The Value Of Public Relations: Increase Your Credibility And Visibility With Mickie Kennedy

Public Relations is a powerful tool in boosting your reputation, credibility, and visibility. But how can you craft a positive image and build strong relationships with your audience? That is what Mickie Kennedy is here for in this episode. Mickie has been the founder of eReleases for more than 24 years. He shows great expertise in explaining the value of public relations and how it can help you increase your visibility and credibility. Do you want to stand out? Join Mickie because he unlocks the door of opportunity to help you generate more value in today’s conversation.

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The Value Of Public Relations: Increase Your Credibility And Visibility With Mickie Kennedy

I’m going to put my student hat on this episode because we’re going to get into an area of marketing that I have no background in. I came from the corporate world. We had our own communications department. If I felt like the world needed to know something, I hit the email with the send button. Sent it off and let somebody else worry about it. Since I was in charge of it, I didn’t bother to take the time to learn about it. I thought it might be appropriate, particularly, for those in the small-business medium-sized business world to bring on an expert in the area of public relations. There’s that word again.

What does that exactly mean? What is it all about? Those are the kinds of questions that we’re going to get in with my guest. His name is Mickie Kennedy. He comes to us from this great state of Maryland. This is North of Baltimore, I grew up as a Baltimore Orioles fan and I love the area. One quick short little story. I was a Brooks Robinson fan. When I was about 7 or 8 years old, my family moved to outside Philly. My dad’s like, “I’m going to get tickets to the Orioles game get it right at third base. He can see Brooks Robinson is a childhood hero.”

I couldn’t sleep tonight before. I was excited. I was tired as heck when I caught up in the morning, but we got in the car and drove to ours down the Baltimore, got to our seats and it was the first game that Doug DeCinces’s played and Brooks sat in the Dugout the whole game. It was the end of an era for Brooks Robinson and was starting to make his journey to retirement. I couldn’t been disappointed. I’m pissed off. Mickie, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Let me read Mickie’s bio and we’ll dive into the conversation. Mickie believes that was some effort in a little money to possibilities are endless. He’s an expert in helping small businesses, authors and startups increase their visibility and credibility. He founded eReleases many years ago after realizing that small businesses desperately need a press release service they can afford and giving them access to the media into a national newswire all with a personal touch.

He holds a Master’s in Fine Arts and Creative Writing with Emphasis and Poetry from George Mason. His press releases have resulted in articles being published in the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Bloomberg and many other prestigious news outlets. That being said, Mickie, welcome to the show. I can’t thank you enough for taking the valuable resource that limited resource you have in your life called time and to come to share your wisdom with the community.

 

 

I’m glad to be here.

Mickie’s Origin Story

I always like to start off with. pickup point in your timeline of your life and start there to give the community an idea of what your journey has been to the point where you are now?

I have a MFA and creative writing. I finished that up many years ago. My game plan career-wise was to write poetry and wait tables. After graduating I did that for the summer and realized that I do not have the stamina or physique of someone who can work on their feet on concrete for 10 to 12-hour days. It taxes you psychologically waiting tables, at least it did for me. I decided I was going to get a safe office job. I applied to a few places and got hired at a telecom research startup as employee number three. Because we were a startup and I had writing on my resume, they were geared to work a lot and, “We want you to figure out press releases and send them out to the media.”

I did wrote what I thought was a press release based on what I could learn and then hit send on a fax machine that I programmed with 100 numbers. The next day, I deleted those numbers and put another number in it or close to another. I begged my boss to buy a second fax machine so we could keep the 100 numbers on this one and 90 some on the other but he was fiscally responsible. That didn’t happen.

What I learned was the media weren’t biting. I started playing with it and trying to figure out what they were interested in. I knew that we published a lot of data and showing the data in a chart and announcing the data wasn’t getting the job done. I started to peel back and look at anomalies, patterns or growth and talk about why those are occurring. There was one Caribbean country that accounted for more Telecom traffic to and from the United States and all other care being countries combined. I was like, “Why is that?”

