THE LITTLE RESORT THAT COULD: A SUCCESS STORY

This is a true story. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Okay. This is a true story, but changing the name of the client has nothing to do with innocence. We just don't think it's fair to share a client's name and budget with the world.

So while the results and statistics in this story are true, I'm just going to call our client the Little Resort That Could.

The Little Resort is not the kind of place that can afford to pay for a lot of advertising to tell the world it's there. But its managers believe in the power of PR. They looked at their budgets, squeezed them tight, and came up with as much as they could to fund PR.

Here's where perspective comes in. The Little Resort viewed their PR budget as a stretch, a very large investment for them. By PR campaign standards, it was very small. But we knew that something bigger and more important was happening here. The Little Resort was showing our team a vote of confidence and literally giving us their all.

The budget was in the $30,000 range. Spread over an entire year. Including expenses. Time to make every penny count.

Decisions, decisions. We could have come up with a big idea, dazzled the client and used the funds all at once. But would that give the Little Resort the most bang for its buck? We didn't think so.

We needed a better idea. Why not spread the funds over a year and generate a steady stream of publicity? And so it began.

Day in, day out, we encouraged media to report news about the Little Resort. We ran a tight and targeted media relations operation. Slow and steady wins the race, we told ourselves. Oh yeah. Pictures with captions helped too.

Big papers like The Washington Post, as well as small regional newspapers, bloggers and big online news sources responded to our message. Impressive awards followed. More and more people started booking vacations at the Little Resort.

Month after month, the results poured in. After a year, we counted them up: coverage 122 times in 45 different media. News about The Little Resort appeared 11 times every single month. Now that's frequency!

If the Little Resort had bought ads to get that exposure in those particular media, it would have cost them more than half a million bucks.

There was much joy at the Little Resort. The general manager liked the return on his investment in PR. The marketing director was thrilled with the exposure. The accounting department head nodded solemly and muttered words of appreciation for our thrifty ways. The owner applauded his staff for finding a cost-effective way to get the phone ringing and build business at the Little Resort That Could.

Best of all, the Little Resort rewarded its PR firm by extending its contract for another year.

Illustration Credit: Download-Free-Pictures.com