Thinking You Have Nothing Newsworthy is a Huge Mistake
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Our client sells a line of plastic welding tools which combine heated air and pressure to weld plastic. They can be used for repairing tanks and vessels, automotive bumpers, personal watercraft, canoes, snow mobiles; you name it. Virtually anything made of plastic.
While publicizing these plastic welding kits for different applications, it occurred to me: the common thread to all of them is plastic welding rod. So I thought, why not publicize plastic welding rod by itself? At first the client balked because it is a commodity. But, the idea seemed logical to me. Customers who purchase plastic welding rod would be become prospects for plastic welding kits. Besides which, plastic welding rod is a neat consumable; similar to razor blades for Gillette razors.
I love preparing news releases for commodity products because very few companies bother doing it. Most people figure everybody knows what plastic welding rod is, so why bother. How ironic, not publicizing what people need routinely. Exactly the wrong attitude! What I did was prepare a news release featuring the rod, materials, variations, configurations, etc., and collaborated with my photographer to create a very colorful and eye-catching photograph that would not be market-specific.
The news release was very successful and the plastic welding rod received a great deal of press coverage in-print and online including a leading automotive consumer publication and several major industrial publications and websites.
What happened next was interesting. After seeing several press clips, I called the client and said, “You’ve had some terrific product publicity for the plastic welding rod, you must have sold a ton of it.” “I didn’t sell any, he said.” There was silence on the other end of the phone and then laughter! “What are you laughing about,” I asked. “Your response,” he said. After I told him that I was stunned, he continued, “The fascinating thing about publicizing the plastic welding rod is that we sold more plastic welding kits as a result of that publicity then we did when we publicized the actual kits themselves!
A classic example of integrated marketing, I thought. The product publicity for the plastic welding rod drove traffic to the company’s website and the visitors clicked-thru to the plastic welding kits and ordered them. Again, the result was selling more kits then publicizing the kits themselves! The beauty of this approach was the measurability. Our client could identify which publications and websites produced the most leads and their corresponding ratio to sales.
It is impossible to predict what product is going to generate the most valuable leads for you. The key is to publicize all categories of products and evaluate the web traffic, click-thrus, and resulting orders. In the meantime, your company will receive a lot of exposure in-print and online, plus inbound links, and you might be surprised by the marketing information and sales results you receive.
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Steven M. Stroum is the founder and president of Venmark International, an industrial and technical product publicity firm located in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He was appointed one of 18 Small Business Advisors to the Governor of Massachusetts, toured South Korea as an Ambassador for the International Rotary Foundation, was
a member of the Norbert Weiner Forum at Tufts University to study the impact of technology on society, and also listed in "Who's Who in the East." www.venmarkinternational.com
For more information contact: NEWS@venmarkinternational.com
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