Got something you want to use as bait for prospective customers?
Publicity can be a great way to spread awareness of the
availability of your giveaway item. Write a press release
announcing it and highlighting its usefulness to your target
market, and often the media cooperate in getting the word out. It
also works to send a sample of your free report, audio, video,
spreadsheet or whatever to media outlets with a cover sheet
describing where and how people can request it.
Things get tricky, though, when you hope to restrict your bait to
a certain population. It would be rather silly to put out a press
release on the newswires saying, "Anyone who owns a vacation
home can go www.zzz.com to download a free energy efficiency
report." By making such an offer public, it would become known
not only to vacation home owners but also regular homeowners and
those who rent. Anyone reading the press release or the resulting
coverage could request your freebie.
It might seem that you could avoid opening your publicity offer
to the general public by mailing, emailing or faxing your release
about it to your preferred media outlets, such as to Vacation
Home Magazine, instead of distributing it on the newswires.
However, once your offer gets published anywhere, you lose
control over it.
In the early 1990s, I had a giveaway offer published in the
newsletter Bottom Line/Personal. People could get a free copy of
my booklet "6 Steps to Free Publicity" by sending a
self-addressed stamped envelope to a certain address. The free
booklet offer was a wise investment on my part, because Bottom
Line/Personal's subscribers were all paying $39.95 annually for
the publication and thus were good prospects for follow-up
publicity services.
What later happened, though, was that several downmarket
publications picked up the offer and reran it without asking me.
I was extremely annoyed to learn that a book with a title like "Best Free Things" had apparently reprinted the offer. Anyone
who would buy such a book was not likely to hire me to create a
publicity campaign. In fact, I continued to receive
self-addressed stamped envelopes for 10 years after the Bottom
Line/Personal notice ran, mainly from various aftermarket
announcements.
Sometimes you can prevent such problems by making the content of
your bait relevant only to your target audience. For instance, if
you offered a free report called "Maintaining Your Kubota
Tractor So It Stays in Service for More Than 10 Years," few
people not owning Kubota tractors would bother to request it.
In the end, the very aspect of publicity that makes it appealing
can undermine its usefulness when you are trying to accomplish
something very specific. Publicity is an affordable method of
getting the word out because the news media have a constant need
of stories. But the media are in charge of the process after you
hand over ingredients for their work. It's up to them to help
you, ignore you or go against your wishes.
For the individual or organization hoping to target only affluent
customers, I suggest using direct mail rather than publicity to
deliver your offer. Direct mail stays under the radar. It's
controllable. Mail your offer only to high net-worth households,
and the chances remain very good that only high net-worth
households will see it and take advantage of it.
Marcia Yudkin: Is the author of 6 Steps to Free
Publicity, Persuading on Paper, Web Site Marketing Makeover and
eight other books. She has engineered coverage for herself or
her company in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Success,
Women in Business and dozens of newspapers around the world. Get
free access to a one-hour audio recording in which she answers
the most common questions about getting media coverage at: http://www.yudkin.com/publicityideas.htm.