The Small Business PR Playbook: How to Earn Media Coverage on Any Budget

Date: June 23, 2026

Reading time: 13 minutes

Key Takeaways

• Most journalists no longer chase down original stories. They pull from newswires like PR Newswire and Business Wire, which is why email pitches have become far less effective, especially with national media.

• A single press release through PR Newswire or Business Wire runs close to $2,000 for 600 to 700 words. Small business PR does not have to cost that much if you know where to look.

• Only about 3% of press releases generate real earned media, so one release is not a strategy. Commit to a campaign of at least six to eight releases spread across the year.

• A single well placed article can change a business overnight. One $400 press release led to a $30 to $40 million dollar deal. A free press release during the pandemic generated over $10 million for local restaurants.

• Product launch press releases usually fall flat because they answer why this is important to us instead of why this is important to the journalist's audience.

• Running an industry survey, even a small one, can turn an unknown brand into a recognized authority. One client went from one hit in every ten releases to 8 to 14 articles from a single survey.

• Earned media does not just build visibility. One contractor increased their close rate by 17% just by showing prospects a binder of press clippings during in-home consultations.

You Don't Need a Publicist to Get Earned Media

I opened this episode of Strategy Talks with a question a lot of small business owners never stop to ask themselves: what if you skipped PR entirely because you assumed it was for companies bigger, better funded, or more famous than yours? Most small business owners do exactly that, and most of them are wrong.

You do not need a publicist, a six figure budget, or a Shark Tank appearance to earn real media coverage. What you need is a strategy, and that is exactly what guest Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases, walked me through.

Mickie has been in this industry for 28 years, and he told me right away that small business PR is not a new trend. “I think it goes through ebbs and flows as far as how PR works,” he said, “but at the end of the day, journalists aren't really out researching original stories predominantly.”

Why Email Pitches Stopped Working

That single point reframes almost everything else Mickie told me. Journalists are being handed content, either through relationships with publicists they already know, or blind pitches that land in an inbox already buried. Increasingly, they are turning to wires instead.

Newswires solve a real problem for journalists. A reporter can log into a feed, customize it by keyword, pin anything mentioning a topic they cover, and exclude anything they do not, all without wading through inbox chaos. In the US, that space is largely a duopoly, Business Wire and PR Newswire, and neither is cheap. A single 600 to 700 word press release through either one runs close to $2,000.

Worth noting, these wires are not the same as the Associated Press or Reuters. Those outlets write and license their own articles. A wire service like PR Newswire simply distributes a release to the journalists who have opted in to see it.

The DIY Alternative to a $2,000 Press Release

That price point is exactly why Mickie built eReleases. His company partnered with PR Newswire close to 15 years ago, which lets small businesses distribute nationally, plus opt into local saturation so the release also reaches journalists who only cover local news, at roughly a quarter to a third of the direct cost.

There is a catch. eReleases is built specifically for small businesses and entrepreneurs, generally with PR budgets under $3,000 a year, the exact segment PR Newswire's own sales team would not pursue directly, since they are typically looking for clients willing to spend $20,000 or more. eReleases distributes over 10,000 releases a year in aggregate, which is how they can offer that pricing while still writing large checks to PR Newswire behind the scenes.

Mickie was direct about what this is and is not. “I consider it completely a DIY,” he told me. His company is not a publicist doing the strategy and pitching for you. It is infrastructure, plus a lot of resources and coaching on what actually works.

The Real Success Rate of Small Business PR

Here is the number that stopped me: even releases that go out over PR Newswire or Business Wire fail to generate any earned media about 97% of the time. Only 3% succeed.

“I have noticed that within the 3% of press releases that are getting earned media, there's a lot of patterns, and there's a lot of things that are applicable to anybody.”  - Mickie Kennedy

The first pattern is simple: never treat a single press release like a magic bullet. Mickie's minimum recommendation is a campaign of six to eight releases, spread out however your business's calendar makes sense, quarterly at the very least. Do that consistently, and the odds shift. Out of six to eight strategic releases, one or two landing is a realistic, repeatable outcome.

Two Wild Stories of What Earned Media Can Do

Mickie shared two stories that stuck with me long after we finished recording.

The first: a single article in Waste News, a trade publication, about one of his clients led to two cities in Australia reaching out asking if the company built facilities abroad. The answer was yes. That one $400 press release turned into 30 to 40 million dollars in facility contracts.

The second is even more improbable. During the early pandemic, Mickie did a press release pro bono for something called the Dining Bond Initiative, a program that let people pre-purchase gift certificates to help struggling local restaurants survive lockdowns. It got picked up in over 100 articles, including plenty of local papers, and generated more than 10 million dollars in restaurant revenue, from a release that would have otherwise cost about $400.

“It's a bit unpredictable, so marketing people hate it. I've had someone say, this went to thousands of journalists and it didn't result in an article, that's impossible. And I'm like, no, it's the norm.”  - Mickie Kennedy

That unpredictability is the tradeoff. You cannot promise a client which release will land. You can only stack the odds by doing more of them, strategically.

Why Most Product Launch Releases Fall Flat

The single most common press release Mickie's team receives is a straightforward product or service launch, and he told me those are also the ones most likely to fail. The reason comes down to one blind spot: business owners write about why the launch matters to them, not why it matters to the journalist's audience.

Mickie's fix is almost backwards. Instead of leading with a feature list, put the spotlight on someone who already used the product, ideally with a specific, almost uncomfortable number attached. His example: a logistics software company could open with the fact that 63% of companies in their industry fail within five years, then introduce a three year old client who looked like exactly that kind of casualty until they started using the software and are now projected to hit their first profitable year. Add a real quote from that client, something with a little more personality than a typical testimonial, and suddenly the release has what journalists are actually looking for.

