Half of UK consumers fear for their finances
Where there's muck there's ... A £57 million bill
64% of Britons are considering carrying on working after retirement
Middle Britain house prices to drop £40,000 by Christmas
Home insurance leaves Britons £9billion out of pocket
They have all featured in the national press in the last few weeks and they are all relating to results obtained by running surveys.
So what does this have to do with me?
Using this technique, you can build press releases around surveys that you can carry out with your client base, or by running queries on your databases. Journalists love stats and the more unique and original the stats the better. You can even use these to produce a monthly report that gets sent out to local and national press.
For example, we used to produce a monthly survey for loan applications for a secured lending client and it got picked up and used for 6 months in 2 national print magazines with links back to the client site each month.
There is a hidden goldmine of stats that you can use in your customer database to create useful press releases:
Demographics - Where are your clients?
Product based - What products are they applying for? How much for? What %age of clients who buy X go onto buy Y as well?
Remember, if using customer data to keep it generic and don't mention customers on an individual basis. Do be prepared to be asked for a case study, so it is always useful to have a case study available. Having a case study in our experience gives you:
o More column inches
o More likelihood of use
o Greater future exposure - If you are easy to deal with, present info in a ready to use way and have case studies - you are a journalists dream!
Opinion based - use an actual online survey to garner results and scale up to a national level. Most surveys use a small number of responses and scale it up to create a national response.
So how do I build a survey that makes it easy to get quantifiable results?
The best way to build a survey is on a multiple choice basis. In this way it is easy to create statistics. Online you can use free tools such as Surveymonkey to create an online survey or poll which then allows you to login in and collect the results to use. You can use a free survey at surveymonkey.com which allows you to collect 100 responses which is a good number to work with.
How do I get people to fill it in?
You can email your existing customer base and offer them entry to a free prize draw for completing the survey. You can use it as a competition and submit it to competition sites such as loquax.co.uk, competitionsuk.net, and ukcompetitions.com.
For the cost of an Ipod Nano or something of similar value you can build a good amount of information.
Keep the survey short, to say five questions, and if used correctly, you can create a press release around each question. So that's a press release every month for 5 months.
Okay so I have the release now what?
There are various methods for publishing press release but we will use two methods.
Firstly, you can email to the finance and insurance journalists. Go out and buy all of the weekend nationals and local papers and note who is writing the stories in the money sections. You can build a quick list of around 20 or 30 in this way.
Secondly, you can submit your release online. You can use a paid for service such as PRWeb or you can spend an hour or so submitting to a few main press release directory sites such as: dbusinessnews.com, seenation.com, Google.com/base, pr-usa.net, openpr.com, i-newswire.com, prlog.com, przoom.com, and pressbox.co.uk.
Some of these sites are US based but it doesn't matter, journalists can look at these resources to get ideas for stories. They also get featured in Google News which is another great source for research for journalists.
Press releases are a great way to get exposure for your business both locally and nationally, online and offline so you should build in marketing time to add in this promotional tool to your arsenal. Press releases used and picked up online also provide your website with a boost in authority too. Having your story picked up and used by the BBC with a link back to your site, for example, can lift your website out of obscurity and improve it web rankings in the major search engines.
Jason Hulott is Marketing Director of Speedie Consultants Limited, and Insurance Internet Marketing Specialist ; We are also content experts that provide a range of services to the Finance and Insurance industry. To get 5 free reports to help maximize your Internet business please visit the site: http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk
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