Online Publicity Can Help Your Business Achieve Credibility

(ARA) - If you're looking to enhance your marketing efforts, getting an article published about your company essentially provides a third party endorsement to your products and services. You don't need the luxury of a million-dollar ad budget to raise awareness of your business. Instead, working with the print media can be a cost-effective way to get editorial publicity for articles that incorporate information about your company. In fact, with the rise of Internet use within the business community and the general public, reaching your target audience is now faster and more convenient than ever.
How then does your business generate good publicity and gain placement in newspapers and magazines? As Guerilla Marketing author Jay Conrad Levinson notes, "the single most important factor in obtaining free publicity [is] providing news worth publicizing." It is crucial that your business products and services are incorporated into articles that provide readers with newsworthy ideas or suggestions. Highlighting an article's human interest angle is another method to increase your chances of publication.

It's important for businesses to distinguish precisely what is and isn't newsworthy about their products and services. For example, the announcement of a new product is more likely to annoy an editor than grab his or her attention. "Editors and publishers get thinly veiled advertising garbage all the time masquerading as news," says "Magnet Marketing" author John R. Graham. However, if the product exemplifies a current trend or helps readers to achieve a goal, an editor will be more inclined to publish it.

The key is to move the article's primary emphasis from the value of the company's products to the potential benefit for the reader. Articles that reference your business as an 'expert' source on a given subject provide powerful credibility. For example, a company that sells a salt substitute should avoid writing an article describing its products in detail. Instead, an article about how a recent study revealed a link between lowered sodium intake and reduced occurrence of osteoporosis has much more value to a publication's readers.

Developing a newsworthy angle, however, is only half the battle. You must also distribute your releases to the appropriate people, and do it cost-effectively. Businesses often rely upon the traditional marketing technique of mailing materials to lists of prospective clients. However, the process of building lists is labor intensive and very costly.