820: Increase Your Visibility and Credibility to Generate More Revenue with Mickie Kennedy

Robert Plank 0:00 Okay, welcome back to the podcast. We're here with Mickey Kennedy from e releases.com. Now, Mickey Kennedy is an expert at helping small businesses, authors and startups increase their visibility and credibility. And we were going to be talking today about doing that with press releases. Now Mickey founded EA releases 22 plus years ago. Now, why the heck would he do that? Well, because he realized that small businesses desperately need a press release service they can actually afford. And that includes you right here right now listening or watching this podcast. And so making you can give you access to the media, and to a national news wire with a personal touch. So Mickey glad to be talking to you.

Unknown Speaker 0:42 Oh, same here. Great to be here.

Robert Plank 0:44 It is great to have you. And you know, even even just you being here on the podcast shows that we all need to be putting our best foot forward and be getting ourselves out there and in marketing and spreading our message because no one will do it for us, it won't happen automatically. And I've heard of this thing called press releases, I think that we've all at least heard of it or or seen it. And we always hear about this, this thing where it seems to have somewhat of a format or a template, but I'm always thinking like, well, I don't really know how to how to put my message into that template. And then you hear about how that like, you can send this one thing out and pay a little bit of money and it gets sent all over the place. And then you always hear about these success stories here. And there, people put out a press release and the right person saw it, they got it on the right media outlet or the right, you know, it went viral or something like that. And so can you tell us about press releases, because as you can tell, I just have little bits and pieces of just what I've heard and picked up and I'd rather hear from the expert, I'd rather get the kind of foundational fundamental knowledge so press releases Tell me. So

Speaker 2 1:48 basically, a press release is an announcement by a company or person, it's usually written into the third person, there might be a first person quote, and a good tip is to always have a really captivating quote, because sometimes, if the story's mediocre, but the quote is outstanding, a journalist will write an article around it, you want to have a really tantalizing headline, you don't want it to be punny, or sort of quizzical or, or funny like a New York Post style, where you might use a pawn or something like that, you want to stick to the facts, you want to make it easy for journalists who are streaming headlines to see that this is something that would be relevant to them. A lot of people get tripped up over the style or the template of a press release. But they're pretty simple. If you go to E releases.com. My website and at the footer, click on press release samples, you'll see a lot there. And almost anyone can write a release, because it's not really like high level writing. It's not creative writing outside of maybe what you might put in a quote. But the real power of the press release that a lot of people don't recognize is what it is, you're choosing to announce strategically, what is it that you've decided is important enough that you want to send it to the media. And so many people choose press releases that are a personnel change, or a website's now Mobley responsive, or other things that no one really cares about, you know, it's probably important that your website's mobile responsive, but no one's going to write an article about it. You know, you know, David, and HR move from associate to assistant HR assistant or something like that. Nobody cares about those either. So, you know, focus on things that are a lot more strategic, and a lot of people who feel like, well, I don't have anything strategic, because I'm not important. I'm not really doing anything, I'm selling a commodity, there's very little that I do that differentiates myself, I would say you have to dig down deep and try and determine what will be your USP. There's a lot of people who sell Apple computers, Apple doesn't let people sell it for you know, I think within 5% of the suggested retail price, they control that. So the lot of people have to compete on other factors. Some people bundle it with software, some people bundle it with accessories, or free Apple Watch or something like that, that they throw into it. But everybody has a USP that sells it and even BestBuy does promotions where you get a $25 gift card if you buy your Apple computer through them. So they're all doing something a little bit different than everyone else. Find out what yours is, if you don't have one, you really need to create one because you don't want to be in the position of being a commodity business without something that differentiates you from everyone else, even if it's just customer service or something that's very hard to identify. There's something about your culture and your business that makes you unique. Other things that you can do is make your own news. I do this all the time with clients. I've done it with a local auto repair shop in Pennsylvania. I've done it with some other companies, and it's basically you author a survey or study in your industry, and you put it out there And in the case of the auto repair shop in Pennsylvania, they got like about a dozen auto trade publications picked it up, many numerous newspapers picked it up, including their local newspaper. And it did phenomenally well. And they're not experts in the auto industry. But they are the expert of that survey, they put together the questions, I gave some input, I told him to put a couple of crazy questions in there, I'll always recommend that, you know, put your standard questions that people would like to know right now. But also throw in one or two odd balls, and the one we put in that one that did really well was What's the strangest thing and customer left in their car while being repaired. And we just left it where people could put about two sentences. And we got lots of crazy anecdotes. And that was what went viral people really resonated with these crazy stories of boa constrictors, Grandma being left in an urn, all of these little things, and, you know, we we, as readers, and an audience, you know, those stories are cool, they're interesting, and that is newsworthy, and you can, you know, author that study, you don't even have to have, you know, leads in this case, they didn't know who to send it to, we knew we wanted to get auto, other auto trade companies involved repair centers involved. And so we just reached out to an independent trade association and said, Could you send a survey to your members will mention you in the press release. And they said, Sure, you know, the smaller and more independent trade associations are much more receptive to that, because all the large trade associations get all the love and the media hype out there. So if you're willing to promote them a little bit, you know, go for it. In some cases, you may want to even consider co branding, the survey between you and the trade association. So just try to look for win wins like that places where you could be more strategic, if you have a viewpoint that is contrarian, or you can rationally come across with a contrarian viewpoint on an industry hot button, you stand a much higher chance of getting media pickup, whenever anyone your industry talks about it, because so many people tend to go with the prevailing thoughts, and what the trends are. And if everybody's moving forward, in the auto industry, there, everybody's moving pro electric car. But if you're the rational person saying, you know, not so fast, you know, there's a lot of things that have to be solved. We don't know what we're going to do with these batteries at the end of their life. From an environmental standpoint, and recycling standpoint, there's the minerals that make up these batteries, the labor practices and the environmental hazards of mining, these are very difficult questions that we kind of need to solve first. And you don't come across as crazy. But it's a viewpoint that will every time a journalist covers a subject, and they should be objective, and cover all sides, they have a go to, for the con side, the person who's pointing out the negative. And that could be you. And you could get a lot a lot of coverage out of that as compared to one of the people who just going along and rubber stamping what everyone else is saying. And

