In one of my current roles as head of marketing for an early-stage digital SaaS startup in the chemicals industry, ChemVM Technologies, time and money are in short supply and I’m constantly challenged to creatively get the most out of my marketing efforts for the least amount of effort and money. One of my latest low-budget challenges was choosing the wiring service will give me the greatest awareness and response by trade journalists for the price to our news release announcing the opening of our ChemVM web app to the market following an invitation-only beta last Fall.
Having spent many years in PR, I was familiar with the big brand wiring services such as PR Newswire (now owned by Cision) and Business Wire (now a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway) as well as lower-cost sites such as PRWeb (also now owned by Cision). I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to afford the two big-name brand services, but thought PRWeb might work. I did some poking around on their websites to research pricing, compare services and ROI and also researched others.
I went as far on the PRWeb site to set up an account and was pleasantly surprised to get an email back within the hour of signing up with a person to call for assistance. I thought, how nice and what a smart and timely marketing tactic…I was far along in my buying journey and ready to buy that day. The quick followup email with easy access to speak with a knowledgeable person to help me find the best solution was the perfect outreach to me as a buyer.
Unfortunately, that’s where success for PRWeb turned to failure for me. I called the sales rep on the email (pasted below with sales rep’s name blocked) to get my questions answered.
In the time between signing up for a PRWeb (or should I say, Cision?) account and receiving the follow-up email, I had zeroed in on a competitive service to PRWeb that I thought could work as well and maybe even better for my tiny budget: PR Underground. So one of my first questions to this PRWeb/Cision sales rep was to ask how their services and pricing levels compared to PR Underground (PRU). The salesperson claimed to have never heard of PR Underground, which if true, is not good. It’s Sales 101 to be prepared to field competitor questions, and the most successful salespeople welcome these questions as an opportunity to help their buyers through the evaluation phase of their purchase journey. I then asked the PRWeb rep why I would pay $99 to host my news release on their site with no option to include links to my website or other relevant information when I can do that on PR Underground for half the price. She had no good answer. It may be there is a very good reason but because this salesperson could not answer and HELP me, they lost my trust and business.
But I digress on the role Marketing and Sales plays in HELPing customers through their purchase journey.
In the end, I chose PR Underground (PRU) for wiring because PRWeb did not convince me paying double the price would bring me double the value. Maybe it would have, but they didn’t convince me of this. Here is a quick compare of the two companies’ similar packages:
PRWeb Basic: $99
Post your release to PRWeb - no distribution
Attach photos but no clickable links are allowed
Word count is unlimited
Main benefit: hosted somewhere other than your company website
For $189: still no clickable links are allowed, but for this next level, they will distribute your release to 1,400 media partner websites; however, it’s up to those media outlets whether these media partners repost your release on their sites and this does not include any keyword tagging or sector/industry targeting
For $289, PRWeb will send your release to targeted journalists relevant to your industry choices
NOTE: during further research for this post, I reached back out to PRWeb to try again for the compare of PRWeb Basic for $99 to PRU for $49.99. They claim “Your going to see greater discoverability with a PRWeb post compared to PR Underground” (mispelling included). Upon further inquiring of why that would be, the answer from the person on the other end of my online chat alluded to the stronger SEO strength of the PRWeb site, but lacked any data to back this up.
PR Underground: $49.99
Post your release to PR Underground - no distribution but they claim “typically pickup by Google News, Twitter, and DigitalJournal.com”
Embed up to 5 images and links (1 link per 100 words, or 5 links for a 500 word release)
Word count: 200-500 words (does not include your company “About” boilerplate paragraph usually found at the end of releases
Create your own branded press room with corporate address, press contact information, company logo, boilerplate messaging, images, videos social links, and keywords
In the end, results tell the story, and I was not disappointed with PRU. With the combination of wiring via PRU and doing my own manual direct email outreach to targeted media (which is always a best practice no matter your wiring strategy), I was very happy with my selection. I got some nice hits on key sites like Google News, which is mainly what you want for basic wiring at this very low cost. And for fifty bucks, I also got a 7-page report of all the sites that picked up my release and an online, branded pressroom setup that will save me time when I’m ready to wire my next release.