I discovered that they were the center for 1-900 numbers which were popular many years ago. There was everything from astrology to dating and all kinds of things that were like you pay per minute and talk to someone generally not a machine and it was all done through there. I wrote that up sent it out and boom the Economist Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post are running with it. I was like, “This is what they’re wanting.” I would continue to come through picking out patterns anomalies, and anything like that I thought would have an interesting story and I’d send it out and we got picked up.

We got picked up in the Telecom Trade Publications, which was instrumental because those were our customers, but we did get a lot of customers from the other magazines and publications in newspapers because there were other people who were like, “I know how to use this data,” who started selling to hedge funds and investors, all kinds of people that were outside the Telecom space that were traditionally our customer base and it was great. As I was doing this, a lot of people started to call the journalists and saying, “In the future, could you email me the press release rather than faxing it?”

That’s like, “Wow,” you can copy and paste the list of 50 people’s emails and hit send and not have to program effects machine and spend all day sending. I started to think about what that could look like and I mentioned to my boss that you could have a business sending emails and he’s like, “There could be something there.” I started to reach out to journalists in my spare time, which wasn’t considerable working for a startup but about one year later, I had almost 10,000 journalists in a database and they were all segmented by their beats.

They all had to for me to send them releases. I launched eReleases many years ago now and I was a matchmaker sending out releases on behalf of clients to who I thought would write about it. Over time, PR news where I reached out to us. They said they liked what we did. They liked that we served small businesses. It’s something that they would never reach out to actively because their salespeople are dedicated to trying to bring on board publicly traded clients who might say, “I’ll take a $30,000 Newsroom. I’ll pay for an Asian distribution with 6 different translations for $14,000.”

They’re not looking for small businesses and entrepreneurs whose budgets are a few hundred dollars for press releases. They liked what we were doing. I fought hard for them to give us a National Distribution rather than some web-only distribution or something like that. Nowadays, all of the releases that go out through eReleases go out nationally through PR news wire and you do not have to pay $1,600. If you go directly to the wire, it’s about $1,600 to move a 600 WordPress release and with us, it’s a few hundred dollars. That’s a great advantage of using eReleases is the cost savings of getting access to the wire for a much smaller price.

The Value Of A PR Release

I’m a huge fan of the word value. It’s the name of my company and forth. What is the value to a business of a PR release versus doing something on social media, TV advertising or some other marketing-based channel that exists out there? What is the value that it brings?

Another great thing about eReleases is the fact that we’re in all editorial staff. We have no salespeople. There are no commissions. Feel free to reach out and talk to us. We can give you guidance on what you’re working on and what you’re thinking about working on. We are there to serve you by phone, email and by chat. One of the things I get asked all the time is, “What is a press release?” A press release is an announcement usually written in the third person that you send out to the media. It’s usually a top-down approach with the most important aspects upfront.

What’s newsworthy? What is it that you’re truly announcing to the media? What we’re ultimately trying to do is to position something that you feel is important and that want a journalist to write about. When you send out a press release, two things happen. 1) A syndication happens almost immediately where a few websites post the press release. I always have to caution people, “Don’t get excited about that.” That’s not important. Most of these locations where these press releases are aren’t very important and they’re not very strategic. What we’re looking for is a journalist to take what’s in the press release and they draft it into an article.

They write the article. When that happens in PR we call that earned media and that’s the ultimate goal of PR and sending out press releases is to get that earned media. Why that’s important? It provides third-party corroboration or social proof. When a journalist writes about you, it’s almost like they’re giving you an implied endorsement. The big thing is its credibility. When you get urged media, it builds authority. It’s establishing a rapport and excitement with the reader. When people read a great article, they’ll often go, “I want to do business with that company.”

