When Pillar Consulting Corp. a NYC-based interactive agency and IT company, launched a web tool to help businesses improve their SEO rankings, it needed an effective way to create buzz and build its brand among potential customers – all on a shoestring budget. Like many small businesses, Pillar Consulting Corporation, with its tiny staff of six employees, wanted to generate interest and drive sales, without spending huge amounts of money on expensive advertising campaigns such as direct mail, online advertising or e-mail blasts.
“While tight budgets and difficult economic times had others shying away from investing in PR and marketing, I saw it as an opportunity to take advantage of the quiet and leapfrog past the competition,” said Richard Lee, founder of Pillar Consulting Corp.
Inbound Leads Drive New Business
Lee turned to PRWeb to create the marketing strategy that he could afford and generate the buzz around his brand that he was looking for. By sending an online news release to announce the company’s newest web tool, Lee hoped to attract new customers and garner media attention. Working through the guidance of the PRWeb editorial team, Lee created a compelling news release with a dynamic headline to entice both customers and reporters who would want to learn more about his business.
“I sent the release out in the morning and that same afternoon, I had someone call me who had read my news release and wanted to learn more about our services,” said Lee. “With a single news release we were able to successfully demonstrate our work and abilities to catch the attention of a prospect who later hired us to build a web 2.0 application.”
Lee chose PRWeb’s Media Visibility Package to push his company to the top of news searches and drive traffic to his website. The package also provided an advanced analytics featured that showed him where his news release was being read. Not only did PRWeb’s cost effective distribution package save Lee the thousands of dollars that he would have spent using other marketing tools, he was able to get the attention of his potential customers and ultimately secure new business.
In just one day, Lee’s PRWeb marketing strategy for his company’s news resulted in a response from his potential customer. That one online news release attracted more than $20,000 worth of business for Lee’s company. A significant return on his initial investment! He received inquires about his company from all over the country as a result of using PRWeb, greatly impacting the reach of his message.
In part, the PRWeb analytics has enabled me to better quantify public relations results. This is helpful when communicating the value of PR to management, for example, I can definitively report to the CEO that, 'We got X number of impressions.'
