This blog is about DIY publicity. However, publicity combined with other ingredients can create a powerful success recipe for whatever you have brewing in your business.
Help a Reporter Out is a fabulous and free media query service created by Peter Shankman that now boasts over 100,000 loyal subscribers who are interested in getting seen, head, and celebrated in the media. HARO also offers advertising opportunities to reach these loyal subscribers, and the success stories I've read about are certainly compelling.
I wanted to talk to HARO advertisers to get the skinny on what really happens with HARO advertising as the secret sauce. As luck would have it, Maria Ross, founder of Red Slice and the author of Build Your Own Brand Strategy in 10 Easy Steps — And Why You Need One Now, is a colleague of mine here in the Seattle area. I asked her to share her success story as a guest blog post. This blog post is longer than typical, but it is well worth your time. And, you just might want to link back to it so everyone else in your community can read it, learn from it, and benefit from it.
I wrote my eBook, How to Build Your Own Brand Strategy in 10 Easy Steps, to
1) help small business owners who couldn’t necessarily afford my consulting services, but needed guidance when embarking on branding to launch/refresh their business and
2) help educate and inspire business owners about what brand really means and help them create good, authentic brands in a sea of mediocrity.
My mission with Red Slice, my branding, marketing and communications consultancy, is to help businesses engage, inform and delight their target audience and keep them coming back for more.
The premise of the eBook is not only to offer a bit of Marketing 101 terminology and clarity, but to explain that brand is the core, the essence of your company. It’s more than just your logo. That would be like judging a person’s entire complex personality based on their shoes. Your brand is how your receptionist answers the phone, how you price your products (the quality of your products), how easy or difficult you are to do business with, how your store is laid out. It’s not just the visual “logo and website” elements or pretty pictures; it’s the mind share you occupy in people’s brains. What parts of their brains light up when they hear your company name or think of you?
The eBook is a labor of love to help save the world from bad marketing – and to help small business owners save thousands of dollars when working with designers and writers, as well as on investing in the right marketing tactics and opportunities. I constantly see people trying to communicate things visually with their logo, their website, etc. without giving poor designers a clue about WHAT they are trying to communicate and TO WHOM. Also, nothing about what they want visually – or what marketing tactics they want to do – is consistent with what they offer or the company personality.
Without a map, every road looks like the right one. A $250 booth at an event attracting 5000 people is NOT a bargain if none of those people will buy from you – and I hear that kind of thinking all the time.
I heroically completed the eBook while recovering from brain injury and a long hospitalization, so it was hard work to finish. So once it was up on my website, I knew I had to drive people to it and not waste that effort. I had been subscribing to HARO for awhile, making note of the ads at the top. I loved that Peter Shankman had a tone similar to my tone in the book and how he personally crafted the ad to endorse the product. This email list is extremely targeted to small business owners and marketing/PR professionals. I knew these people were the exact audience for my book – if you are subscribing to HARO, it means you are most likely trying to get press opportunities yourself, which means you need to save money, which means you have smaller budgets, which means you must be a small business owner in many cases (or know someone who is). Bingo! A ripe audience for this eBook.
The ad was pricey, I won’t lie, but the CPM is very cheap for (at the time) 75,000 targeted members with a reported 90% open rate. He probably has an even larger list now. Take it from me as a marketer: that is an unheard of open rate in email marketing. I personally know I usually open all his emails and scan them for opps, so I don’t doubt this number. He also sent over testimonials to show the effects the ads had on people’s businesses.
As of April 2009 (he may have changed), he offered four types of sponsorships:
NON-JOBS (Company/Client email) – most of the product/service ads
JOBS (Jobs/Hiring) – for job postings only if you are a firm who is hiring
HARO Gift Bag Product List – This list hits 30,000 “product” people – people who run companies that have products to donate to gift bags, people who want to get their products in front of celebrities, and the like. Virtually everyone on this list is also on HARO. if your company works in corporate events, this is a great one for reaching Event Planners and finding items for auction or goodie bags.
WHOH (What's Hot on HARO) – 2-minute video-cast that goes out every morning, highlighting what's hot on HARO for that day. You get a mention in the video, and a link from his blog below the video on that day. That link stays up forever.
