Today's Guest

Mickie Kennedy is the founder and president of eReleases, a leader in affordable press release writing and distribution services. Mickie started the company in 1998 after working in a PR environment that was not meeting the needs of small- and medium-sized businesses and firms. eReleases has grown exponentially since then and even works with big names now, but the spirit of Mickie's original intent has not changed. Mickie shares why it’s important for small businesses to include PR as part of their marketing strategy.

Resources Shared

• eReleases
• Thryv

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning On Main Street, your small business podcast. And this week we have an expert on small business publicity and press releases and how you can use public relations to grow. Real expert. Welcome Mickie Kennedy.

Mickie Kennedy:

Thanks for having me, Gordon.

Gordon Henry:

Great to have you. So a quick intro on Mickie. Mickie is the founder and president of eReleases, the small business leader for press release distribution now celebrating over two decades in business. He's an expert at helping small businesses increase their visibility and credibility and basically helping you get website traffic and better quality customers through coverage in the media.

What should listeners get out of this episode? Now, every business needs traffic to their website and a steady flow of new customers. Mickie and his firm eReleases can show you how gaining media coverage. The show is brought to you by Thryv; small business runs better on Thryv. So Mickie, welcome to the show. Why don't we get started by just having you tell us a bit about your background and how you built eReleases?

Mickie Kennedy:

Sure. I mean, it's I guess a very non-traditional path. I was pursuing a master's of fine arts and creative writing with an emphasis in poetry. And my game plan was to wait tables during the day and write poetry at night. And so I graduated about 26, 27 years ago and I did that for a summer and I just realized that my ankles, my knees, I just couldn't handle being on concrete 12 hours out of a day and I just felt so spent at the end of the day. I wasn't reading or writing and so I wanted a safe office job and give that a try.

So I was hired by a telecom research startup as employee number three. And because I had a writing background, they said, "Hey, figure out press releases and get them to work for us." And we published a lot of interesting numbers and, you know, how do you make that interesting to the media? So I would look for anomalies, get the analyst to tell me why these anomalies are happening and explain them in a press release. And we sent it to the media, and we got lots of media pickup, The Economist, Financial Times, a lot of international, Canadian as well as US, Washington Post, New York Times, wall Street Journal.

And it seemed kind of easy and I was just like, why aren't more people doing this? And I was faxing at the time and there was a transition where a lot of times after I do fax, a journalist would call and say, "Could you just email that to me? It's easier to work with these numbers and things like that." And that sort of gave me an idea for email as a way to approach journalists. And that was the idea for eReleases. So I spent about a year in my evenings and on the weekends just reaching out to journalists and say, Hey, I noticed that you cover this beat. Could I send you related press releases?

And almost everyone at that time said yes. And that's how we launched, me just being a matchmaker, sending out press releases to these journalists. And over time PR Newswire reached out to me and said, "You should also send your releases through us." And I'm like, you charge $1,200 to $1,500 to go out nationally. My clients could never afford that. I think at the time, 20 some years ago, they were paying like $250 and they didn't run away. They were just like, "Let's see if we could make this work for each other." And they customize the national distribution for us. We schedule our releases by default the next business day. So their overnight editorial team, which has a lot of down hours can work on them without costing them additional labor. And it's been running smooth ever since. So small businesses and entrepreneurs get a really great value in getting a national release over the wire as well as our email distribution. And it's nowhere near $1,200 to $1,500 per release.

Gordon Henry:

Great. So obviously the media landscape has changed tremendously in the past couple of decades. Growth of social, obviously everything now being sort of internet. Why is it still so important to have a PR strategy and specifically for a small business, can't they just do this by posting a few blogs or social media?

Mickie Kennedy:

So the opportunity and the ability of leverage is the biggest differentiator of getting earned to media. So a blog post is great, but it's unlikely to generate millions of dollars in sales. I had a client that was in the waste management business where they just built whole facilities and he said, "My boss wants to send a press release." We did. And he called me back and said, "We're negotiating 160 million deal in Australia." He goes, "Obviously my boss was onto something."

So people don't realize that when you do get pick up, they got picked up in a trade publication that you're on people's radar all of a sudden. And whether it's in a newspaper or a trade publication or a magazine or radio or TV or even social media, the Newswire accepts as journalist influencers. So for example, there are Instagram influencers in the fashion world that are more prominent than actual magazines and publications.

So the landscape is changing, but the Newswire is very open to accepting these people, which is a different stance than they had when blogging started. I had to fight to try to get some bloggers access to the wire because the Newswire just didn't consider them journalists. And I'm like, this site gets more traffic than the largest trade publication in the industry. I really think you're making a mistake. And eventually they turned around and I think that they're just much more willing to be open now because the landscape of media is changing.

