Is PR possible without costs?
When a new business does not have significant funds for a loud promo, when a new budget is not allocated for a new product, is it possible to reach the audience with PR? Quite, but for this it is necessary to adhere to at least a couple of tips.
Think about PR at the design stage
Start thinking about PR, marketing and promoting your idea / product even at the development stage. When her / his uniqueness, feature and main distinctive feature can be laid in the bud.
Involve PR professionals at all stages. Even then, at the level of the prototype, they can either consider or suggest that it can become provocative in order to extravagantly convey the message and values to the target audience.
A proven method is to write a press release / pitch about launching a product, when it does not exist in principle, it is only on paper or in the head. Show a PR document about a virtual product to several people, including journalists, and look at the reaction. If it provokes genuine interest, you are on the right track.
From the first ideas and at each subsequent stage, think through PR-steps, gradually involving in the process of friends, opinion leaders, journalists. As a result, this will result in fed up lighting of the launch and further support.
Do not spray
When you promote your product, but the funds are not enough, to seize the mass market – everything at once – is unlikely. You will rush and remain unnoticed. So concentrate your efforts on the most relevant audience.
You know who that is?
There are people who really are close to your idea, who in life has already exhibited something of similar interest or is predisposed to the consumption of your product. Let these fans become pioneers, your potential evangelists (the effect of five handshakes has not yet been canceled). Concentrate your resources in the places of their accumulation, appear with promo there, where they “hang out” most often and in maximum concentration, do something special for the audience, but within the values of the brand.
A similar path was Uber. The company for several years ran its service, throwing all the forces at the SXSW festival in Austin (USA), where a large audience of potential young people gathered. One of the chips was the delivery of barbecue sets to the venue of parties, and parties like everyone. Thanks to the feedback and posts of the first testers, Uber was able to significantly expand the audience and get into the review of journalists, provoking a flurry of publications and further developing stories.
Do not underestimate the thematic media
Based on subjective opinion, customers – owners and business leaders – often believe that their story is simply obliged to get to the front pages of Journal N.
God, how many times have we heard from clients: “The boss said that we should be in” Journal N “, because his friends are reading” Journal N. “And the fact that the audience is 99% concentrated not in there, but in industry publications or In gloss, for example, – for customers the matter is secondary: who wants to contradict the boss, waving media statistics before him.
Do not underestimate sectoral, thematic media. As practice shows, often it is they who should first tell the story – information about the product will be very close and relevant to both the editorial staff and readers. In addition, business publications, which top managers dream of, may well develop the story further or re-publish it, since journalists are often subscribed to the media of their profile.
Think of a chip
Having a small budget, you can reach out to your audience, laying the trick directly in the way the product is distributed. Playing on the effect of chosenness, for example. This is the most difficult of all of the above, and everyone dreams about it.
So, one day Hotmail attached to each user’s email the “Get a free account on Hotmail” subscribe, and all users distributed the attached message from letter to letter, increasing the mail service base to a giant one. A similar circuit after mastered Gmail, triggering first the excitement among users, and after entering the tolerance by invitation. In turn, Dropbox allocated space in the cloud only on the lists, provoking a rabid demand for getting into this list.
Remember the queue at the bazaar, where some are not even sure whether they need something for which they are so eager. The effect of chosenness fully armed. To the category of such hacks can be attributed and the most popular tool today – a referral, the issuance of promotional codes, incentives for “driving a friend.” To some extent this works, but not for all businesses. In addition, these actions require already certain investments, and this is another story.