I spent $60,000 on PR for my brand (here's what happened)

Welcome to the second edition of the Hidden Tempo newsletter, in which I share insights on e-commerce, including direct response marketing, media buying, and more, from my work on my own skincare brand and the clients I work with at my agency.

As a reminder, many of you are receiving this email because you subscribed to the Principles of Marketing email list back in the fall. The branding may have changed, but the content hasn’t.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll be sharing the insights learned after working with a PR agency for my brand and how it relates to influencer marketing.

I started working with my PR agency a year ago on a fixed monthly retainer basis. I made this decision after realizing that the only way to reduce the cost to acquire a new customer would be possible only with a stronger organic presence and more credibility.

First, I wanted potential customers who were seeing my ads but hadn’t purchased to be able to search for the brand on Google and see the reviews and features in publications like Byrdie, Allure, and other authorities in the beauty world. This would improve the performance of my ads as skeptical viewers started to convert.

Second, I wanted to improve the response rate from influencers I was reaching out to for collaborations. For example, having an Allure Best of Beauty award would generate more interest and increase the likelihood of collaborating with influencers with my target audience.

Third, as I steadily grow the brand, I’m looking at retail opportunities given that the last few years have taught us that e-commerce is just one channel for sales, not a business model in itself. Placements in prominent publications open up those opportunities in retail, which is where I’d like the brand to be in the next three years.

Finally, I wanted to build a strong organic presence for the brand that drives sales. As you’re about to find out, PR placements can drive significant organic traffic, but it’s not as simple as that. Traffic quality matters.

The agency I worked with was responsible for several workflows:

1. Pitching the brand’s products to journalists for

2. Organic influencer seeding

3. Identifying paid opportunities with makeup artists

4. Submitting the brand’s products for industry awards and other promotional opportunities

While I understood what I was getting myself into, you have to remember PR agencies still operate based on a legacy perspective that have carried over from magazines.

Unfortunately, this also means an emphasis on vanity metrics.

For example, instead of focusing on website visits driven by a particular article featuring your products, PR agencies will focus on the unique visitors per month (UVPM), which is disingenuous since only a small fraction of the millions of visitors a particular outlet, like Vogue or Byrdie, receives will comes across the particular placement.

In the first six months of working together ($30,000 spent), my brand received only a handful of website visits from third and second-tier publications.

However, given that we were a new brand and that PR takes time to build momentum with, it wasn’t a cause for alarm.

We also were able to sign a retail partnership with a small boutique store in NYC that allowed us sell a few hundred units of our product at wholesale prices.

At the end of the six month period, we received word that we had won an industry award. This was probably the biggest PR achievement we had in the entire year.

This award would eventually drive over 1,000 visits over the span of six months and counting from an audience with a high buying intent, leading to a conversion rate of over 10%.

Unfortunately, this is where the relatively small wins ended.

During the next six month period, we did gain more placements in publications, but they did not drive much traffic.

Of course, PR is not considered, nor do agencies hold it out to be, a positive ROI activity that drives sales.

However, my belief is that PR used strategically can lead to a positive ROI. With the right placements and by putting your products in the right hands, significant value can be unlocked that traditional media buying can’t.

PR needs to be done the right way.

After spending $60,000, I now understand how to approach PR in a way that is value accretive. Here’s what I’ve learned and what I need to do next:

Lesson #1: PR alone is not enough. It needs to be combined with traditional Meta and Google ads, which are enhanced by the effects of PR. I believe I may have jumped into PR a little too soon because more monthly ad spend is required to capitalize on the opportunities presented by PR.

Lesson #2: PR in beauty in particular needs to be complemented with a comprehensive influencer marketing strategy. This was perhaps my most critical mistake. The journalists my PR agency was reaching out to are keeping a close eye on what their favorite makeup and skincare influencers are doing. If they don’t see the buzz on Instagram, they have no motivation or desire to write about your products.

In fact, the general conclusion I came to after all this is probably the most important takeaway for this newsletter:

Influencer marketing is the new PR. PR is just the halo effect of the influencer attention paid to your products. With the right influencers, the organic traffic is high quality, and you also receive high quality traffic from high quality placements as well.

With just one solid placement and an award win, we were able to drive high quality organic traffic with a significantly above-average conversion rate.

If you can rack up many more of those types of placements, then things start to look a lot different.

But this can only come with a strong influencer marketing strategy.

Given this lesson, I will be pausing my PR efforts to focus on influencer marketing.

Lesson #3: I thought that by hiring a PR agency with good relationships with prominent beauty editors and makeup artists, my brand would be on the fast track to receiving the right placements. This is not the case. Journalists do not care about your brand unless everyone else does. Relationships don’t mean much, especially when said journalists need to pitch article ideas that their editors will accept.

Lesson #4: Pay to play. If you have the budget, generating high quality organic traffic at a large volume is better done through paid placements and promotions. Trying to generate attention organically is just going to take time and much longer than you want it to.

Lesson #5: Keep a close eye on the work your agency is doing. When working in the realm of qualitative results, it’s important to keep track of what’s being accomplished on a weekly basis. This lesson applies to all agencies and freelancers you work with.

So where do I go from here?

PR was an expensive but necessary mistake. I see signs of promise if it’s utilized correctly. My next step will be to double down on influencer marketing for the organic traffic and leverage that to get the right PR.

If I execute correctly, then not only will my ad costs drop, I’ll be able to generate a large percentage of traffic from organic sources, solidifying the marketing strategy for my brand.

I’ll provide an update on my influencer marketing and PR efforts in the next few months in a future newsletter.

Hopefully, these insights were helpful as many of you who operate brands look to diversify outside of ads.

I’ll be back with more content on traditional paid traffic and direct response marketing for ads, landing pages, and emails in a few days.

Talk soon,

Sharad

@pmktg00

P.S. If you own or operate an e-commerce brand generating at least $1,000,000 in annual revenue, feel free to book a call with me to discuss how we can improve your ad creative or email/SMS marketing strategy.

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