January, 2009

The ROI From PR

In this site’s first installment, we talked about how clients, using agency resources, can cost effectively conduct an international PR campaign despite a current global economy generally unfavorable to U.S. marketing initiatives.

This month our focus is the solid return on investment (ROI) that PR can bring to the bottom line…more “bang for the buck,” if you will. This can be illustrated by a recent editorial placement campaign we developed for one of our clients, a laboratory equipment manufacturer.

Our challenge was to achieve wide and frequent editorial coverage for our client’s product lines, but at the same time, measuring our results to show that our client’s investment in PR was sound and highly beneficial. Our metric was to treat the dollars spent for PR as if we were buying comparable advertising space in the targeted publications. In other words, what it would cost our client to pay for the space occupied by each PR placement. Here’s what we found:

We achieved 14 PR placements in “premium” space (i.e., magazine covers and high-profile product focus features within the pubs) in six publications. The placement space ranged in comparable advertising value from $1,485 to $4,840 each, bringing the total advertising value of these 14 placements to about $39.900.

We also achieved 79 editorial placements in “non-premium” space in 14 publications. These placements ranged in comparable advertising value from $1,200 to $2,879 each. Their total equivalent paid advertising value equated to $120,900.

All in all, our client was receiving more than $160,000 worth of product publicity space for these placements, while paying out just one-third of that sum for the PR effort to bring these placements about. Needless to say, a great return on investment!

One final note: not only did the client benefit in dollar-for-dollar ROI terms but they also benefited from a higher “credibility quotient”; namely, the PR placements were solely the editors’ call, not the result of an insertion order. These objective, third-party endorsements often carry more weight with the customer than a paid advertisement – a definite value added.

To determine your PR ROI, contact Harry McBrien at harry@maier.com or call 860.677.4581.

October, 2008

Hello!
This is the inaugural installment of Maier-PR.com – an informal communication channel to bring you what, we hope, will be some helpful ideas and insights on how products and services can be effectively promoted through third-party editorial placements, not to mention benefiting from a solid return on investment.

As we move forward, if you have any questions or ideas of your own on the topics that will be covered here, please send them along to harry@maier.com. Thanks for your interest.

International Reach
One of the major changes we’ve seen in public relations within the past few years is globalization.  As businesses extend well beyond the U.S. borders, both for sourcing and new customers, PR has had to follow. Where we once prided ourselves on being a ‘national’ agency, with clients from Chicago to Atlanta to San Jose. Now we’ve grown into an ‘international’ agency, serving client needs from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim.

Our agency now has one of the most extensive databases for editorial contact throughout the world. This not only expands our media relations reach but is also a cost-effective tool for clients who, as with everyone else, must face both a weak dollar abroad and sharply rising costs for foreign-based marketing services – typically, at least doubling the dollar costs in the U.K. and even quadrupling them in China.

Maier has been able both to reach around the globe in placing editorial for several of our clients and, at the same time, save our clients some extra dollars they would normally incur by going it alone or through an overseas agent. A couple of examples from our client experience:

PowerSmart, a venture capital start-up in the battery microchip industry, planned a product launch at an Asian trade show. Maier helped place a client bylined article in a trade journal that was being distributed at the show. Not only that, we got the client’s product on the trade show issue’s cover, and the article was published in Chinese.

Our client’s battery management microchip appeared on the cover of Electronics Engineer, followed by a bylined article inside the issue describing the technology. The magazine was distributed at the Taiwan trade show where our client was launching its product in the Asian market.

UltraCell, a fast-growing manufacturer of micro fuel cells for portable applications, saw its potential market growing well beyond the U.S. Maier was able to support this international mission by obtaining product-launch placements in publications located in Latin America, South Africa, the Netherlands and even the Spanish Basque region in Europe, among others.

Because of our worldwide press release distribution, our client’s new portable fuel cell product garnered a lot of interest from the international scientific trade press including the engineering pub, De Ingenieur, in Holland, and the science and technology journal, Elhuyar, based in the Basque region on the Spain-France border.

One final item of note: Usually, with international marketing communications, translations of English copy is an added expense (for clients). But not with the examples above. All of the editors we dealt with generated their own translations of our English-copy press releases, free of charge and for not a small cost savings – a clear value added for clients.