Public Relations

[jkendrick]

I'm curious as to experiences you all have had with PR for your muse. I'm finding that my niche is probably best reached through a combination of guerilla marketing (i.e. street teams) and PR and NOT Adwords. Thoughts?

[webgal]

PR rocks. Not enough people use it.

[JKohlbach]

I've found direct email marketing good for one side of my audience, while PPC seemed effective enough for the other side. Depends on the different targets you're going after I guess!

[jkendrick]

Well I'll elaborate a bit. My audience is college students from 15 major universities. PPC doesn't seem like an option because I can't think of a way to narrowly target THESE college students as opposed to ALL college students (which is, obviously, a costly demo to target). Likewise, my product is not something that ANY college student is currently likely to actively seek out without first becoming aware of it through other marketing. For example, a search term of "Widget for State University" wouldn't be effective... yet.

Sooo, where does that leave me? Well I thought about direct email lists, but they are expensive, have low conversion rates even when done as effectively as possible and (with audiences that have high turnover such as students) are often not as accurate and current as they should be. So I am looking at hiring street teams (perhaps through Elance) at these 15 schools to sell the product on campus (with marketing to the Website on the packaging giving instructions on how to order more) . By compensating the street teams with the profits for each sale, I will break even on this marketing technique and create exposure for the site and the product.

What does this have to do with PR? So far, not much. But I will also target local student newspapers and independent newspapers with a PR campaign with the hopes of being at least included in "back to school" supplies round-ups. That will cost me nothing but time (wire services don't seem like they'd be worth the expense). Once I have some exposure, perhaps then a PPC model will work for us.

So, I'm still wondering if anyone has generated traffic in this manner and what their experiences have been.

Thanks!

[Harry]

Hey jkendrick.

I'v been lurking on the forum for a while now but your post FORCED me to join because I can't stand by and watch you miss out on an amazing marketing method which is PERFECT for reaching your target audience: Facebook!

I'm a university student myself out here in the UK and was thinking of using Facebook ads to promote a venture of mine. I later decided against it, but their ads works pretty similar to Adwords. It's great because you can target users by location, age, interests etc. and the one that you'd be especially happy about: you can target users by their college networks!

You can select the 15 colleges you want to target, and Facebook will only show your ads to people who are listed as being at these colleges (you can be really specific as well: you could target just males at those 15 colleges, who are X age who have Y listed as their interests in their profile etc.)

If you're aiming a product at college students, Facebook is definitely the way to go. I can't imagine there being too many people at college these days who don't have Facebook, and almost all of them are part of their college network, so you'd pretty much be hitting the whole of your target market.

Personally, I've seen ads come up on my profile that have been specific to courses at my particular university all the time, so they definitely create exposure...

Harry

[jkendrick]

Yeah we're definitely going to create Facebook and MySpace profiles, but the ad rates to do what you suggest are little beyond us right now. We will most certainly go this route should we see some success; we just don't want to have to invest too much up front. Thanks for chiming in though and I should have mentioned Facebook in my last post as it is certainly a channel we will not ignore.