PR For Small & Medium Sized Businesses

Are you stuck with the overwhelming task of trying to grow your small business by yourself? Have you spent marketing dollars on expensive advertising and marketing programs with little return on your investment? Have you tried direct mail marketing only to see a less than one percent response rate? Marketing is expensive and time consuming, yet most businesses fail because they don’t spend enough time generating new customers.

In this tough economy, many organizations are forgoing advertising and direct marketing and looking to Public Relations as a value-based alternative. In fact, Public Relations is one of the most effective ways to get the word out about your business and bring in new customers. Best of all, it’s extremely cost effective over time and it has an immediate impact on sales. And you don’t need to hire a pricey PR firm to get started.

Open Door Communications understands what it’s like to operate a small business – we’ve been running this one for 10 years and have yet to advertise or use direct marketing. Public Relations simply works better for small and medium sized businesses. To help you get started on your own, we developed a Public Relations workshop specifically designed to help small and medium sized businesses. This workshop will show you how your company can benefit from PR and will provide you with the skills and tools you need to reach out to the news media, community groups and the general public. Stop thinking like an “advertiser” and start leveraging the power of the free and social media.

Open Door Communications PR Workshop

The Open Door Communications Small Business Public Relations Workshop is a three-hour, hands-on program that covers both traditional Public Relations along with the latest social networking tactics. The workshop is divided into three main segments:

Small Business PR 101. This portion of the workshop will teach you how to reach out to the news media to get your story covered. Topics covered include: understanding the media, defining news, preparing and sending a press release, identifying appropriate media outlets, media relations, tracking results.

Blogging for Business. This section will teach you how to launch a blog and use it to generate business. Topics covered include: who should blog, how to set up a blog, how to post, keys to better blogging, generating readers, linking your blog to other social media tools.

Best Practices in Social Networking. This portion of the workshop will provide an overview of the latest social networking tools including Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others and will teach you how to use these tools to promote your business. We’ll also review best practices for using social networking for business and teach you tricks to maximize your exposure.