If you’ve never thought about public relations for your company, you could be missing a huge opportunity to help your business grow. Even one well-placed news story can make an enormous difference for your business, and the costs associated with public relations probably aren’t as expensive as you think.
At Oxygen Marketing, we encourage many of our advertising clients to also take advantage of our public relations capabilities. Unlike many other public relations organizations, Oxygen’s PR staff has worked in and around news organizations, so we have a firsthand understanding of the wants and needs of reporters.
Over the past few years, we’ve done public relations for such diverse clients as Overstock.com, Bear River Mutual Insurance, City Academy Charter School, Beehive Science & Technology Charter School, Utah Project Safe Neighborhoods and the Utah Department of Health, among others. We’ve placed news stories on our clients on every major Utah television station and in every major newspaper in the state. We’ve also enjoyed great success in having clients interviewed by several nationally syndicated radio programs, and by television network affiliates in such markets as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, not to mention a couple of national placements with CNBC’s “Wall Street Journal Report” and the “Today” program.
The power of one news story can result in an enormous difference in your company’s bottom line. Within the past couple of years, we placed two clients on two different syndicated radio programs. During these interviews, the one of our client’s website received more than 10,000 hits, while the other had about 50,000 hits. The syndicated programs were heard in 25 different radio markets across the country. If these clients were to have purchased advertising time in these markets for as much time as they were given, not to mention production time, the advertising fees alone would have amounted to several hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Yet, their public relations fee was miniscule in comparison with the value of the air time they received. In addition, keep in mind that non-paid interviews like these carry a great deal more credibility than advertising (some studies suggest that news stories are retained 10 times more than advertising). In reality, it’s impossible to buy this kind of exposure.
In addition, through our public relations efforts, many of our clients have been presented with awards like “Best of State,” “Entrepreneur of the Year,” Mountain West Capital’s Utah 100, and several Utah Business magazine honors.
As part of our public relations services, we also provide clients with crisis communication preparation and media training as needed.