Well OK, maybe not priceless but certainly a lot of value.
A lot of so-called marketing and PR gurus have written articles recently about how the traditional press release is dead. Nothing can be further from the truth. Fact is they are simply wrong. As are the experts who say traditional marketing is dead.
What makes us authorities? Glad you asked.
We at HRmarketer.com recently issued a press release about our 36 consecutive months of sales growth and distributed it to a select group of journalists and over our HRmarketer Direct2Net wire service. A week later we receive a call from a company wanting to learn more about our service. When we asked how they found about us, they said they saw a news blurb about us in the local newspaper. Curious, I phoned the newspaper and the editor said they pulled the story from the Internet and ran it because it was about a local company (us). How did the press release get to the Internet? Through HRmarketer's Direct2Net wire service.
It took us about an hour to write the press release and about 15 minutes to distribute via HRmarketer. Our return? The prospect ended up buying an HRmarketer membership for $2,995 per year.
Still think the traditional press release is dead?
We have made countless postings on this blog about the value of distributing regular press releases (at least one per month) and it amazes us how so few HR vendors do this. Will every release get you a feature article in the Wall Street Journal or HR Executive? Of course not. In fact, you may never get that. But that's not the point.
Marketing is about selling more of your products to more people more often. To do this, of course, you need to generate a lot of qualified sales leads. How you do this is to repeatedly deliver a consistent message to your buyers. The message you deliver must support your company's branding objectives and provide a crisp, clean value proposition that differentiates your product from the hundreds of other HR solutions in the marketplace. You repeatedly deliver the message because a buyer typically needs to see it 6+ times before they actually recognize your company and take action.
Which leads us back to the press release which is just one component of public relations which in turn is just one component of a marketing plan.
Every HR vendor’s marketing department should at a minimum be doing the following: Press releases, direct marketing, event participation, speaking, white papers, byline placements, webinars and advertising. Why? Because this is how you build awareness of your company/product and generate qualified sales leads which is the purpose of marketing and how marketing professionals should be measured.
Press releases do work. So does direct mail. So does event participation, white papers, byline articles, etc.
What's interesting is contrary to what many marketing experts predicted, the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed much over the years, nor do they vary between companies in different markets or of different sizes. Only the budgets do. The activities, listed above, work as well today as they did 50 years ago. What has changed is how technology redefines and impacts the execution of these tactics. For example, Blogs and search engine optimization (SEO) didn’t exist a few years ago but are now core components of any marketing initiative. Yes, Webinars are new but that is just a variation of event participation, Pay-per-click is just a variation of advertising and eNewsletters are just a variation of direct marketing.
Our point is this stuff works and it is the fundamental reason why we developed HRmarketer, why HRmarketer has enjoyed 36 consecutive months of sales growth and why we are so passionate about helping companies with their marketing and PR.
Thanks for reading.
Some other HRmarketer blog postings you may find interesting include:
Is There Anybody Out There? The Importance of PR in Your Marketing Plan
The Price of Public Relations
The Relevance of Traditional “PR” in Marketing HR Products and Services