Robert Plank 8:01 that's a lot to think about just in the the first half of our discussion here. And I can, this seems like a lot of fun. And I can tell that you have a lot of fun to kind of being creative and thinking outside the box. So you're saying that, that we can write our press release ourselves, that's kind of the easy part. And that he releases.com is the place to go there and look at some of the samples. And you're saying that we should be kind of thinking are paying attention to like things that are like kind of sort of newsworthy, so not just an internal organizational change. No one cares about that. But if there is something like fun and interesting and exciting, and something that's maybe a little weird, or maybe a little funny, or something that you could see appearing on the local news or being mentioned, maybe something of that nature, that's kind of the vibe I got, like when you said that there's that survey, they're up what are the weirdest things people left in their car, that seems like kind of like a like a local news thing that they might put neck near near the end of the of the program, as far as like what's happened in this mindset of what goes viral? And what would people be be like? What would the masses be sharing, who maybe are themselves not, not, at the very moment interested in getting their car service, but could share it and then it could get kind of the wider audience there. And so so this is all really fun to think about, and especially kind of how you kind of have this than multi part strategy of sometimes even saying, Well, I want to do that this survey, and I don't maybe even have enough of a traffic or audience or a list to do the sugar myself, but I can kind of partner with someone else and tap into their audience, talk to this association, and then use them and then and it works in so many ways, right? Because you kind of use the association to get your your news or your press release figured out and you mentioned them plus you get this sort of connection figured out and in a way you mean you've helped them too. So that's something else to circle back around. And I love stuff like that. I love how and especially with the PR guys like you, you kind of have like a multi step strategy like I heard one. So and I don't even know what it means, but it stuck with him for all these years of this guy saying, Well, if you're going to be doing this thing, then put out a press release announcing that thing. But then a month before that put out a press release announcing the announcement, like I love things like that, where it's like, kind of almost gimmicky, but it serves a purpose of getting people's attention waking people up, like you said, they're being contrarian in some ways. And like following the news and following the trends, but not being being a me too kind of person as well, just saying, like, well, here's the thing everyone's talking about, but let me be like the little pebble in the road, let me be someone that is like kind of bringing, bringing attention to a minor issue that is relating to the trend that not everyone is talking about. It's really interesting to to think about. And so to help us kind of still understand the roadmap. So there's the there's like that press release, kind of sort of format that we can look at and see what works and see what it is. And then you hear a lot about like press release distribution, and like that itself is a mystery to me as well, because I sometimes see like different websites that do it. And I'm thinking like, Well, does any website work for this? And like, where does it go? Does it end up like this, the Associated Press get it? And then you also see different kind of price ranges? So can you help us like kind of decode that part of it? Like, where is the Where's the place to submit our press release? Are they all the same? Or some better than others? And what sort of the price range and what does that mean?

