any other medium, and PR looks pretty darned good. So why don't more companies use it? Good question!

Contact Alan at agladish@praxisagency.com.