Promotion: Persuading Customers with Advertising and Public Relations
IF THE TARGET AUDIENCE FOR YOUR PRODUCTS happens to be your neighbors, family or co-workers eagerly awaiting your kitchen creations, then produce, package and deliver your product and let the money roll in as you keep them stocked and happy.
For most food entrepreneurs, however, you’ll need to let potential customers know your company exists to serve their needs with products you’ve tested and know they’ll love. You’ll need to reach out to connect with these potential customers, whether they’re in your office, school, church or neighborhood.
You need not empty the bank to promote your product, however. Depending on your skill set, comfort with a computer, time and budget, there are many free or nearly free promotional opportunities covered in this chapter. Despite the saying, “you have to spend money to make money,” we’ve found that the less you have to spend in promotion, the more you earn selling your products. The trick is to find the most cost-effective way to reach your target market.
Promotion is what most of us think about as marketing, the applied art form of persuasive communication by graphics, words and such to help sell products. Creative, innovative thinking thrives through your approach to promotion, communicating information — telling the story about your product — that leads to customers wanting to buy your products. Promotion helps them realize they have a need that will be satisfied by purchasing your product.
Marketers often refer to brand as the embodiment of your product in the form of your name, logo and other design aspects. The goal, of course, is to devise communications that help your customers understand and remember what your business is about and why they’ll love your products. While multinational corporations spend millions on developing their brand, you can do it with almost no money at all by harnessing the power of the Internet and a home computer, plus your own creativity.
Included in promotion is both advertising and public relations (PR). Advertising is purchased while PR, whether solicited or unsolicited, is free. The smaller the business, the less you’ll need to focus on paying for traditional advertising in media like magazines or newspapers and the more you might want to focus on public relations efforts, since PR involves investing time, not money.
Promotion decisions include developing a sense of what your company offers with words, graphics and other communicative elements. These elements often include your logo, product slogan and unifying colors, styles, themes and images expressing what you do, for whom and why it matters. They position your product in the marketplace.
In the traditional sense, advertising is paid forms of communication via outlets such as newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. Depending on what products you’re selling and your existing networks of friends, community connections and comfort with a computer and the Internet, most of your promotional efforts can be accomplished by spending little to nothing on traditional paid advertising. Save your money and focus on Internet communications and PR instead.
However, don’t rule out the possibility of exchanging your products for a display advertisement in a newspaper. Publications, particularly regional or non-profit newsletters, may be open to creating a giveaway of your product (perhaps as an incentive for renewals) in exchange for a “free” publication advertisement, which will garner you conventional advertising exposure through an unconventional means. So if you get a local newspaper sales call, float the idea by them as a marketing promotion.
Posters and Flyers
For most CFOs, if you’re planning to spend anything on advertising, it will be on a printed flyer to pass around to your neighbors or co-workers, a poster to be displayed at the local library and other public places, and maybe a few nicely crafted letters to area businesses or organizations announcing your new venture, with a product order form attached (and, if appropriate, some samples in a box).
How you advertise will be predicated on what you’re selling and how, based on your state laws. On this book’s website, we share a few examples as a guide. Don’t leave out contact information, any order specifics (like minimum orders) and whether or not free delivery is included.
Direct Marketing
In the same way many CFOs sell their products directly to their customers, direct marketing connects your messages directly to those you wish to reach. While social media can be viewed as direct marketing, there are many other channels used to elicit direct responses from potential customers. Some of the most widely used include promotional letters, newsletters and postcards, sent via mail, e-mail or text messaging.
Most of us are familiar with catalogs and credit card offers delivered to us via the US Postal Service. While they’re becoming less common thanks to the exploding use of electronic forms of communication, sending a polished “snail mail” letter, perhaps with a coupon to sample your product, to potential customers can be effective, particularly if you are trying to land a large account like a weekly bakery order for an office. But you need to reach the right decision-maker or your solicitation letter may end up with the rest of the “junk mail.” You may need to make a few “cold calls” to receptionists or secretaries first, before you send out your sampler pack and introductory letter. On a national level, an entire industry represented by the Direct Marketing Association (the-dma.org) serves companies that assemble direct mail databases used to solicit business.
• E-mail List Campaigns
Like catalogs in the mail, spam in our in-box has become an accepted, albeit unwanted, aspect of having e-mail, the electronic form of direct communication via the Internet. With the widespread availability of free e-mail, more people than ever have adopted this means of both receiving and sending messages.
