I’m deep into The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott, and it’s already changed how I do my job. Scott is the author of a popular marketing strategy blog and his book is an award-winning Business Week best-seller. It’s a sort of guide on how to use modern tools, like the internet, to promote your company and its products directly to the public, rather than focusing on intermediaries like publicists and journalists. It makes a great case for rejecting the old ways of doing things as obsolete.
Photo by NS Newsflash
Very much in line with the principles espoused by this book, Amble Resorts has, to date, eschewed big marketing and PR firms and trusted a more modern, and more personal, approach. Our first efforts at promotion began this month in a small way, and they will build to a full-fledged promotional effort in January when we launch the sales of our resort residences to the public. Part of our plan is to create a series of informative news releases about our project that are not intended primarily for the press, but for direct consumption by potential customers. With the public’s usage of internet search engines, we no longer have to rely on publicists pitching to journalists who may consider writing about us (that’s two extra intermediaries between us and our customers). Now we can release our news directly, and those who are interested in our topics will find them with search engines. In this way, we not only eliminate the expense and disconnect of two layers of intermediaries, but we reach people when they are actively looking for the kinds of information we put out there.
As much as I’ve embraced Scott’s methods intellectually while reading about them, now that I’ve begun to employ them I’m becoming something of an acolyte. Our first press release got us on just about every internet news distribution site for a few hundred dollars, and was then picked up by online news outlets such as AOL Money News (almost 20 million readers a day), Forbes.com, MarketWatch and Reuters. What does this do for us? Well, the dozens or perhaps hundreds of news outlets both large and small that post it online make it easier to find for anyone searching for information about resorts in Panama; both potential customers, related businesses and journalists. It seems that Scott is right. We don’t need to pitch to journalists through a publicist; they will find us when they are looking for information on a related topic. For example, our second news release went out to a similar list of news outlets; you can view this news release on Reuter’s. Today (July 15, 2009) we were quoted in the Panama Star newspaper.
An article like this news release doesn’t directly promote us the old fashioned way with a list of products and prices and a call to action, but it does something much more important: it begins to establish us as thought leaders in the industry. Even though the reporter may not agree with us, he/she has legitimized us by showing that we are the ones to go to when you want to know what’s going on. This kind of exposure will build brand more than any blanket advertising campaign, at minuscule fraction of the cost. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
This week our third news release goes out. It’ll be about the make-up of our international development team. After that we’ll be writing about why thoughtful design is one of the best ways to be environmentally responsible. See, we’re not just trying to look like leaders in the industry, we believe we are leaders. And we want to use our team’s combined knowledge and expertise to inform, instruct and advocate, as well as to create a shining example of an island resort development.
TAGS: Business Marketing Press/News