But I did a press release early in the pandemic at no charge for a PR firm that was doing an initiative called The Dining Bond Initiative. And basically it was a matchmaking in and of itself where you could nominate your favorite local restaurant that was closed, and if they were able to contact them, you could make a donation that would immediately go to them and be back sort of like as a gift certificate.

It got over 150 articles. The Wall Street Journal picked it up, Washington Post, a lot of major media, a lot of smaller media as well. It really resonated, generated in excess of $10 million in revenue for small businesses. And I challenge anyone, no matter how good you are at marketing, take something that normally would've cost $300 to $500 and turn it into $10 million.

Gordon Henry:

That's pretty good.

Mickie Kennedy:

It's extremely unlikely to do that through any other method than through PR.

Gordon Henry:

Pretty good ROI. Yeah, yeah. So most of our customers or clients, and listeners are small businesses, very often local service businesses, your local roofer, your plumber, your auto mechanic, dentist. And what do they have to say that's so newsworthy? They probably thinking, "I just go to work every day. I don't really have anything newsworthy to say." What do you say to that kind of business?

Mickie Kennedy:

I say It is a challenge, but you can get earned media. I had a auto repair shop in Pennsylvania that came to me through an SEO person saying, "We're looking for authority links." Because they had a website, it vanished with the yellow pages, somehow it was tied to the yellow pages, and they had a new domain name and they were not ranking at all. And the SEO guy said, "If you could get some auto industry links to us, that would be great." And so that was the challenge. And what we did was a survey of the auto industry, other auto repair shops, and these people are like "But we're not authority enough to do a survey." And I said, anybody can do a survey. And then they're like, "Well, we wouldn't know where to send it." And I'm like, do you belong to some trade associations? We reached out to one of the smaller independent trade associations and they agreed to send it out to their list of members, and we said that we would profile them in the press release, we'd be issuing over the wire.

So for them it's a little bit of a win-win because they don't get the love that the large trade associations do. And we got a few hundred responses, and they got over a dozen auto industry links as well as a local newspaper and some additional papers as well. And that's just a local auto repair shop in Pennsylvania, asking compelling questions and building a survey that really is intriguing and takes the pulse on a whole industry is a great way to stand out because you're manufacturing and creating the news. And it does take a little bit of work, but it's not that difficult using a product like SurveyMonkey and then just reaching out to trade associations.

There are literally thousands of trade associations in almost every industry. You can pick them regionally or by lots of different demographics or things like that. These are opportunities for you to align yourself with them and use their membership to have them promote it either through email or social media. And sometimes they'll do both in exchange for a mention in the press release. At the worst, I've had a couple push back and say We'd like to co-brand the survey with us. And I don't see that as a downside. It just gives you a little bit more credibility.

Gordon Henry:

What is the cost to work with you and eReleases?

Mickie Kennedy:

So our prices for new customers, we have a new customer rate. When you come in, it's usually between $300 to $500. Our retail rates are between 400 and 700 for our more premium distribution, but most people are quite fine with the mid-tier product. It's our most popular. And really the writing of the press releases is something we offer for an additional charge. But I do challenge a lot of people to try to write the press release yourself. They're not very difficult. If you look at a press release, you'll see they're written very simply in the third person. The things I tell people to spend your most time and energy on is the headline, the opening paragraph and the quote. So many people just use a safe quote, and that's the place to really ramp up your message, say something that can't easily be paraphrased, and if it's good enough, a journalist will build a whole story around it.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. So $400 to $700 you said. And then you also added that you encourage people to write their own releases. So the $400 to $700, what does that get me?

Mickie Kennedy:

That is a distribution that goes out through email and the national distribution over PR Newswire, which is the oldest and largest repository of press releases.

Gordon Henry:

Is that per press release?

Mickie Kennedy:

Per press release.

Gordon Henry:

Per press release. Okay.

Mickie Kennedy:

Correct.

Gordon Henry:

So I could write my own press release. And for $400 to $700 you distribute that. I assume that's nationally, maybe even internationally, right?

Mickie Kennedy:

Correct.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah. Okay. And if I want you to write the release for me or with me, how much extra does that cost?

Mickie Kennedy:

It's $300.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. So for somewhere under $1,000, I can have you do the whole thing or obviously I can do some of the work myself. And if I decide this is working for me and I want to do it on a more frequent basis, let's say quarterly, is there any kind of package to it or-

Mickie Kennedy:

We do. We have package pricing where you could get six press releases distribution for under $3,000 for our mid-tier product. And I do encourage people who are open to PR to try to commit to a PR campaign of at least six releases to give it a shot to see what works. And the important thing to know is try to build a strategic type of press release. You can do that. I have a free masterclass that just teaches you how to do that. It's less than an hour long. It talks about the survey and study as one of the approaches.