Many times, I’ve seen a blog post or an article about a Kickstarter campaign and the next thing I know I’ve clicked through. I’ve seen how much it costs to back that campaign and I do often if it’s affordable. Those are the types of things that happen with earned media where when you see an ad, our blinders come up and we’ve been trained whether the ad is on social media, a billboard, radio, TV or in a newspaper. We block them or we are very resistant to the messaging in advertising, but we don’t have that same blockage when it comes to an article. That’s the real value of getting PR. Often, you can get customers coming directly through the campaign when they click through or you type your company name into a browser, you get the potential of new leads coming in and also your existing customers reading about you.

You can take that same link when you get earned media and share it with your customers. Put it in your newsletter. Share it with your social media. In existing customers, there’s always churn. A certain percentage feel like we should try someone else this year. If they read that article and get warm and fuzzies, that happens with the credibility of media, they’re less likely to shop around that year. You’ve dodged to pull it and you’re going to have a little bit less churn.

On the other side with leads, there’s always a number of people that you won’t convert. For most people, it’s a sizable number. It’s the majority of your leads. Don’t convert. Maybe you convert 20% of your leads and 80% won’t buy but if you take that 80% population and get that article in front of them and they read it, you might find yourself converting even more of that population. That’s the real value of it. Getting that earned media is one of the central and more important aspects of PR and why you should focus on it.

One central and more important aspect of PR is getting that earned media. Click To Tweet

Journalists

One of the biggest challenges that I have with the releases is most of the people come to me with a press release in hand and they want to pay us to send it out. Most of the press releases are not great press releases. It’s not that they’re not written well, but what they’re announcing isn’t strategically important and doesn’t have all the necessary elements that a press release needs. For example, a press release needs to tell a story or have the elements for journalists to tell a story. Journalists are natural storytellers. An ideal article with them is going to follow more of a story arc and take, for example, one of the more common press releases that we get is a personnel change.

It’s like, “Welcome X to our HR department,” where she’s going to be an associate. It’s not extremely important. This is a major executive. This isn’t an industry veteran with decades of experience. He’s recognized across the industry. The newsworthiness is quite low and there are not the elements of a story. You may be better off taking that announcement and you wouldn’t even have to draft the press release if you sentence and a photo, send it to your local paper and maybe a trade publication that publishes on the move section because that’s generally what you’re going to get from that.

If you’re going to spend money to go over the wire you want to do something more strategically. Another common press release that we get is a product announcement. You have a new product, a new version of a product or service and you want to announce it and a lot of people say, “Here’s this new great product. Here’s a list of features. Here’s a page to learn more and buy.” For journalists, they look at that like, “That’s pretty darn close to an ad. There’s not a lot there for me to build a story arc.”

One of the first things I’d recommend this, “Let’s put a use case study in there. I assume you had people who tried the product or beta-tested it. What were their results? Tell us a little bit about that person, that company, what the results they saw and ideally get a quote from them?” All of a sudden a journalist can build more of a story like, “Here’s a new product. Here’s someone who used it.” This was the pain points they were suffering before they used it. Here were the results ideally with numbers. Here’s an amazing quote and here’s also some features of the product that weren’t mentioned.”

It tells more of a complete story. Another thing that you can do is build in data and numbers. Journalists love numbers. They love data. For example, you’re going to maybe talk about the product. It adds a solution in your industry that solves a major pain point. You could introduce and say, “Go find some public data numbers. They’re out there. They might be a little hard, but if you have trade associations in your industry, you can check there. You can also check other places. In the logistics arena, 67% of all new businesses fail within the first 5 years and often one of the reasons is because of this. To address that, we’ve got this product.”

What you’ve done is you’ve anchored the story and shown the stakes that are there for someone not having a solution like this. That gets more story elements and story building. That’s an important thing that you can do to make a product launch press release that is pretty similar to what you see out there, stand out, make it more meaningful and allow a journalist to turn it into an article. A journalist by and large like to work with what they have in front of them. Often, it’s the press release and if you link to your website or page on a website, they will hunt around on your website. See if they can get some more information sometimes but what they hate to do is have to pick up the phone, call or send an email and go back and forth before they have a solid understanding of whether this is a story or not.

