Last week, I explained how the placement of “bling” keywords in your Vocus news releases could cleverly divert competitors’ customers and re-route them to your site.
In this post, I’ll hip you to another secret technique that can open the traffic-siphoning spigot even wider: I call it Sort Of Shout-Outs (S.O.S.O.). Done correctly and in tandem with the bling approach, S.O.S.O. could help to add enduring value, customer appeal, and ROI to your news release.
S.O.S.O. is the strategic inclusion of the names of your biggest competitors in your news release.
Now, you may be thinking “whoa, hold on a second there Rafe – you’re kidding, right? I mean, include the names of my competitors in my company’s news release? Really? Seriously?
Yes. Really and seriously. And not only will I explain how to do it, I’ll also share the details of how S.O.S.O. generated some real and serious results for one of my clients.
First, the process:
1. Write/research/bling your news release (details in last week’s blog).
2. List an assortment of your most profitable and market-dominant competitors.
3. Include the names of your competitors in your news release in a way that’s complimentary and within the context of your news release’s main message.
Here’s how I successfully implemented S.O.S.O. for one of my clients:
Tsi-La Organic Perfumery is a small Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of organic perfumes. The organic perfume market is dominated by an assortment of companies that are larger, have greater sales, and more widespread distribution than Tsi-La.
Tsi-La’s press release namechecks other organic perfume makers – click to see how they did it.
In early 2012, Tsi-La asked me to craft a PRWeb news release about how their products offer a healthy alternative to mass market perfumes. I provided lots of facts, details, and research that validated the health advantages of organic perfumes and explained how Tsi-La’s unique formulations and manufacturing approach deliver a variety of holistic wellness benefits to its customers.
I devised S.O.S.O. with the goal of rerouting customers that were searching for information about Tsi-La’s competition to information about Tsi-La, and here’s how I put it together in the release:
The popularity of organic perfume and natural perfume has gained momentum over the last decade: companies such as red flower, A Perfume Organic, Aftelier Perfumes, Strange Invisible Perfumes, Intelligent Nutrients, wholearth beauty + bath by Danny Seo, LaVanila, and Rich Hippie have achieved success by keeping their ingredients real, clean, and natural.
“We love where these companies are going in terms of bringing safe and beautiful products to the marketplace,” says Annie Morton, president of Tsi-La. “Along with offering our own natural fragrances crafted in artisan-size batches, our goal with Tsi-La is to also infuse our products with the healthful mind and body benefits that our hands-on aromatherapy expertise make possible.”
Note how the S.O.S.O. methodology was used:
1. I named Tsi-La’s most successful, profitable, and market dominant competitors.
2. I praised them in the context of the overall hook of the article: organic perfume is good for consumers, and Tsi-La’s organic perfumes are really good and ones that consumers should consider buying.
Prospects searching for information about organic perfume or the names of the competitors that I mentioned found Tsi-La’s PRWeb release among their search results. This made Tsi-La’s release a viable choice to be clicked, and created the perception that Tsi-La was as viable, trustworthy, and desirable a vendor of organic perfume as Tsi-La’s much larger competitors.
In terms of results there were two biggies:
- Broadcast media coverage: Tsi-La was contacted by a Philadelphia news station about the release, and produced a segment about the health benefits of organic perfume.
- Increase in sales: Tsi-La received orders from a European retailer, which began selling Tsi-La’s line of perfumes.
Implemented strategically, tastefully, and contextually – and done in tandem with “bling” keyword inclusion – S.O.S.O. could deliver huge results and tremendous benefits. It could give the little guys a tasty chomp of the big guys’ business, and bump them from “also ran” status to “in the running” very quickly.
Really. Seriously!
Rafe’s work has been featured in a variety of media outlets, including Fox News Channel, MSNBC, PBS, Gawker, Brandweek, CBS Moneywatch, Adweek, the American Express OPEN Forum, FoxBusiness.com, Yahoo! Small Business, Entrepreneur Magazine, Direct Marketing News, and The New York Daily News. He recommends the Vocus Marketing Suite to all of his clients. Follow him @vcincmarketing
Images: Michael Casey, Tsi-La