It has long been said, “In the real estate business the three most important factors when selling a property are location, location, and location.” In marketing, the three most important factors are: repetition, repetition, and repetition. Therefore, the first rule B2B marketers should never forget is that repetition creates sales opportunities.

Why? Because repetition puts your products in front of prospective customers when their need arises. As B2B marketers, we have no control over whether our prospective customers are “ready to make a change” and try our product or service. They may be happy today with their current vendor, but tomorrow might bring a price increase, botched delivery, or another sales opportunity may be created as a result of growth, a personnel change, or some other factor out of our control. In addition to increasing your odds of visibility at an opportune time, repetition reinforces perceptions about your products and company, builds brands, and most importantly, generates sales inquiries.

The real marketing challenge, therefore, is: to compete for mindshare and “be in front of that prospective customer” when such an opportunity arises and to do it in the most cost-effective way! There is no magic pill when it comes to meeting this marketing challenge. However, the closest thing is a well-executed product publicity campaign. As David Meerman Scott wrote in “The New Rules of Marketing & PR,” don’t just send news releases when big news is happening; find good reasons to send them all the time.

So, the first rule for creating a well-executed publicity campaign is to see it as making a contribution to the exact reason why the media exists: to bring readers and website visitors relevant, high-quality content. Create news releases that help editors and web hosts develop their content and editorial by illustrating how your products solve problems for their readers and website visitors. That’s what makes publicity so effective.

In his book, “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding,” author, Al Ries pointed out “The publicity message has credibility because it comes from a presumably unbiased source. Furthermore, you expect the media to tell you about things you’ve never heard of. That is what news is all about.” If an editor or web host decides to publish news about your company, it is because they judge it to be newsworthy.

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© 2015 Steven M. Stroum