And it's available at ereleases.com/plan. And again, it's completely free because I'm trying to get people to do more strategic types of press releases. The most common press release we get at eReleases is about a personnel change of the company. And those rarely do anything. At best, you might get the local paper put on the move a little, the sentence or two about this. And it really is, if you're going to spend money, especially to go over a wire, you really want to make sure that you're sort of fishing with good bait, and that is not good bait.

Gordon Henry:

Right. So what is good bait? So if I'm a small business, get my wheels spinning here. What are some good ideas for a local business to think, "Hey, if I wrote a press release about that, that would really get me on the map," what would it be?

Mickie Kennedy:

Sure. So talking about industry blind spots, we've had that work really well. We did a carpet company in New Jersey, again as a local company service industry kind of commodity. And they were able to get a lot of media attention after five or six tries of nothing. And what they ended up doing was talking about an industry blind spot where their biggest competitor of carpet companies nationwide is the big box home improvement stores.

And all of them know that they're not great experiences for customers. They use inferior padding. And even worse, they just call people who have a home improvement license and ask, "Are you available tomorrow between these hours to do a carpet install?" They never ask, have you installed carpet before? Do you even know what stretching is? Do you know how to align seams in a way that are not noticeable? It really can be a terrible product for so many people and yet it drives so much sales.

And so they built a press release about that and talked about the challenges of competing against the big box summer improvement stores, and they got pickup everywhere and they continued to do that. Talk about things or were sort of like things when you're at a trade show or a conference, things you talk about, like "Hey, have you noticed that everyone's now taking 120 to 150 days to pay instead of 30 to 60?" They're like, "Yeah, what's going on?"

That's fodder because the trade publications generally aren't that attuned to what's going on. And this could be something that could highlight a problem in the industry that you could take advantage of. Other things that you could talk about are, take a position in your industry that's a little bit contrarian. You'd never want to be seen as crazy or insane, but there's a way to be the friendly jerk. And if there's something that's really popular in your industry, you stand the chance of getting mentioned in every article about it because so few people are willing to raise their hand and say, "Not so fast, here's the con side of this." And if you are that person, a fair and balanced media is going to want to have both sides, they can plug you in to every article that's written about it. And that's another great way to get some attention.

Gordon Henry:

Right. That you write the piece and then you become quoted as the expert, the contrarian expert.

Mickie Kennedy:

Yeah, exactly.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So-

Mickie Kennedy:

And there's several of these approaches in that free masterclass. It does take a little bit of work, but it takes looking at the situation and doing audit of your industry for opportunities that could've be there. And they're not the obvious opportunities that so many people do. Another common press release that we get is the product launch press release. And I get it, you've launched a new product, you want to get a message out there, you want people to buy it. But what a lot of people do is they will do the product launch, press release, and they won't have the elements for a journalist to build a story. It's the product and what it does and a list of features.

And what you could do is you could have a case study or a use study where someone had tried the product, what they achieved through the product, and a quote by them. All of a sudden you built a whole story arc. And if you've read articles before in newspapers and magazines, you know journalists like a story arc. And anytime that you're doing something, even the product launch, it can work, but you have to have the elements in there for them to create a story.

Gordon Henry:

So you're trying to, at the end of the day, drive traffic to a website. That's kind of the payoff. What should I expect if I'm the small business, let's say I do this program with you, six releases over the course of the year. What should I expect in terms of traffic to my website?

Mickie Kennedy:

It really varies. Sometimes article can generate a ton of visitors, sometimes it's just a few hundred. The important thing is that often when a journalist writes an article about you, the traffic that you do get converts extremely highly, way better than your best sales page. And the reason for that is when someone reads a story, an article, it comes across as a third party corroboration. There's social proof, there's almost an implied endorsement that this journalist has written about you. And so when people read the article and then they feel motivated enough to click through, or if there's no direct link, do a search for you and pull you up. They often are in buy mode and they just want to do business with the company they read about. They don't want to then go see if they can get it cheaper on Amazon or save $10 going somewhere else. They really have that goodwill that's been built up through the article that makes them want to do business with you.

In some cases, it can result in a lot of sales, sometimes it can result in a lot of leads that potentially could be sales, but that third party corroboration is really important. That's why I always tell people that even though you've gotten media attention and you've gotten articles, don't just bury it, put it on your website, share it with your leads, share it with your customers.

There are people that are always going to be on the fence about whether to work with you or not. And if they see this article and it's got that third party corroboration, the social proof, it's going to make them much more likely to choose you to work with you. And also, customers are always, every once in a while looking around to see if I can get a better product or service elsewhere. And if they see that article, it just makes them feel more comfortable like, "I'm with the right person. I don't need to do that." And so that's another great way in which you can sort of stand out.

