Getting your story on a magazine cover is, for many marketers, a crowning achievement. But covers are usually reserved for the likes of Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, or the latest company to be implicated in some perilous scandal. So how do you get your story onto the front cover? Ask Rocket Science. We’ve done it several times. Here’s how:

Play the other story assets:
That’s our client on the left, seated. We had several roadblocks to overcome in achieving our PR goals Her start-up had an alpha product and only two trial customers. But we recognized that the CEO was dynamic, articulate, and a female entrepreneur making great strides in the somewhat male-oriented technology industry.

So our strategy was to focus on the individual at the helm in order to garner coverage for the company, and it worked.

Rocket Science was able to win multiple articles in the Red Herring, the San Jose Mercury News, several technology trade publications and radio appearances… and as you see, the cover story of U.S. News and World Report.

Refute popular wisdom:
The press was saying that Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was dead. Several large companies had well-publicized setbacks in their ERP deployments, and the media was having a field day. Our client was an ERP integration consultant, so how were we to create positive buzz for them in such a hostile environment?

Prove the pundits wrong, of course! Rocket Science gathered the facts and pulled together a solid case study about how our client had “saved the day” at a global pharmaceutical company. We pitched and won favorable cover-page news in ComputerWorld with a story headline that read, “Flash! ERP Works if You’re Careful.”

Ride the wave, and rise above:
It’s December of 1999 and everybody is waiting for the Y2K “crisis” to play out. The press was full of chatter and doom-and-gloom prognoses. Our PR challenge was two-fold: to be heard, and to get above the noise in a positive light.

In its last issue of the year, Inter@ctive Week was examining the computing boom that was expected to take hold once everyone got past their millennium anxieties, and we had just the story they needed.

Rocket Science shared a customer testimonial about how our client’s technology was handling 1.5 million transactions per day — flawlessly. The deployment was Y2K tested, and the customer was happy and looking forward to spending a lot more money with our client in 2000. Just the story they were looking for to fill out the cover and celebrate the New Year!