Besides crafting simple e-mails that announce a new product or event you will be selling at, you can also design more sophisticated e-mails using graphically rich templates from many e-mail systems, perhaps ones you already use.
You may, however, encounter a limit as to how many e-mails you can send out at one time — in part, an (unsuccessful) effort by technology companies to curb spam. So if you have a large enough database of names, you may find yourself needing to use various free or low cost e-mail management systems, plus a host of other marketing features. Among some of the most widely used service providers are MailChimp (mailchimp.com), Constant Contact (constantcontact.com) and Emma (myemma.com). Besides price, each e-mail service provider may offer various analytics and other customizable options and design features.
A word of caution, however. Like “junk mail,” keep what you e-mail out relevant, helpful and informative, otherwise you run the risk of turning off the very customers you want to excite and engage. If you send too many messages, too often, you run the risk of turning constant contact into a constant annoyance.
Websites
One of the easiest ways to raise awareness and establish a degree of professionalism around your product and company is to create a website. This digital presence allows you to share information about your company and what you produce. For whatever reasons, a few states’ cottage food laws prohibit any Internet-based advertising or communication; double-check to make sure this restriction doesn’t apply to you. Even if your state forbids sales via the Internet, you can still have a website to share general product and company information and take an order over the telephone.
On the website would, of course, be your company name, products, contact information, order forms (if allowed in your state) and a backstory that explains what you’re all about. While there are lots of opinions about what makes a great website, ease of navigation remains important. Most websites have either a navigation bar across the top or along one side, containing words or a graphic that connects you to key components, or pages, on the site.
Be sure to include a slice of your personal story. This helps differentiate your products from the mass-produced ones on the supermarket shelves. A simple “About” page could include a photo of you in the kitchen preparing your products, plus a lively question and answer format that helps support and promote your story. Replies to the following questions may be a great place to start:
• How did you get started making your product?
• What makes your product unique?
• Why did you start (your business name)?
• When you’re not in the kitchen, what are you doing?
Another important feature may be a “frequently asked questions,” or FAQ, page. This page can deflect time-consuming telephone or e-mail questions and clarify your policies and procedures. Included might be answers to the following questions:
• How can I get your product?
• Do you have a minimum order?
• Can you deliver?
• What kind of payment do you accept?
• How quick is your turnaround on an order?
The graphics, style and feel of your website should echo your products in terms of the design, color schemes and other creative elements. For example, if you decide to use a red-checked gingham pattern for your products, this could be cleverly worked into the design of the website as well. Featuring customer endorsements, testimonials or any media coverage you may have received will help reinforce the quality of your products and the reputation of your company.
Thanks to “widgets,” self-contained mini programs you just paste into sections of your website, you can keep your homepage dynamic and fresh with new content that gets posted to there, perhaps via a social media update. Feedburner (feedburner.com) is a tool that can be used to automatically repost your social media post to your website page.
There are two ways to approach a website for your business, one which involves money and another that is completely free. Gone are the days when you needed big bucks for a website. Since many cottage food businesses may be just getting off the ground, starting with a free website might be the simplest and wisest choice.
1. Free Websites
The following companies offer the ability to modify easy-to-use templates and customize them for your business; there are many other options as well. If you have some computer experience, the intuitive nature of the websites make them easy to navigate, and instructional videos will guide you through the design, so there’s no programming or “coding” involved. The websites do have some space and creative limitations and may come with small ads that also appear on your website. But for most first-timers, you’ll be amazed by the results. Just register for the website template you like the best and start uploading text and photos. There’s plenty of free storage space.
It’s so easy an eleven-year-old can do it. Really. This is the leading blogging interface that can be adapted easily as a business website. For the record, “blog” stands for a “web log.” If you love writing about your products, ingredients or journey as a food entrepreneur, this option will be particularly attractive.
• wix.com
Containing numerous templates, many product oriented, this online website builder focuses on easy drag-and-drop design elements. Stick to their HTML5 options, since more and more people are viewing websites via their mobile smartphones, so you want to make sure your website looks okay on these tiny devices, too.
A very basic, visuals-driven website design interface. Not many bells and whistles, but its simplicity will appeal to less tech-savvy people and get you quickly set up on the Internet.
Created by the most widely used Internet search engine company, Google Sites provides the ability to create a free website with various features. If you like to write regularly, then you can use Google’s blogspot.com.
