By Wal Baker As a client of a public
relations firm which is providing publicity services for your business,
you want to know what those services are, how much they are likely to
cost you, how much you should budget toward them and how you should
evaluate the benefits gained from publicity achieved. Considering
services When you consider the cost of
publicity, you need to understand what publicity services are provided
so that you and your publicist can specify which services you need. They
include research, writing, text and photo editing, distribution, web
submission, media liaison, monitoring, clipping and web publishing
services. We at Wallace Baker Public Relations provide these services,
as outlined on our website at www.wb-pr.com
, according to the different needs of our various clients. Estimating
costs As our client, you pay us at a
set hourly rate for the amount of time we spend serving you. We give you
an estimate of how much you may need to budget for our services. You aim
to benefit from these services by gaining publicity which helps to
increases your sales and profits to more than recover the costs. How
much you benefit depends partly on variables beyond the control of you
and your publicist. Publicity services may be
charged differently from services in industries other than public
relations. For example, our publicity services are not usually provided
for scheduled fees, as are many legal services, or for fixed quoted
prices, as are printing services. This is because publicity
services are somewhat creative and dependent on a client’s input and
cooperation and various unpredictable circumstances. For example,
forming a strategy and writing a new release is creative work, unlike
the routine jobs of processing a property conveyance form, or
pre-pressing digital artwork for a printed brochure. How quickly and
efficiently a publicist works depends partly on the quality of
information and photographs provided by the client, something largely
beyond the publicist’s control. A brief news release announcing
the appointment of a finance manager may take less time to write than a
long one explaining the science of a medical breakthrough. So one news
release may cost more than the other. If information supplied by a
client to the publicist about a staff appointment is insufficient or
incorrect and supplied without a suitable photograph, then the brief
news release must be revised and may cost more than it would otherwise
cost. If a scientist supplies to the publicist a lengthy, complex
document filled with medical terminology without a simply written
summary of his findings, then a news article may need more rewriting and
editing to suit the mass media and may cost more than it would
otherwise. Other factors too like the
extent to which journalists respond to your news release and the amount
of publicity coverage achieved may not be predictable. When seven
journalists who receive a news release phone the publicist seeking an
interview with the client, that may take more of the publicists time
than if only two journalists phone. A news release wired to 1,000
journalists on almost that many publications around the nation may cost
more than one emailed to two publications in your home town. News
manually submitted online in forms to 30 internet publications may cost
you more than news broadcast by email to 200 printed publications. If a
publicist needs to promptly liaise with six news editors about an issue
of crisis management within your company, that may take more of his time
and cost you more than if there is no crisis. Publicity coverage found by
electronic monitoring of the mass media may be summarised
by the publicist for you in a list of those publications which mention
information from your news release. With the summary, the publicist may
also supply print, sound and video clips. Supplying the clips may take
more time and cost the client more money than just a list. Internet
searching with images clipped from web sites and posted in a private
collection online for the client to review may take more time and cost
more money. Although electronic media monitoring may cost the same
whether it finds 25 clips or two, preparing and presenting 20 internet
clips, five press clips, two radio clips and one television clip may
take more of the publicist’s time than just two press clips and so may
cost the client more. Publicity is a bit like news
itself. When you know what is going to happen next, it is no longer
news. When you know just how much it will cost, it probably is not
publicity but advertising. A publicist may estimate how
much you need to budget for publicity services but the actual cost of
providing those services may be out of anybody’s control. So you may
be charged less or more than estimated. If the publicist estimates
$2,000 to research, write, distribute and monitor a news release but
more research than usual becomes necessary, then the job may cost
$2,100. You need to be flexible with your publicity budget to allow for
conditions beyond the control of you and your publicist. The examples given above help to
explain why a publicist may not be able to quote accurately the cost of
publicity services or estimate the amount of coverage to be gained. If a
publicist were to provide a fixed quote, that quote might have to
include higher fees to allow for detailed costing, unknown availability
of information to be supplied, various possible media responses,
different levels of coverage and other unforeseeable circumstances. So a
fixed quote could cost you much more. Controlling
budgets You as our client can control
ongoing publicity costs by determining how much the publicity is worth
to you and keeping your publicity budget below that value. If your
initial budget achieves good publicity, you may decide to increase your
budget for the next month. If your profits fall because of a slowing
economy, you may decide to reduce your publicity budget until the market
improves. You can compare the amount of publicity you receive to advertising. You or your publicist may measure how much space the publicity covers on pages of newspapers, magazines and websites then calculate how much that amount of advertising space would cost in those same publications. You may measure the length of sound and video clips from radio and television broadcasts and determine how much the same amount of broadcast time would cost for radio and television commercials. If you find that you have paid
$2,500 for publicity services and the publicity coverage you have
received is worth about $4,000 in advertising, then you may want to
spend another $3,000 on publicity. If you find that the coverage is
worth $500, you may want to reduce your budget to as little as nothing
for the time being. As we do not charge any retainer or require a
minimum monthly expenditure from you, you can control your costs by
changing your budget to any amount. The optimum size of your budget
may be limited by the ratio of how much you spend on publicity services
to how much coverage you gain as a result. That limit is reached after
the amount of coverage exceeds an optimum level and declines to a point
at which more publicity is not profitable. You may issue a news release
one month and gain $2,000 worth of publicity from it, two news releases
the next month and gain $5,000 worth of publicity from them and four
news releases next month yet still gain $5,000 worth. So budgeting for