“Journalists love story arcs.”  - Mickie Kennedy

The Origin Story Trick Journalists Can't Resist

Mickie pointed to the boilerplate, the short paragraph at the end of every release that is technically just about the company, as one of the most underused pieces of real estate in small business PR. That is where your origin story belongs.

Some of his examples were almost too good. One client's founding story involved a chance conversation with Cher on a flight, which was true, but required an actual letter from Cher's attorney before the wire would allow her name to be used, since implied celebrity endorsements are against wire policy. Another client nearly left out the detail that they used to run fulfillment out of their garage and once had to cancel Thanksgiving so the whole family could help pack orders. Mickie pushed them to include it anyway. That detail became the opening of a two page feature in Inc. Magazine.

Even eBay's famous founding myth, that the site was built to help sell a girlfriend's Pez dispenser collection, was reportedly a story invented by a PR firm. It was not true, but it worked, because it made an abstract idea, an online auction platform, instantly relatable.

“There's a reason that every time someone goes on Shark Tank, they don't just open with their numbers and their business. They try to get vulnerable a little bit.”  - Mickie Kennedy

My Own Brush With Earned Media

Listening to Mickie talk about personal stories cutting through, I could not help but think of a client of my own. I once worked with a woman who owned a security and commercial alarm company with her husband. The reason she started that business was not abstract at all. She had been working at a jewelry store years earlier and begged the owners to install a security system. They refused. She was then robbed at gunpoint.

She survived, and that experience is the entire reason the company exists, and why they are so vocal about panic buttons and commercial security, not just home systems. Once she shared that story on her blog, and I pitched it directly to a couple of journalists I was already working with on her social media, it got picked up locally first, then nationally, and eventually the BBC ran it as a survival story.

It's funny, because I never really thought about how close PR and the stories we tell are to what we do in marketing every day. It's just concentrated into a press release instead of a caption or a blog post.  - Dorien Morin-van Dam

But it is the same instinct: if there is a real reason you started your company, that reason is often the most valuable asset you have, in marketing and in small business PR alike.

The Survey Strategy That Turns You Into a Media Magnet

This might be the single most repeatable tactic Mickie shared. One of his longtime clients started out running what he bluntly described as a link farm, endless top 10 lists like best CAD software for architects or best CRM for email marketing. They were getting picked up in maybe one out of every ten to twelve releases.

Then they ran a survey within one specific niche and got 8 to 14 articles from that single release. So they did it again in another vertical. Eventually they were running 20 to 30 survey based releases a year, turned each one into an annual tradition, and built a portfolio of authority backlinks across dozens of niches. Today, Mickie says, they barely need to do PR at all. The media calls them.

Here is the part that makes this accessible to almost anyone: you do not need your own list of survey respondents. Mickie's advice is to approach small, independent trade associations directly, the smaller niche ones, not the big obvious ones with major conferences that do not need your help. About 85% of any given industry's associations fall into that smaller category. Offer to send your survey to their members, ask for at least 100 responses to be statistically meaningful, and offer to feature the association by name in the press release you issue nationally through PR Newswire in return.

“The first time we ask, they say yes, because nobody knows about these people. And when I coach people through this, almost everybody gets six to 12 articles, individual articles, from one press release.”  - Mickie Kennedy

Even in a niche as small as biometrics, where there were only four trade publications total, that approach landed all four.

Good survey questions do not need to be complicated. Mickie's suggestions included how AI is influencing a specific industry, or how work culture has shifted since the pandemic, anything timely with a number behind it that a journalist could not easily find anywhere else.

Finding Your Industry's Blind Spot

Not every strategy needs a survey. Sometimes it just takes naming something the media has been missing entirely. Mickie described a carpet installation company in New Jersey, a business he called about as non-newsworthy as it gets, that got real traction by publicly naming their actual competitive threat: big box home improvement stores.

No one in their trade publications had covered that angle before. The first press release using it landed in over ten trade publications. By the end of a full year of consistent releases, after six months of nothing working, they had accumulated over 20 articles in their local paper and in New Jersey Magazine, a title that genuinely mattered to their customer base.

The Sales Impact Nobody Talks About

The most surprising part of this conversation, for me, was learning that earned media's biggest return is not always visibility. That same carpet company built what they called a brag book, a physical binder of every press clipping they had earned, and started bringing it into in-home sales consultations.

“We may not come in the cheapest,” their team would say, “but we have a strong reputation,” and then flip through it. It added maybe two minutes to a conversation. It also increased their close rate by 17%.

That is small business PR working exactly the way it is supposed to: not as a vanity metric, but as a trust signal that shows up at the exact moment a prospect is deciding who to hire.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is small business PR, and how is it different from hiring a publicist?

Small business PR typically means distributing press releases through a wire service and pursuing earned media directly, often without the ongoing strategy and pitching a publicist would normally provide. Services like eReleases are built as a DIY alternative, giving small businesses access to national wire distribution at a fraction of the direct cost.

How much does small business PR actually cost?

A single press release distributed directly through Business Wire or PR Newswire runs close to $2,000 for 600 to 700 words. DIY services built for small businesses can bring that down to roughly a quarter to a third of that price.

What is a realistic success rate for a small business PR campaign?

Only about 3% of press releases generate earned media, even through major wires. Because of that, a single release is not a strategy. A minimum campaign of six to eight releases, spread out quarterly at least, gives you a realistic shot at one or two landing.

About Mickie Kennedy

Mickie Kennedy is the founder of eReleases, a press release distribution service built specifically for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Over the past 28 years, he has helped clients distribute more than 10,000 press releases a year through a partnership with PR Newswire, and he offers a free master class breaking down the strategies behind the 3% of releases that actually earn media coverage. Find the master class here.

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