Armed with this info, I purchased my ad (he requires payment upfront) for two months out, which was the first time he had inventory. He offers a morning, noon, and evening edition and I got to choose. I sent him a write up on the product, told him the points I’d love for him to emphasize, and set up a HARO discount code for $10 off. I calculated how many books I needed to sell to break even– everything after that was profit.
I can’t say enough good things about this ad – if this is the target audience you need to reach. My email started lighting up the day the ad ran, with PayPal alerts about all the new transactions. I got some great monetary rewards, as well as future marketing opportunities.
- The four months before the ad, I sold about 3 eBooks. Within four weeks, I sold 45 eBooks from the ad. Some sales trickled in much later.
- I got two paying clients directly from the ad – in Pennsylvania and the Netherlands!
- A very-well connected marketing consultant in California saw the ad and absolutely loved the eBook – she started following me on Twitter and we met when she was in Seattle. We might be partnering in the future.
And I will be using HARO again for other products targeted to small business owners and marketers.
Rules to Follow:
Make sure this is the right audience. Make sure your product appeals to the target audience of small business owners, PR or marketing professionals or it will be a waste of money.
Offer some HARO Love: Offer a HARO discount code for dollars off or a freebie. Not only is this a good incentive to entice conversion, it seems to be the standard on HARO ads. This is a very loyal, tight-knit community.
Know there will always be a bad apple. One woman demanded a refund, saying my eBook was just a huge ad for my business. I got pretty bent out of shape about this, especially since I wrote the eBook SPECIFICALLY for people who did not want to purchase my services and I gave lots of useful and unbiased marketing advice and information. She also really thought Peter was endorsing the product and that this was not a paid ad. But I got so much other great feedback, I had to let it go. Peter assured me there is one in every bunch – so make sure you don’t take this personally.
Price Right: Make sure this is a decent price point that is not too high. These folks are all over the country and may not know you from Adam, so you may have better luck with products priced between $10-50. That’s the price point I typically see on his ads for physical or digital products. Make it easy for people to respond. If you are merely advertising your services and they are thousands of dollars, I’d suggest creating a Starter Kit or Trial Package priced at $100-200 and make it a HARO exclusive.
Have a goal in mind. I knew exactly what my goal was for this ad, and anything else – the clients, etc. – was just gravy. Are you trying to sell a certain amount of product? Are you trying to get more names for your email list? Are you trying to encourage people to sign a petition? Clearly state the call to action – the action you want people to take – in the ad. Don’t just say, “Hey, Look at my Business. We do cool stuff. This is not only not measurable (except maybe web hits?) but they have no incentive to act AND targeted email marketing like this is not meant for branding and awareness – it’s meant for direct, action-oriented marketing.
Negotiate – Fairly. Never just pay the Rate Card price without seeing how flexible they can be on price. Once you get the rate card, try to negotiate down closer to your budget. I did this and got to a fair number for both of us (although it was still pretty high). Be sure to make a reasonable offer back in good faith and hopefully you can meet somewhere in the middle. If the ad is $1500, then $100 is not a reasonable offer so use your best judgment and think about how you would want to be treated.
Thank you, Maria Ross, for sharing your favorable experience as a HARO advertiser so the loyal and growing readership of this DIY publicity blog can profit from the wisdom of your experience.
Maria's ebook is really, really good. I invite you to check it out if your brand strategy needs improvement.
And if advertising your business to this targeted audience of marketers, business owners and PR professionals is a perfect fit for your business, connect with Peter Shankman at HARO to arrange for your ad in perfect timing with your needs.
DIY Publicity Tip for Today: If you are serious about growing your business and inviting meaningful results at the cash register, remember that DIY publicity — combined with other high powered advertising ingredients — can pack the punch you are seeking. As Maria writes, PR is just one aspect of promotion. It is about making sure the truth of your story surfaces clearly and is heard. She also writes, “PR cannot just come along and — poof — make you thinner, prettier, or more popular if the fundamentals are not there — if the BRAND is not 
there.”
Here's a red apple for Red Slice Founder Maria Ross, who taught us a few valuable lessons today. Delicious, and so good for you and your business. Love that.