Gordon Henry:

Okay, great. After the break, I want to ask you about word of mouth marketing, because so many small businesses think that the only way they really need to go to market is just rely on word of mouth. We'll be right back, don't go anywhere.

All right, Tim, everything all right?

Tim:

Yep. All good.

Gordon Henry:

Take a sip of water if you want, Mickie.

Mickie Kennedy:

Sure.

Gordon Henry:

All right, Tim.

Tim:

Ready to go?

Gordon Henry:

Hmm.

Tim:

All right, settle. Here we go. Ready in 3, 2.

Gordon Henry:

And we're back with Mickie Kennedy. Fascinating conversation about PR and how even a small business can generate a lot of lookups and traffic to their website and hopefully leads and conversions through PR at not a tremendous cost. So what about... we talking before the break, word of mouth or free marketing, or some people call it sort of earned. For people who want to rely on that. Is that a good idea? People say, "I provide a service that's really valuable. My customers get me new customers." What about that?

Mickie Kennedy:

I think that if your existing customers can create the pipeline and you're happy with the business that you get, then let it continue to work for you. But I don't see that in a lot of small businesses, I see it as helping. At eReleases, it's probably where we get the majority of our customers, but we still do paid advertising with Google. We still do educational outreach like this, trying to just expose the product and service to others because we want more people in our pipeline and to work with us.

So I would say there's lots of different ways to market. PR is usually not the top of people's list, and I'm just out here letting people know that it is an opportunity, especially if you're watching dollars, you can create a whole six press release campaign for under $3,000 that'll take you through a whole year of PR and getting messaging out. And if just one of those strikes gold, it could generate a ton of leads or sales for you. And that's the real opportunity of it. The downside of it is, it is harder to measure than a lot of the other paid marketing, because you don't have the trackable links and things like that. But it is one of those things that you just do and see what works and what seems to happen after you get those earned media articles out there.

Gordon Henry:

Right. By the way, on social, which so many small businesses are interested in as well. And other related things like blogging, is that something you recommend? And is any area where you don't recommend like TikTok or something like that where you say stay away? I

Mickie Kennedy:

I think every industry is different. I think that a lot of people are finding TikTok is a great way to engage with people and work with them. It's on my to-do list. But years ago, Pinterest was on my to-do list and I never really got to it. So it's a matter of finding what you're comfortable with. Some people, it's LinkedIn, other people, it's Facebook. It's really just building a communities where you can. I have all my social media handled by other people and we're out there in all the places, but it's not a place where I spend a great deal of my own time and energy.

Gordon Henry:

Got it. What's next for Mickie Kennedy and eReleases? Where do you see the business going the next few years?

Mickie Kennedy:

I want to just continue helping small businesses and entrepreneurs. I really want to educate customers. That's why I don't charge for my masterclass. I really want to just have my clients have more successes, and the only way they're going to have more successes is if they do better. And that's one of the important things to get out there. And I will say that a lot of small businesses have an imposter syndrome where they don't feel they're important and a journalists would never be interested in them.

But understand, journalists don't want to profile and write articles about large, well-funded companies. They know they can advertise. What they like to be seen as is curators, and discovering a small little company or a small product or service that no one really knows about. And often these are little businesses, mom and pops, and that's okay. I mean, I've helped a lot of clients get into, like Inc Magazine and magazines like that for startups and things like that. And these people thought "We're a home-based business. There's no way." And it can happen. It's just a matter of really building out your story, being authentic, sharing your obstacles, being vulnerable. The media responds to that because those are all elements of which they can build a story.

Gordon Henry:

Got it. Well, this has been great, Mickie. Where can people find you and learn more about what you're doing and potentially become a client?

Mickie Kennedy:

Sure. So ereleases.com is our website. We have phone, chat, email. All the staff are editors, no salespeople, no commissions or anything like that. We hold people's hands through the process and walk them through what to expect and what we need. But I think that really the best place for anyone to start is at ereleases.com/plan. It's just a free audit. And if it's way over your head, then maybe give us a call and we can walk you through sort of aspects of it. But I think that a lot of people when they do that are going to be inspired and have a list of actionable strategic types of press releases they could do.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. And that's also where they can find the masterclass. Right? The very masterclass.

Mickie Kennedy:

Correct. Yep.

Gordon Henry:

Right. Well, I want to thank you for coming on the show, and hopefully some of our listeners will become clients of ereleases.

Mickie Kennedy:

That would be great.

Gordon Henry:

And I want to thank our producer, Tim Alleman, our coordinators Diette Barnett, and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe and please leave us a five star review. We'd really appreciate it. Until next time, make it a great week.

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