To Campaign or Not to Campaign; Product Marketing and Public Relations on a Shoestring Budget

Small and mid-sized companies that have been working on new product initiatives for the past year are now trying to figure out how to get the word out about their new stuff while keeping a wary eye on their marketing budget. The challenge for companies that are reluctant to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a big marketing or public relations campaign is to figure out how far they can get with self-promotion alone.

The fact is that sometimes you need to hire an expert. With that said prudence dictates that in leaner times you should see just how far you can get on a limited budget before you seek outside help. There are enough tools out there nowadays that savvy businesses should make considerable progress simply by taking time to execute.

Here are a number of ideas that could help get your homespun PR campaign off the ground.

Create a press release through Enhanced Online News (EON) – Enhanced Online News is a service of Business Wire. This innovative service is definitely geared for the do-it-yourselfer. EON helps you turn your basic press release into an interactive web page that is optimized for key words and phrases. Your press release will be indexed and served up to all major search engines. Each release costs $295 with additional fees tacked on for including media and image files. These fees range from $50 to $100 per release. A single release with a logo or graphic embedded will run you about $395. Not too bad if you only plan on issuing a release once in a while. Visit http://eon.businesswire.com/portal/site/eon/home/ for more information.

Create a product page in Facebook – A Facebook page can be used by a business to post information about a product or service. The customer community can support your business by adding themselves as a fan or by leaving comments on your wall. At the very least, you will learn what people think about your product. You can engage your community directly by making special offers to fans, uploading videos, product reviews, etc. For more information visit http://www.facebook.com/business/?pages.

Find reporters seeking experts via HARO and contribute – HARO, or “Help A Reporter Out” is a unique site where reporters can post requests for assistance from the community at large. You may peruse the HARO site and find that some reporter is working on an article that is in your field. By providing assistance to that reporter you might get quoted or your company mentioned. Being quoted as an expert can help generate interest in your firm. Visit www.helpareporter.com for more information about this free service.

Submit your product to the blogosphere for comment – Bloggers are always looking for things to expound on. Most bloggers can pull off their blogs because they actually know what they are talking about. The trick of course, is finding the right blogger and inviting him or her to look at your product to provide a review. You can search the blogger directory at Technorati to find the right blogger to approach. This directory lists blogs by subject and provides rankings so you can select the most popular blogs to approach. Visit www.technorati.com for more information.

Naturally, these aren’t the only things you can do to launch your own PR campaign. You can create product videos and post them on YouTube, for example. These same videos can also be used to guide new users on your help pages and generate product interest on your home page. In the end, you may need to hire a marketing or PR firm anyway to help you get the word out to a broader audience, but these things will get you started and allow you to spend your limited PR and marketing dollars in the areas where you need the most guidance.