If you’re incomplete, don’t believe that they’re going to come to you and flesh something out. Some might but more likely they’re going to move on to another opportunity that has more of the information. They need to build an article. That’s important. When it comes to getting press releases out and sending to the media, there are different avenues. Some people use a PR firm and they do pitching. Often, they’ll do email pitching but I’ll be honest with you, email has become a minefield for a lot of journalists. The advent of media databases over the last decades has created something where in the industry. People will buy a media database and have access to all of these journalists and they say, “We spent $10,000 or x amount of dollars for a year’s access to this database. I could send it to a fine little amount of people that would probably need most appropriate for me, but it cost me nothing extra to select all and hit blast.”

Who cares if it’s a sports reporter and I’m promoting a logistics software solution? Who cares if it’s going to people who cover women’s fashion? It’s free. For that reason, email inbox is inundated with off-target messaging that it’s easy to get lost and for PR firm’s emails to not get the attention that they used to get. A lot of PR firms still rely on picking up the phone and making the calls. That is a great way to cut through and to reach people but for small businesses and entrepreneurs, it is difficult to afford a PR firm. My belief is that if you act more creatively and more strategically, you can do a press release, hit send on the newswire, pay a fee and get more coverage than someone who uses a journalist.

It is not unusual to encounter people who’ve used a PR firm before and spent as a small business $20,000 to $40,000 over a 1-year period where they worked with that PR firm and generated no media coverage. It’s not that these PR firms didn’t do the work. It’s that for them, they find getting media attention is not easy. For that reason, very few people guarantee media coverage. If you do encounter, someone that guarantees media coverage, what they’re often doing are paid or sponsored articles.

 

Sometimes they they don’t say sponsored but they are supposed to be in compliance with the FTC. I see a lot of Forbes article opportunities being made to people and the thing you have to realize is Forbes is a business and they know that they have a reputation. People are willing to pay to have someone put articles up on Forbes for them. These articles don’t get in the magazine. They’re not in print. They’re usually on a location of the website that does not get a lot of traffic. I don’t believe in paying for a placement. I think it’s not a good return on your investment.

For me, you get a real article in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist or something like that. That drives eyeballs and traffic. These paid placements, I’ve never seen them do that. I haven’t seen them work. It doesn’t make sense for the media outlets to push those things and to give them the same placement as the articles that they’ve paid people to write. For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend that.

Using Data For Media Coverage

I believe that PR is an amazing opportunity. There are lots of little tips and tricks to get out there and make that work for people. There’s the data thing I mentioned before but what you don’t know is there are ways of using data to almost guarantee media coverage. This is going to be you creating the data. Now it’s first-person data rather than finding publicly available numbers, data and statistics that are out there. Whatever our clients don’t discourage or they come at me and they’re very hesitant because they’ve been burned in the past, I always tell them, “Let’s do a survey within your industry.”

It sounds like a big ask, but it isn’t. I’m going to break it down where it’s very easy to understand the path to do this. What you’re going to do is, first of all, you’re going to come up with sixteen meaningful questions to ask people in your industry that are relevant today. The best questions are those that expire. You’re going to pick some questions that are in the news and have been in the news for a while. It could be cultural changes.

 

People are resistant to go back in the office. Is that something that’s been going on in your industry? For some Industries it is and for other industries, if you’re an auto mechanic, you don’t get to work from home. You have to ask questions that are relevant to your industry. You’re thinking head-on. If you went to a conference of other people in your industry and what are the questions you would ask like, “Have you noticed that some clients are taking a lot longer to pay than it used to be or have you noticed that people coming into the business don’t seem to be prepared in this aspect of their education?”