Speaker 2 11:37 Right so in, in the US, we have three major news wires or press releases, it's globe news wires, the smallest business wires, middle of the road. And then PR Newswire, which is owned by scission is the oldest and largest newswire press releases. All of the releases that EA releases go through PR Newswire, the retail for the average customer to do a national release through PR Newswire is $1,000 for a 500 600 word press release through E releases, because we sort of act as a co op for small businesses, we've developed a custom national distribution with PR Newswire sort of takes into account some of the sources we already have in our database. But our prices are like 269, for a new customer coming in 200 to 400 is usually the level for distribution through us. There are a lot of lower price people out there, they tend to do web only or syndicated runs. So you'll get your press release syndicated with a bunch of your URLs showing your press release on these little websites. It can be valuable from a branding standpoint, we could put as featured on these little ABC, FOX, CBS, little local stations, but no journalist saw it, nobody wrote anything about it. And it's not going to drive traffic or sales to your business. The only way for PR to do that is to get it to actual media and journalists. And you're going to have to use a service that that costs money. And you know, I think that globe news wires around 650 to $700. Business wires closer to PR Newswire in price, so it can be considerable. But you know, if you're a small business, or you're doing, you know, just a few releases a year of service, like E releases is is a really good fit. And there's really no one cheaper than us that's providing a real newswire distribution nationally out there, as well as the email distribution that we provide to journalists that are in our database. But if there is confusion, we have people who say I paid you know, $59 to go over this x xx wire or something like that. And it's not it never reached a journalist. And, you know, there were a few links that they saw where their release was on a few websites, but it nothing generally comes from that. Just to give you the flip side last year, we did a press release for the dining bond initiative, which was modeled after the war bonds where they were trying to help local businesses, predominantly restaurants in this case, and basically you would nominate your local restaurant if they accepted. You would basically make a donation it would go directly to the restaurant immediately. And you would be secured through dining bond or gift certificate type strategy. One press release it got over 150 articles New York Times Washington Post, all your major food, travel, magazines and publications picked it up. We quit counting at 150 we just there's a lot of little minor newspapers and other places have picked it up that we didn't even bother recording because you just had so many clips as a result of it generated millions of dollars in revenue to help these local businesses. One press release you know of what normally would have cost 269. We did it for free. But you know, you, that's the kind of leverage that is possible with PR, it's unlikely you'll ever get, you know, 10 plus millions of dollars from one press release. But it's not unusual for my clients to do a press release that gets favorable articles, and it drives traffic, and they get 10s of 1000s of dollars in sales or even more. And so you know, this, this leverage opportunity is where PR can really work. But so many people go into it, and they test one press release, which is not a PR campaign, you generally want to do between four to eight releases on different strategic hooks to get a feel for what works in your industry. And you learn from each one. And sometimes if one does really well, maybe you could tweak it and make it slightly different. In the case of the survey, I have a client, that survey worked really well for him. So now they do 40 surveys a year. Now, they're fortunate that they cover lots of little verticals, so they could do a survey on each little vertical as they go. But each one, they get between eight and 14 articles on average, as a result of each press release. And these are industry specific, their customers specific and it drives, you know, for them, millions of dollars in revenue, you know, because of their ability to recognize what good surveys are. And you know, right now is a right time for anybody to do a survey, because we've got a lot of unknowns in our future. So a lot of people are wondering, are things you know, going to go back to a lockdown? Is the economy going to slow down? Or is it the the worst behind us? And if you were to take your industries temperature right now and say, you know, what's your outlook? What's your spending? As far as are you contracting? Are you spending more? Or are you spending about the same? That's really useful information that people in your industry would want to know? So if you published a survey right now, and you included questions like that taking their temperature, do you would probably do very well. So anytime that there's something going on, or just, you know, some unknown or something within the industry, if you could take their temperature and their feelings about it. And you know, evaluate it from several different questions from several different perspectives, ones, maybe being financial, one being more emotional or psychological. And, you know, also, you could look at HR and hiring do you plan on hiring more, you know, is hiring difficult for you? We know that hiring is really problematic for a lot of industries right now. So again, you know, incorporating things like that in your questionnaire would probably make it something that a lot of industry trade publications would write about, including perhaps newspapers as well, that might cover that.

