One Free Strategy to Market Your Small Business
Strengths
Press release is another free strategy to reach your small business globally, but sometimes with small charge if you hire someone to write and distribute it. It is still minimal if you want to win big money. Most small businesses don’t do PR is that they don’t know how it’s done. Again, get some coaching, or pay someone to do it for you.
Press is trusted more than advertising. If you read a review that says that a new restaurant is the best thing in civic, there’s some credibility there. We tend to assume that a person who is writing an article is an expert, and that they are an uninterested third party.
You can distribute PR globally. While what you are doing is actually interesting globally, you can distribute your press releases globally. This isn’t necessarily as targeted as your advertising needs to be, but you’re not paying for editorial. By the way, never pay for editorial, and don’t advertise with media that promises to give you editorial while you advertise. This is immoral and transparent – and the credibility of the media will always be in probe.
Weaknesses
You have no control over what the press is actually going to write or say about you. They may spell your name wrong, they may get some details wrong, they may choose to focus on something you don’t want to highlight. In general this isn’t a big issue, as long as they are saying good things about you.
PR tends to be single exposure. Unless circumstances are really unusual, the press is not going to run the same story over and over again. I have been involved with an exception to that. I was doing something that corresponded with a current event and the press came to me again and again over 4 weeks for TV interviews. This was pure timing. It’s difficult to engineer press like that without seeming mercenary.
There is no guarantee that you’re even going to get coverage. I was called to do a TV interview once and rushed into the city to meet the reporter and photographer. On my way in ,the reporter called me on my cell phone to tell me they were pulling the story because there was breaking news that they had to go cover. Depending on what’s going on you may get tons of press or none at all.
You see that small business advertising and PR are different things. You need them both, and you need to work at both of them consistently. They are two important tools in your small business marketing toolbox.
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