All of these could be great ideas for looking at things that are trends in your trade publications, people who cover your industry and if there’s something hot or I know in some fields going green or environmental has been a trend that’s been going on for a few years and seems it will probably still continue. Are there some things around that that you could ask that are a little more specific? You could also ask economic questions like, “Do you plan on spending more or less over the next couple of quarters in regards to marketing?” That could trigger economic changes within your industry.

I like SurveyMonkey. I find it easy to use. I do four questions per page. It’s four pages and if someone stops halfway, you’ve got half their responses. That’s one of the reasons I like that and it makes it easier for someone completing it to digest it for questions at a time. On the last page, you can afford to put a couple of odd or left-field questions. They don’t complete that page. You’ve got 75% of the responses. Surprisingly, I’ve had good results with that where sometimes the question you ask on that page is the one that you generate the press release about. A local auto repair shop in Pennsylvania approached me. Their website, the domain name was somehow tied to the Yellow Pages and they used it for decade-plus and no problems and then it went away.

I don’t know if the relationship with the Yellow Pages went away or the Yellow Pages quit providing that service, but they couldn’t get that domain name back. They had to get a new one. They talked to an SEO guy because they were not showing up in results. The SEO guy said, “Talk to Mickie. You need auto industry links. I think Mickie is the guy who could probably make it happen.” I talked to him and I’m like, “I don’t know guys. The only thing I think that a local auto repair shop in Pennsylvania is going to get articles written about them by Auto Trade Publications is a survey.”

They were like, “We can’t do that. We’re not important. We don’t matter.” I’m like, “No, anybody can do a survey. You doing it makes you the perceived expert.” We’re going to get some quotes associated with you, but you’re the expert.” We put together the survey. The next big ask is, “I don’t have a role of decks of people my industry to send it to,” and you don’t need that. In almost every industry, there are dozens, if not hundreds of trade associations that you’re not aware of. Everyone knows the big trade association or a big couple of trade associations, but people don’t realize that they’re small trade associations of a couple of hundred members to mid-size ones or a couple of thousand members. They’re all over the country.

Anybody can do a survey, and doing it makes you the perceived expert. Click To Tweet

Some of them are regional and demographic like maybe people who are of a certain race or allegiance to something. Some are for men. Some are for women. I see less for men now, but the women when I do still see quite a bit. Look around. It doesn’t have to be an association that you’re a member of in the case of the auto repair shop, they were members of the Independent Association of auto repair shops. I think it had around 1,700 or so members. What you do is you approach them and say, “I’ve got this link,” your SurveyMonkey link, “I would love for you to send this out to your members. I’m conducting a survey and an exchange for that, I will mention you in the press release I’ll be issuing over The Wire.”

The small and independent trade associations get no media attention. The large ones do. These smaller ones will see this often as a win-win for them where they can get some attention. I’ve had a few pushbacks and asked if they could go brand the survey. It’s you and them. I don’t have a problem with that as long as they’re not going to make you go through many levels of bureaucracy to get things approved, questions and how the press releases are written but most of the smaller and independent ones don’t have that micro-management approach.

I don’t see that as a downside. It may even add a little more credibility to the survey aligning it with them. They’ll then take that and send it out ideally through email and social media. If they do one or the other and you don’t get over 100 results, go back to them and say, “Is there a way we could bump this again? I need 100 responses or more to be statistically relevant or else I won’t be able to include you guys in the press release and I won’t be able to use your data.” They’ll often do that and push it out again. You’re looking for at least 100  responses and then you’re going to look at the results and 16 questions. You’re only going to focus on 1 to 3 of those at most in the press release.

Now you have to figure out what were the biggest surprises in the survey and what are the biggest questions that people would want to know. do recommend that you build out a web page on your website where you put all the questions and responses because what you’ll find is entrepreneurial journalists will go under that page and see if maybe there’s another story that they might be interested in covering and potentially, they could pull out something more meaningful, bringing that to your attention and there could be another release an approach that you could do.