Robert Plank 17:48 Yeah, and this is really cool to think about, this is a lot of like an outside the box kind of strategy. So it seems like, well, you touch on something a few minutes ago, which is I've been hearing that a lot more often of someone saying, well, x strategy didn't work. And then when you find out what they did was they just tried it one time, kind of like you said, you know, I put out a press release once and it didn't work. So I'll just write off all of anything PR and then and then someone like you would say, Well, you did it, you did it one time. And you were maybe even were expecting it to fail. And you weren't going into it with maybe a mindset of well, let me maybe, like tweak it later. Or let me try it four times, or eight times. Or let me try attacking it from from different angles. You just tried it once and said okay, at least I can check out off the bucket list and don't ever have to revisit it. And it's like, and you hear that with just so many different like traffic's kind of sources, right? Like, I tried paid ads didn't work, I tried SEO, it didn't work. And it's like, are you really gonna write off this whole, this whole mess, this whole tried and true industry, just because you personally tried it one time and didn't work. So I'm getting that kind of that kind of vibe from you as far as like, well, this is maybe something to do long term. And you might have to like, you know, tweak things, you might have to see something might fall flat, something might work. And then you can revisit that reuse that in a different way later. But then you're also saying that this is more of like a long game where don't just expect to launch this one and then have 10s of millions of dollars. It might be something that you do every few months as you as you kind of can chase the news, or you can figure out what kind of new things are happening. And and I find it interesting that you're kind of go to at least with some of these examples is the survey. And that's really cool to think about because it seems it seems like in especially this last couple of years, there's like this disconnect of it's either one extreme or the other. It's either Well, I heard I got this friend of a friend who said this about this medical issue or about this legal issue. And it's like, well, you're just taking one tiny little anecdotal story. But then the other extreme event, as you see, well, there's all all these, this data and all these things to pour over and you're thinking well, that's like that's equally unhelpful. So this is cool how you say well, by kind of meeting people in the middle Having this this kind of news PR kind of a splash in the water is you have the survey and you figure out well, am I going to talk to this industry, or these experts in this industry or this particular job type like HR people, or just like, like, you know, retail businesses or whoever, like, what kind of person am I going to contact and with the survey questions, and have some of the basic things and take your temperature and know what everyone's thinking, but then also throw in kind of the fun questions, too. To have the viral aspect of it, it's really cool to think about that there's sure there's like things, there's problems to be solved. And there's kind of a little bit of the creativity and thinking outside the box. But you've given us a lot of the starting points, as far as the press release template, and the the survey idea, like there's kind of a jumping off point to start off from and then we can apply our own magic. It's cool to think about and so in these last few minutes, as we're kind of getting closer to the tail end of our conversation here, Mickey, where do you see people failing with press releases, like we've covered a couple of bases. But if there's something where, you know, someone said, I've tried it before, and I failed, or I'm for I'm afraid to even try, because I'm worried about all the things I don't know, what is an easy thing to avoid failing at with press releases,

Speaker 2 21:19 I think it's changed your perspective, the press release should not be self serving, while you do want to promote yourself, the goal of your announcement should serve the journalist, the journalist, again acts as a gatekeeper. And if you can envision that they're deciding and looking at all this content and saying, What would my audience be interested in? And if you can sort of, you know, realize that and say, Well, I'm announcing a new reboot of my product version 1.5 or something, you know, that's very self serving? Is there something that I could put in here that would make this stand out and make it more, you know, resonate better with an audience? Is there features or highlights that I could bring in here to light that would make it really interesting to that audience? Is there a case study or a use study of something like this, that would really help. And therefore journalists would say all people in my audience would really, you know, be interested in something like that. So I think if you keep looking at the press release, as not just serving you buy this as news, I want to get out. But it's like news, I want to get out. But I have to do it through the lens of a journalist. And so I kind of have to reverse engineer some of what I'm writing to take that into account. And where are the opportunities in this press release to make it not serve me, but the journalist who really wants to provide captivating content to to their audience? Fantastic.

