Creative entrepreneurs can craft and develop a very effective, and free, promotional tool for their business or invention. The ability to utilize public relations is a key component of any successful enterprise. The potential to create and deliver your own message, and widely disseminate this message, is very powerful.

Advertising is a wonderful sales promotional tool. It offers a product the opportunity to deliver a specific message detailing the features and benefits inherent in the item being advertised to a potentially vast audience. A business can buy advertising to custom deliver a story to an appropriate demographic. Based on a company’s advertising budget, an effective campaign can be crafted to deliver a maximum result and return on invested advertising dollar.

Nevertheless, contemporary media is a vast, cluttered world of segmentation, niche players and competing new technologies. It has become very difficult to measure advertising effectiveness owing to this maelstrom. The inter-net is now a huge advertising vehicle being utilized by many businesses that only a few years ago were exclusive users of television as the advertising medium of choice.

Additionally, advertising can be extremely expensive. A campaign designed to effectively reach the masses is prohibitively expensive for almost any entrepreneur or small business. Creative, production and media-buy are expensive if any level of quality is to be achieved when delivering a print ad, television spot, direct mail message or radio commercial.

Free publicity offers several benefits denied when using most advertising mediums. Every consumer recognizes advertising when they see it. We are bombarded every day with thousands of commercial messages, everywhere we turn the senses are being challenged. Publicity, however, does not assault our senses and cause a barrier response. Effective publicity informs, teaches and imparts useful detail that assumes editorial status and is readily read. Publicity is not framed in advertising structures where content is exclusively commercial. We change the channel when commercials come on, but we are interested in gaining knowledge, exactly the benefit proffered by public relations.

I am always amazed at how few businesses and entrepreneurs effectively utilize a public relations component in their sale promotion campaign. The ability to spread product/company specific messages to interested consumers of this information, at no expense, is a bonanza not to be missed. If you can write a letter you can write a press release. If you have access to the inter-net you have the delivery system required to implement a publicity campaign for your new product or small business. If your industry has trade journals, industry specific magazines, trade associations or affiliations you have a built in audience interested in staying current on industry happenings. Take full advantage!

It costs nothing to e-mail a press release to thousands of consumers. It costs virtually nothing to fax a press release to targeted, important decision- makers in your area of commerce. The opportunity to have a portion, or all, of your press release re-printed in a newspaper, magazine or trade journal, for free, is exponentially more important and beneficial than an ad placement in the same vehicle.

There are professional public relations firms everywhere. They perform a valuable service and can be as important to a business as an advertising agency relationship. However, there is no reason for an entrepreneur to have to pay to implement a publicity campaign for their business. It can be self-directed and achieve excellent results.

I utilize Public Relations for every client I serve. The results have proven, when measured against the time invested, stunningly positive. A cosmetic product highlighted in Mademoiselle, a tow-able float featured in Boat Magazine or a novel fire extinguisher described in Popular Mechanics are only a few of the dozens of examples of placements that have leveraged successful product launches.