You’re going to focus on what 1 to 3 meaningful questions are in the press release. You’re going to provide a quote by you providing your analysis or opinion of why you felt the numbers skewed in a particular way. People would probably think that most people in your industry support being environmental but yet the numbers show that only 32% care about environmental issues. You could say, “I believe that the majority of people don’t care about the environmental issue that’s driving forward because I believe most of us are taking it for granted that we’re good stewards of the environment,” or whatever your spin on it is.

Ideally, it’s something that seems logical and something that you can defend. Maybe talk to a couple of people and ask, “Do you care about the environment? Why is that?” It could be apathy. Try to figure out what it is and then speak meaningfully about it. After that release goes out, what I find is most of the time if you’ve asked the right questions, you’re going to get anywhere from forest the least I’ve seen to as many as fourteen articles written. Each of these are individual articles. They’re usually some trade publications, but they’re also might be newspapers, and other people who cover your industry and it’s a great way to stand out.

You’re going to be getting links, traffic and recognition. I have one client who does this. They started a few years ago. They represent a lot of different verticals. They started doing a survey and they got good results. They started doing another survey and now they’re doing 25 to 30 surveys a year on all of these verticals and they’re doing them annually. People know them as the survey guys. They have so much respect in the industry. They are seen as experts and they started as a review site. They had reviews of all these little verticals.

Now they’re industry veterans. People pay a premium to be associated with them, listed and reviewed. It has given them so much authority. That’s the real value of that. Doing a survey seems like a big ass, but as I broke it down, it’s not that difficult. It’s like fifteen minutes on SurveyMonkey plugging it in. It may take a few hours to a few days to think through the sixteen questions. That’s the most important part because you want to ask questions that are meaningful. In the case of my client who does 25 to 30 of these a year, they tend to ask the same questions. You want some questions that are timely and relevant, but they’re also questions that potentially could ask where you’re taking the industry’s temperature on something that in a year, the temperatures going to be different.

Free Master Class

There is room for those types of questions. Think, be creative, put your energy there and it can go far. I do have a free master class that goes a little bit more into detail about the survey and study approach and several other strategic types of releases you could do. It’s completely free. It’s a less than an hour video that you might be starting, stopping and taking a lot of notes. There’s a lot of data there and information but it’s a good place for anybody who’s considering PR to start there because if you start with meaningful, press releases and build a PR campaign of 6 to 8 releases and most of them are strategic and aligned to be important in newsworthy, you’re going to have many more successes.

You will have many more successes if you start with meaningful press releases and build a strategic and aligned PR campaign of six to eight releases. Click To Tweet

There are people who come in, try a release, it doesn’t work and they move on. What they don’t realize is if they had kept trying and testing, then testing ones that are more meaningful, they could have positive results. Many people come in, test it and then move on. You have to commit to a PR campaign of 6 to 8 releases. Half of them may not do anything. You get the syndication which I said is not important where the press release is on a bunch of websites, but you don’t get any articles. For other ones, you get some articles and it can be meaningful.

I’ve had a client who got one article in a trade publication. They ended up getting a new client in Australia to build several waste management facilities that were many tens of millions of dollars. That was a good return. Sometimes you get direct sales. Sometimes you get direct leads. Sometimes you get more recognition in the industry. It’s hard to control what the outcome is. The thing is the more of those earned media opportunities that you get the more variety of those types of things you will see where it does move the revenue needle, where it does improve conversions, and makes it easier to convert customers.

The more earned media opportunities you get, the more variety of things. You will see where it moves the revenue needle, improves conversions, and makes it easier to convert customers. Click To Tweet

That’s one of the great things about earned media and it doesn’t have to cost a lot. If you use a service like eReleases, we have a new customer special. It’s a few hundred dollars to send out a release. You could potentially do a campaign of 6 to 8 releases if you do the writing for well under $3,500. If you added the writing, you could do a campaign of 6 to 8 releases for the writing and distribution. It is not going to cost you more than $5,000. You don’t have to do the whole campaign in a few months. It might be a natural rhythm where you do a press release every other month. To do 6 to 8 releases could take you well into 15 to 16 months well over 1 year. Spreading out an expense of $5,000 over a little over a year is not a huge commitment on a monthly basis.