Robert Plank 22:54 That's interesting to think about that. Is this this reverse engineer mentality? And it's easy, like you said, to just either try the strategy in quotes of throwing things to the wall, seeing what sticks, talking about myself, and all those things seemed like recipes for failure. But if you say, Well, what, what ended up getting the virality? What press releases impress me, or what press releases found their way to me, and then reverse engineer with that that attitude of okay, well, this, like you said, like the point is to get it in front of journalists. And sure, you could get it, get it out in the newswire and get it in the back pages and be able to have the logos of saying it was on this NBC affiliate or whatever. But as far as the actual goal, which is getting it in front of journalists, these journalists are thinking every day about the audience that they want to serve, they say what is my audience interested in? So what a concept, why not give it to them? And so So that's this is really cool stuff to think about. And we said that EA releases.com is where there are those press release samples. And if someone has got the itch now for for press releases for PR for pursuing some of this and actually giving it a real shot and not just saying, Let me try it. And then and then give up later, if someone really was serious about using this as a traffic tool to get more attention in their business of whatever kind. What's the next step here? Where should they go? What should they do, right? So

Speaker 2 24:18 I'm gonna recommend that they go to E releases.com, forward slash plan PLA n. And that's a free video masterclass, I've got it's less than an hour, but it just goes through about eight strategies like the survey, like the contrarian approach, but their tried and true strategies that work time and time again. And if they were to watch that hour thinking about their business, and not have at least six to 12 ideas for their next PR campaign, then it probably is going to work for them. Because, you know, I've laid out what strategies work and if you were to look at that through you know, your business and how your business would apply to that. I'm sure you're gonna come up with brainstorm of what lots of ideas. And that's where I would go first, you know, come up with these great ideas. And if you can come up with strategic ideas, then you can build a PR campaign of, you know, six to eight press releases and see if PR works for you. And I, you know, just let you know, I haven't had anyone follow the model have those eight strategies, and not get media success with a PR campaign of six releases. So, and generally, the least anyone's ever gotten from a survey or study is four articles. And that's still a pretty decent amount, especially if it's a really good trade association. But on average, it's anywhere from eight to 16 is usually the average for a survey or study, press release that you get out there. Super

Robert Plank 25:44 great. Well, you hear Mr. Mickey, the place to go is ear laces.com/plan. It's only an hour what else you're going to do with an hour of your life. And as Mickey said, you watch the video, you take it seriously, you get these eight strategies. And if you honestly, watch this one hour video, and you get nothing from it, then you're in the wrong business, then you should go go and work at McDonald's or something. And if you watch this one hour video, and you get these eight strategies, and you apply it, and they don't work, then give up on your business completely, then throw your business, your computer out the window, obviously, we're just kidding. But this press release thing, it might not seem exciting on the surface, but then when you dive into it, I get excited about it. And it's something that can be exciting. And it seems like it's kind of a blend between the old and the new, right? There's still be these huge news corporations, they're still these journalists. And then the press releases have also embraced the just the duplicate ability of virality of the internet. So why not use this this technique that is thankfully not overcrowded, but it's also proven from all these decades of journalism. And why not use it to get extra attention on your website, on your brick and mortar service on whatever new new hot trend you want people to be aware of. And it could be a fun outside the box way for you to get more attention on you and what you do. So run, don't walk, go right now. It's e releases.com. Forward slash plan, watch the video, get the eight strategies, you're gonna love it. And then you'll get the PR press release ish. And then you'll want to contact Mickey and his team afterwards to move things in the next direction and use press releases as not something you thought about once you tried once, but something that is a vital valuable part of your business moving forward, ie releases.com/plan. Anything else to say Mickey as we wrap up, wind down our conversation? No,

Speaker 2 27:34 I think that's pretty much it. You know, I would just say PR has so much leverage capability where for a little bit of effort and time and a little bit of money, you can you know, get a factor of you know, 20 4200 times what you spend is possible and I see it every day and I just it just excites me especially when you can put the creative brainstorm together and come up with these great strategies that will work for you