Malcom Company sells a line of plastic welding tool kits and I’ve been preparing innovative news releases about the kits for about 20 years.  The tools combine heated air and pressure to weld plastic and 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 that the common thread to all of them is plastic welding rod.  So I thought, why not publicize plastic welding rod by itself?

Preparing news releases for commodity products is a terrific opportunity because 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 happened next was fascinating.  By publicizing the plastic welding rod, Malcom sold more plastic welding kits as a result of that publicity then they did when we publicized the actual kits themselves! The product publicity for plastic welding rod drove traffic to the company’s website and the visitors clicked-thru to the plastic welding kits and purchased them online.

The beauty of this contrarian approach was the measurability.  Malcom was able to identify which publications and websites produced the most leads from the plastic welding rod publicity and their corresponding ratio to sales. The big lesson here is that there isn’t always a linear relationship between what is product is publicized and what the resulting sales are.  It is impossible to predict what product is going to generate the most valuable sales leads for you.  Therefore, the key is to publicize all categories of products and evaluate the web traffic, click-thrus, and resulting orders.

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 © 2013 Steven M. Stroum