What people find is when you try different releases and you get one that works often, you can go back and tweak it. In the case of the client who does surveys,  it is a matter of doing a different survey. Maybe it’s a different audience used one trade association that had one alliance, maybe independent people or use another trade association that has a representative of a different population. You disclose that in the survey. You could ask the same questions, do a different survey and say, “While we previously did a survey, we found that independent operators experience this.

We found that operators of people who are 40 and older which is often trade associations can be met made up of age where it’s young or people over a certain age had this different experience, and that’s different than our previous survey, which makes us think that the older more senior people believe this,” and then you have a great quote.

It’s a great way to go back to the well and make it work again. In the case of a client who felt he was completely not newsworthy, it was a local carpet company in New Jersey. I agree that they are not newsworthy. We didn’t do a survey or study in his industry.  What we did was after a few months of working with them and nothing happening, we did a brainstorm. One of the questions I asked was, “Who is your biggest enemy?” and expecting it to be an owl across the street with his Rug Emporium. It was the big box home improvement stores.

He talked about how bad they are for the carpet industry, the padding that they use and inferior. Many of them call a sheet of people who have home improvement licenses in the state and they don’t even ask if you’ve installed carpet before. They just call and say, “We need 2,200 square feet installed in a home tomorrow at 11:00. Are you available?” If you call a licensed roofer who doesn’t have work tomorrow, that person is watching YouTube that night and figuring out how to install the carpet.

That’s why many people have these experiences where they get these carpets and they don’t look right after a few months or a couple of years. They weren’t stretched properly. The seams weren’t done exactly right and the experiences that people have are not ideal. We put together a David versus Goliath press release, talking about the marketing against these big bucks some improvement stores, and the downfalls of it and it did extremely well.

It went viral in the store trade world which it’s very small but a dozen trade publications picked it up immediately after it went out. What we had identified with basically a blind spot in the industry where these trade publications weren’t discussing the big box. Homer’s improvement stores despite the fact that they were the biggest enemy in the industry.

The subscribers to these magazines are not the big box home improvement stores sure. They might get a few copies, but the bulk of them are local operators and regional operators like my customers, and it resonated. Many letters to the editor thanking people for that article. It was great. Those publications are coming back to us and asking for more. We kept talking about marketing, differentiating and the opportunities of having a big giant competitor and how you make that an advantage and how you navigate that.

At the end of a year doing a press release a month and the first four doing nothing, they had about 30 clips and articles that were written about them. Most of them were for trade publications, which their customers do not read. I had pointed that out to them, but they had a bigger vision than I did. They did get in their local paper and they did get in New Jersey magazine, which is a nice glossy publication. They did circle back and try to see if they could then get them to advertise in the magazine. That didn’t happen.

They printed out all and scanned all of these great clippings that they had. They put them in a brag book. That’s what they call it. Every time their sales guy goes to someone’s home measures and gives them a quote after showing them carpet samples, they say, “We may not come in the cheapest but we’ve been doing this for X amount of years. All of our installers are people who’ve been with us for years. They know what we’re doing. Here we’ve been picked up by floor trade weekly. We’ve been picked up by this publication. Here we are in the local newspaper. Here we are in New Jersey Magazine.”

