The ‘New’ Marketing PR Drives Sales Leads

B2B Marketing Trends has an excellent article that summarizes good public relations news for small business selling to businesses. 

According to B2B Marketing, today:

• More than 30 million Americans a month use Yahoo! News and Google News, according to Nielsen/Net ratings from 2004.
• More than 70 percent of Americans use a search engine news portal
• And 84 percent use a search engine to find information, products and services

Small businesses can take advantage of the lowly press release and tap the best of both worlds—marketing and public relations.  In the old economy, businesses were subject to the whims of major media outlets (journalists/reporters and editors) in order to get coverage. Now the new, new press release can help you generate website visits and sales leads.

You can use any of the wire services to distribute the release.  I like PRWeb.  They provide educational webinars and their staff is always available to answer questions.)  Key to driving web visitors and sales leads, is using keywords and embedding hyperlinks that your prospects are likely to use when searching for products and services.

The B2B Marketing Trends’ article highlights a success story:

• It’s easy to measure successes in marketing PR campaigns  you either generate sales leads or you don’t. Leade Health, a provider of health coaching services and an HRmarketer.com client, measures its success in Web traffic and search engine visibility, both of which generate tangible leads. They consider media placements a means to an end.
• Since the company started sending marketing press releases in early 2006, Web site traffic has jumped considerably  a recent white paper announcement netted 400 downloads. Another key metric for Leade Health is SEO success; Leade’s goal was to appear on Google’s front page when potential customers entered targeted keyword phrases. Releases contained relevant words and phrases, which were included as hyperlinks back to the company’s Web site. Before Marketing PR campaigns, the firm was not even in Google’s top 100. Today, a search for "health coaching" finds the company squarely on page one.

Leade Health followed the sage advice of David Meerman Scott, one of my favorite bloggers, Web Ink Now.  Check out David’s smart, free e-Book, The New Rules of PR.

So, dust off that press release, enter your keywords and leverage the web!   When should you send a press release?  When you have a customer success story (testimonial) , when you have a new white paper or article, or any time you have a new solution for the biggest problems facing your customers.