«Return to Blog List The Impact of a Single Article
A dripping faucet fills a sink one drop at a time.
Such is the process of marketing and PR in the new world with thousands of distributed, targeted media opportunities. A little exposure here, a little there, and you slowly build awareness about your product, service or business in front of just the right audience.
But some drips ripple more than others.
Take a feature story in a very targeted industry publication, for example. Steven Rainwater of Treeside Communications shared his story about how a customer-story article, written for a client, turned into sales.
As a writer and PR consultant, Steve crafts customer success stories for clients and assists in landing media coverage. This summer, he wrote a feature-length article for his client, UNIST Inc., that ran in the July 2008 issue of Modern Applications News.
“It happened to fit a slot the publication editor was trying to fill, so I wrote it up for him a couple of months prior,” Steve said.
The story features the success of Bear Metal Works, which purchased a 200-3S Saw Coolubing System from UNIST, a Grand Rapids, MI manufacturer of lubrication systems for metal shops.
The story made a surprisingly fast, impressive impact.
“Before July was over, I happened to be talking with one of the inside sales people at my client and she mentioned they had already had at least a half dozen calls in response to the above article, and about 3-5 orders for systems like the ones mentioned in the article,” Steve said. “Those initial sales amount to about 10-15 times what they paid me for the article. What I thought was interesting is the quickness of the response, still being July.”
Following that, UNIST received permission to use excerpts from the article in upcoming trade show materials.
On the back end, the publication ran the article Steve submitted with few changes. The article was one of many PR activities the company has done, but really hit the right audience in this case. What an amazing impact when that happens.
The take-aways here:
Look out for opportunities to provide relevant content to key media in your area of focus
Customer stories are compelling to editors and their readers