They continue to quickly flash through these articles. The person doesn’t read them. They see the headlines. They see the logos of the different trade publications. By adding that extra minute or or two to the sales process resulted in a 17% increase in conversions. Almost 1 out of every 5 homes that used to say no is now saying yes, which has completely changed their business. You don’t think about it, but if you’re used to having to go through X amount of these cells consoles-cations and you’re converting 17% more, it’s meaningful. That’s a great advantage to them. It helped them. Several years after that’s done using that same brag book, they are still converting at that rate and people are deciding that, “Yes, this company may not be the cheapest but I’m willing to pay $200, $300 or $400 more on this job knowing that I’m with someone who is respected throughout the industry. My local paper has reported on them in New Jersey Magazine.”

Those are all huge signals of trust and that sea of trust that radius goes far and has completely amplified their importance and people’s willingness to want to work with them. So many people just rely on testimonials. I’m one of those people who think I suffer from testimonial fatigue or I see a name and something glowing. It doesn’t mean much but I think that when not one many publications right about you and you’re an obscure little company in a city in New Jersey, it’s like, “What has this company done that has put them under the spotlight?”

The truth is they’ve just put themselves out there and talked about something that nobody else was talking about. I go through all of these strategic types of press release ideas in my free Master Class. It’s eReleases.com/Plan. I’m trying to get my customers to go through it, but I think it’s a great place to start if you’re open to PR and you want to do press releases. I think that that’s a meaningful thing that you can do and make it work for you. A lot of people believe that PR is the venue of large well well-flooded companies. I’m here to tell you that journalists, while they have to cover big companies, they know that they can afford to advertise.

They also know that they do not get a lot of accolades from their readers, viewers and audience every time that they talk about the latest update to Microsoft Office. If they pull up a new tool, a piece of software or something that nobody knows about often because it’s a startup, a new company, a small company or a mom-and-pop, they do get a lot of people who say, “I appreciate that. That solved what I was looking for. That seemed like a great tool.”

For that reason, the smaller you are and the less known you are makes you more attractive are to a journalist. Don’t feel that you don’t matter because of your size. It could be a signal of strength to a journalist who’s looking to showcase someone that their audience doesn’t know about. At the end of the day, journalists are gatekeepers. They’re trying to protect their audience. You have to make sure that what you’re telling the journalist is something that either educates, entertains or even in some cases delights their audience.

 

Sometimes looking at what you want to announce and reverse engineering it a little bit to put some of those elements in there, also using the story arc formula where you’re providing the elements for a story can make sure that you do well and you go for. I welcome anyone to go to eReleases.com and visit our social media on the lower right. Feel free to chat or email or call the office. You’ll only speak to editors, those salespeople and the free masterclass, eReleases.com/Plan. That’s a great place for anybody to start. I look forward to hopefully having a great experience with PR and building meaningful press that stand a great chance of media success. Take care.

Our time has come to an end. I can’t thank you enough for coming on to the show and sharing your wisdom. On our show, we call them golden nuggets of information. People can use it to integrate into their lives or into their businesses, bring about better results, and enjoy happiness and success in their lives or in their businesses. For the audience, I can’t thank you enough for joining us on this episode. We’re here with another great guest like Mickie to share their insights and their particular expertise in the area of leadership, South leadership for business. What I hope you got out of this is that PR is not for celebrities. PR is for everybody and there are benefits to it no matter how big or small your business is. That being said, have a great day. We’ll see you here next time. Take care.

 

Important Links

• Mickie Kennedy
• eReleases.com/Plan

 

About Mickie Kennedy

Mickie Kennedy believes that with some effort and a little money, the possibilities are endless. He is an expert at helping small businesses, authors, and startups increase their visibility and credibility. Mickie founded eReleases 24+ years ago after realizing that small businesses desperately need a press release service they can actually afford, giving them access to the media and to a national newswire – all with a personal touch. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry from George Mason University. His press releases have resulted in articles being published in the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Bloomberg, and many more prestigious new outlets.

Mickie lives in Baltimore County with his family and two feuding cats. He enjoys British science fiction and acknowledges an unhealthy addiction to diet soda. He still writes poetry most Monday nights (virtually) with a group of fellow misfits in Brunswick, Maryland.