By Damon Carson
This year I’m going to write columns for Inventors Digest about using the media to get word out about your inventions.
This marketing discipline, or public relations, is one of the best marketing approaches for inventions because the media really like to talk about the next great thing.
I’m one of you – a small business owner in the Mile High City of Denver. Several years ago I was faced with the situation we all face. I needed to get word out about my company – www.kiddieridesusa.com. While my vision was great, my marketing budget was not.
To help you understand my marketing challenge let me give you a 10-cent tour of my business.
In 2004 I bought a small Denver company called Kiddie Rides USA. While once one of the largest manufacturers of coin-operated rides in the United States, a slow down in the vending industry forced the closure of its assembly line.
Almost overnight Kiddie Rides USA went from being a manufacturer to being a re-manufacturer of coin-op rides. When I bought the company, it was simply buying old rides at auctions and refurbishing and then re-selling them.
In the Denver warehouse sat more than 250 rides of all different shapes and sizes awaiting a buyer. For over a half century, kiddie rides have captured pop culture in miniature.
On the shelves were a Model T, helicopters, a stagecoach, an F-40 Ferrari, a Ghostbuster car, a hot-air balloon, a Harley-Davidson Springer, a VW Bug, a dragon, a Holstein cow, a semi truck, a Garfield, a shoe ride, a space shuttle, and just about every animal that Noah took with him on the Ark.
Each of these rides appealed to a very different buyer. The Model T should go to a car collector, the Holstein to Chik-fil-a or an ice cream parlor, the Ghostbuster to a movie buff, the stagecoach to Wells Fargo Bank, a semi truck to a trucking company and painted just like their over-the-road rigs, a shoe ride to a shoe store, the VW Bug and H-D Springer to an auto and a cycle dealership, respectively.
That was my marketing challenge. How do I get Wells Fargo interested in the stagecoach ride or the VW dealer in the VW Bug car?
Our business model further complicated the marketing challenge because I may have only one VW Bug in inventory at any given time. Placing a $5,000 ad, for example, in Hot VW magazine wouldn’t pencil out because I only had one $3,000 VW ride to sell.
So, I decided doing a publicity campaign would be the best way to achieve my marketing goals. I could take different rides and “pitch” different publications that would be interested in a specific ride.
I could pitch our boat rides to boat magazines, and horse rides to horse magazines. I could pitch cars to car publications, and trains to train publications.
The economic beauty of this was that if a magazine would choose to do a story they wouldn’t charge me anything. So, if a horse magazine did a blurb on us and I only had one horse to sell, I still came out ahead since I didn’t pay anything to get in the magazine.
My marketing tactic began to work. I got mentions in Boating, Model Toy Trains, Horse Illustrated, and in The Robb Report Collection’s Ferrari edition.
I thought I could also accomplish another one of my marketing initiatives. While most everyone knows what a kiddie ride is, my job was to just get the word out about all the fun and offbeat reasons to buy kiddie rides.
You won’t believe all the reasons people buy rides. Most of our buyers don’t buy them to use as vending machines anymore. Pediatric doctors buy them for their lobbies. Grandparents buy them for their grandkids. Museums buy them for their exhibits. Movie studios buy them for props. The list goes on and on.
I just needed to get some of the stories out so others would read them and understand our business. The endgame would be that somebody would read about our kiddie rides and end up buying one for whatever their particular reason.
This time I began pitching these stories to reporters at mass market and business publications in hopes that they would tell my story.
This particular story angle has been even more successful than my pitching specific rides to specific industry publications. The story of my business has been told in Fortune, Time, on CNN, on The Today Show, the Detroit News, on CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, the in-flight magazines of United, Skywest, and Frontier airlines, and a host of others.
That is a bit about the history of my own do-it-yourself PR campaign. We’ll start getting into some of the specifics of how you can use the media to tell your story in upcoming installments.
Editor’s note: This story appears in the January 2010 print edition.
