PR On a Shoestring
Many small companies, like KidPub, have to watch every dollar spent. I’m always looking for ways to cut costs while not sacrificing either quality or progress toward my business goals. For a publishing company, PR is incredibly important, but it can also be incredibly expensive. We send out a press release for each books that is published, plus releases for contest announcements and general news. It can add up to five to ten releases each month.
When I started shopping around for a PR agency to handle my account, I quickly realized that press releases were going to be a significant slice of my marketing budget. I wanted to know if there were alternatives to traditional agencies that might save money but still be effective.
I’ve used some of the online firms in the past with limited success. They typically charge a per-release fee with a suite of add-on services that can inflate the final bill. These companies, such as PRWeb, do an ok job of sending out your release and tracking it, but it seemed that my releases were getting lost in the flood of PR that goes across their wire.
Finally, by a stroke of luck, I found Mondo Times and its sister site, EasyMediaList. Mondo’s goal is to be a source of media information. Say you wanted to send a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Herald. it takes just a few clicks on Mondo to pull up contact information for the paper. Mondo is a membership site, and to get the phone, fax, and email of the editor it’s $80 a year.
That’s actually a pretty good deal, and I use this service to look up editorial information for hometown news media of each author that publishes with KidPub Press. I’ve found that the local newspaper nearly always will run a story about the young author. Mondo lets you search by city, so it’s quick work to find the half a dozen news outlets in an author’s hometown and put together a list for the press release.
The better deal at Mondo, though, is their Professional level membership at $199 per year. You get all of the data and lookup features of the $80 membership, but you also get five free mailing lists for Mondos sister site, EasyMediaList.
EasyMediaList sells contact lists for media. You can purchase lists by state, major metro area, subject, and so on. The lists are priced according to size and range from $30 to a few hundred dollars each. For KidPub, I used four of my five free lists from Mondo membership to grab the top 100 media outlets, the educational media list, and the parenting and kids media lists. The lists are high-quality (for example, Parenting Magazine, Scholastic, Nickelodeon, and Sports Illustrated Kids are included) and clean…I get very few bounces on the emails included.
I send out press releases to segments of these lists, depending on what the news is. Do they work? Yes. I’ve gotten responses from many major media outlets from releases sent to these lists. It’s well worth the $200 annual membership fee.
The other piece of the shoestring is Skype. We only have one phone in the office, and for $5 per month we’ve set it up with an inbound phone number and unlimited domestic calling, and it includes an answering machine. I can afford to spend afternoons on the phone calling media contacts…the phone numbers are on the EasyMediaList lsits…to follow up on press releases. I think that editors appreciate hearing an actual person on the other side of the press release, and I’ve gotten a great response.
Between Mondo and Skype the majority of KidPub’s PR needs are met, and I can concentrate on growing the business instead of worrying about the marketing budget.