It amazes me how many companies are losing out on terrific sales opportunities because they assume there is a linear relationship between what they publicize and what people purchase.

A great client, Malcom Company sells a line of plastic welding tool kits and I’ve been preparing innovative news releases about the kits for many years. The tools combine heated air and pressure to weld plastic and can be used for repairing tanks and vessels, automotive bumpers, personal watercraft, canoes, snow mobiles, you name it. Virtually anything made of plastic.

While publicizing these plastic welding kits for different applications, it occurred to me that the common thread to all of them was plastic welding rod. So I thought, why not publicize plastic welding rod by itself, because anyone interested in the rod would be a prospect for tools?

Preparing news releases for commodity products is a terrific opportunity because most people figure everybody knows what it is, so why bother? How ironic, not publicizing what people need routinely. Exactly the wrong attitude!

Press Release Creates Unexpected Sales Volume

By publicizing the plastic welding rod, Malcom sold more plastic welding kits as a result of that publicity then they did when we publicized the actual kits themselves!

The product publicity for the plastic welding rod got phenomenal media coverage,  drove a lot of traffic to their website and visitors clicked-through to the plastic welding kits and purchased them online. The beauty of this contrarian approach was measurability. Malcom was able to identify which media outlets produced the most leads from the plastic welding rod publicity and could evaluate their corresponding ratio to sales.

The big lesson here is to have a consistent product publicity program for all categories of products you sell and evaluate the web traffic, click activity, and resulting orders. There isn’t always a linear relationship between the product publicized and the resulting sales. What’s more, it is impossible to predict what product is going to generate the most valuable sales leads.

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 © 2014 Steven M. Stroum