The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [75]
Make the News
The press consists of people who are just like anyone else whose attention you’d like to capture. Just as the Dream 100 strategy works to penetrate impossible accounts, it can be used with great effect to penetrate even the largest media sources. If Oprah’s producers hear from you each and every month with yet another idea, they will get to know exactly who you are. The same is true of any publication or news source. If you are national in scope, you can target national publications with such consistency that they will get to know exactly who you are.
Exercise
Make a list of dream media outlets that you’d like to write about your company or publish your articles. If your market is local, hit your local newspapers constantly with ideas or items of interest. A great core story that is packed full of data will give you a lot of fodder for press releases that will attract the attention of editors or news sources.
Ever notice how the entertainment media all cover the same shows all the time? There are tons of entertainment choices, but only the same 10 shows or movies get covered. That’s because the people who determine the content of entertainment shows and magazines have relationships with the PR folks responsible for getting those shows covered. You, too, can form relationships with the important media people covering your industry.
In fact, according to Guerrilla Marketing, 70 percent of what is published as news is actually “placed news,” or news that comes directly from press releases and PR initiatives. Most media sources are besieged by press releases. A sharp editor can see a story in those press releases and assign a reporter to flesh it out.
Every press release you send should be followed by a phone call. That’s how you build relationships. Here’s what you say: “Did you receive our press release about the amazing amount of pollutants in the home? We were wondering if there was anything we could do to help with that story.” Often at that point, you’ll be asked to resend your press release. Or you’ll be brushed off, but the following month, when you call about the five million dust mites in every one’s living room, the editor will start to remember: you’re the guy who knows about indoor air pollution. If a story comes up along those lines, guess who they are going to call first? Also, editors are just like anyone else. They respect someone who continues to call them with story ideas on a regular basis.
Earlier I mentioned American Art Resources (AAR), the people who sell art to hospitals. If they targeted the press for hospitals with pieces like “Why AAR is great” or “AAR gets another major hospital client,” how effective do you think they’d be? Those are ego pieces and are of little interest to anyone except AAR. Instead, they use data from their core story for their press releases, so they have received remarkable coverage in national magazines and in many of the trade journals that cover their industry.
Their core story goes into data about hospitals and their struggles—every thing from lawsuits to injuries caused in hospitals to lack of staff and waning profits. They cite data like this: 2,000 of the 5,000 or so hospitals are operating in the red (AHA News); hospitals accidentally kill more than 200,000 people per year (Journal of American Medicine). Their core story contains a massive amount of very disconcerting data that makes for very interesting information to editors of magazines and newspapers. Their PR effort has been astonishing.
But make no mistake: PR isn’t just press releases. What about speaking at an industry event? You’re not likely to get a speaking gig just to talk about your product or ser vice. But, surely, if you’ve got a powerful core story, you’ll certainly get a gig. AAR’s core story was so packed with great data that they ended up being keynote speakers at several major conferences with their Dream 100 all in the room, all at once. Masterful PR for sure. In one speaking engagement, they got