two news releases a month generally may be the your optimum. Budgets need to be flexible so
that they can be increased when a client has more important news to tell
the media, such as the announcement of a company takeover, and decreased
when the client has only routine news, such as a staff appointment. We may be able to reduce some
costs for you, for example by writing shorter news releases and
distributing them to fewer print publications or submitting them to
fewer internet publications, but this may reduce your chance of gaining
publicity. You may save money by choosing not to have us monitor, clip
or evaluate your coverage, but then you may not be able to review and
evaluate the publicity you receive. Evaluating
benefits Publicity can be evaluated by
comparing it to advertising, as explained above, and by estimating how
much it has contributed to your profit. You benefit from publicity by
spending less on publicity than you earn in extra profit which results
from that publicity. For example, if you are selling a building and you
spend $900 gaining publicity for the sale and earn $10,000 in profit
from the sale, then you may decide that the publicity has benefited you. If you spend $2,000 publicising
a new range of fashion clothing one month, and your sales turnover on
that clothing increases 15 percent the next month to $45,000, then that
rise in profit may encourage you to spend more on publicity. Costs and benefits of publicity
are usually considered and evaluated over a year or more, not just over
one month. Sometimes your profit may not rise right away to cover the
cost of publicity, even though the value of the publicity your have
received compared with advertising is worth more than the cost. You may
fail to sell a property one month but sell two properties the next month
as a result of publicity you gained during the first month. Summer
clothing sales may decline one month during cool weather even after you
have received good publicity on television, but may rise above average
in following months as a result of that earlier coverage. You may
release news one month yet it may not be published in a magazine until
two months later. Publishers often produce both
print and online versions of their publications. Years after printed
publications have been discarded by readers, online versions of those
publications may continue to be archived on the internet for everybody
to read. A story mentioning your business in a newspaper may soon be
lost and forgotten by readers but the digital versions of that story may
stay displayed online for years and be found by many more readers. When your publicity costs for a
year are totalled and compared with your profit, then you may find that
the publicity has benefited you. Some businesses may need to invest
money in publicity services for months before they earn enough profit to
cover the cost. A new business may take years to earn enough profit to
fully recover the cost of publicity services. Still the benefits may be
cost effective in the long term. You may find it harder to
estimate how much you will benefit from publicity services than to
estimate how much you will benefit from buying something more tangible
like capital equipment. For example, if you plan to buy a new
photocopier, you may compare its specified speed and efficiency with
that of your old copier and decide that it is likely to print better
quality documents, faster and more copies per toner cartridge, at lower
operating and maintenance costs. Those features of the new equipment are
likely to reduce costs and thereby increase profits. It is harder to
assess publicity services and estimate how much they may benefit your
business. This is because the success of these intangible services
depends on many variables or contingencies outside your office and
beyond the control of you, your staff and your publicist. When you plan to send a news
release to the mass media, you and your publicist cannot estimate how
much free publicity coverage you will achieve, or how much profit you
will gain as a result of that publicity. That will depend on outside
factors such as: how many other businesses happen to send news releases;
how much editorial space is available in newspapers and magazines; what
vital issues arise in the news generally; what important events take
place; and who else of more importance says or does something more
newsworthy. The amount of publicity coverage
you receive may not be a measure of how much that publicity is worth to
your business or how much you benefit from it. Publicity on one talkback
radio program may result in more sales of a consumer product like skin
cream than publicity in several newspapers. News broadcast on television
quoting a management consultant may win one client for that consultant
at first yet months later, that same news still being published across
the internet may win him three more clients. Publicity in just one trade
magazine may help an equipment distributor to sell one piece of
manufacturing machinery the profit from which may absorb the cost of
sending the news release to nine other publications which have not
publish the news. Many businesses which could not
afford publicity services decades ago can afford them today because of
computers. Computers and the internet have reduced publicity costs by
enhancing the efficiency of publicity services with such innovations as:
email broadcasting of news releases; submitting of news in online forms to
news bureaus and networks; online corporate newsrooms presenting media
kits and conferences; robotic monitoring and reporting of coverage on the internet;
and electronic monitoring and clipping of text used in print
publications. A newsroom on the internet, for example, may display news
releases, background information, photographs and audio and video clips
about your business for journalists to download. This method may cost
less than printing and posting news releases with photographs as has
been done in years past. So your business may be able to profit more
from publicity today than in the past. Accepting
variables You probably understand better
now that publicity services are provided strategically and creatively in
circumstances largely beyond the control of the publicist. A publicist
cannot predict such factors as the quality of information you will
supply to him, the extent of media response, or the results of media
monitoring. As you accept such unforeseeable variables, you can more
easily consider the scope of services provided, broadly estimate ongoing
costs, control budgets flexibly and assess long-term benefits. It is in the best interest of your publicist to please you as a client by coping with the variables and providing you with the most effective services at the lowest possible cost. By charging for our services as we provide them, without offering fixed quotes or allowing for all possible variables, we have a better chance of providing you with the best services at the lowest cost. ___ Wal Baker is principal consultant at Wallace Baker Public Relations and has been since he set up this firm in 1984. He is a media expert and publicist who has been accredited by the public relations institute. Before he became a public relations consultant, he was employed as a journalist by News Limited, John Fairfax Group and other media organisations for many years.
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© 2011 Wallace Baker. All rights reserved.