2. Low-cost Websites
More experienced entrepreneurs who want greater control over their name, products, design elements and capabilities can purchase their domain name (the name you select to represent your company) and then host their own website. Both the domain name and hosting fees cost less than $100 per year from companies like GoDaddy.com.
Hosting and designing your own website may require greater computer knowledge than you have the time or interest for. If so, you could hire a website designer depending on your budget, your design goals and the scope of what you want the website to do for your business. Some CFOs find a family member, friend or neighbor happy to help design a professional-looking website, perhaps in exchange for a regular supply of cookies or jams.
Social Media
Everything you do is about sharing your story. Don’t overlook ways to let your customers do this for you as well. To build awareness around your product, you’ll need to get people to try it, love it and share what they like about it with the rest of the world. With the explosive growth of the Internet — plus access to it through computers, mobile phones and tablets — social media have become an increasingly important part of an advertising campaign. And it need not cost you a penny to get started.
Your most effective advertising are the satisfied customers themselves. Word of mouth has always trumped a four-color display ad in a magazine. People are much more likely to trust their friends than a company trying to sell them something (even if what you’re selling is really great).
Thanks to the proliferation of social media, there are lots of options for sharing your story with the world, in characters, updates, photos and video. The multiplier-effect cannot be overstated. But it does require a different modus operandi, where talking becomes typing and a printed poster becomes a “folder” of incredible photos of your products, your home kitchen and your customers savoring a bite of what you’ve produced. Because there aren’t enough hours in the day to do them all, carefully select the social media your customers use most.
The more your customers rave about your products to others on the Internet, the better. People who love your product can, in spirit, be your “in-house” advertising agency. They can tell their friends, share links to your products on Facebook and tweet about their favorites, too.
Facebook: facebook.com
Currently, the dominant social media networking service, where you can keep connected to your customers and share regular social updates, such as a new product or an event you’ll be selling at next week. As part of their marketing strategy, some companies are now choosing to make their business Facebook page their de facto “website.”
When you start your Facebook page for your venture, be sure to select and create a “business” profile, not a “personal” page. This keeps your business professional and opens up opportunities you won’t have on your personal page, including the ability to schedule posts in advance, assign other people as administrators (to help you), access analytic tools and implement targeted advertising campaigns, if you choose to do so down the line.
Google+: google.com/+/business
This search engine giant likewise has ambitions to thrive in the social media world through Google-plus for business.
Twitter: twitter.com
If you like texting, then this online microblogging website is perfect for sharing what’s happening with your business in 140 characters or less.
Pinterest: pinterest.com
Think cork bulletin board with photos, embedded on an Internet page. This pinboard-style website can spread images of your food products through the Internet if your photos are beautiful enough.
Instagram: instagram.com
Like Twitter, except what you share is snapshots, not text. So when your product wins a state fair or is enjoyed by your state governor, share that candid photo here. Instagram currently only works with mobile devices.
Name: Rhonda L. Jones
Business: Chez Moi Bakery (Durham, North Carolina)
Website: iloverumcake.com
Products: spirit and plain cakes, ice cream cakewiches and panna cotta with homemade dessert sauces
Sales Venue: direct, mail order, special events, food truck
Annual Sales: $30,000
Chez Moi Bakery owner Rhonda Jones inside her food truck, which she uses to deliver and sell her cakes. COURTESY OF JONES FAMILY
Spirit Cake Sales Pour in via Social Media
When most folks go on a Caribbean cruise, they come home with a tan. Rhonda L. Jones came back with a dream of launching a rum cake business from her home kitchen.
“At the last minute I ended up going on a cruise to the Grand Cayman Islands when a family member was unable to go,” shares Jones. “Onboard, I went to a rum tasting and a later excursion to a local rum cake bakery when we docked. I brought back a few bottles of duty-free rum and started recipe experimenting with my family as taste-testers until I nailed it.” With this distinct recipe in her kitchen repertoire, Jones embraced the opportunity to launch a bakery business.
“My passion for baking started early in life; I remember baking my dad miniature pineapple layer cakes in my Easy Bake Oven,” Jones recalls. “I grew up in a household that loved sharing food. My mother baked every chance she found, and I helped at her side making her specialties of apple pies, peach cobbler and yeast rolls. I never realized back then that those experiences would so directly impact me today.”
Jones’ business roots are in people and creating connections through the kitchen. Everything is personal with a story behind it, starting with the name of her business: Chez Moi. “I simply love the French language, which started with my dad teaching me words and phrases when I was very young. I continued learning French by studying it in high school and lived in Boug-en-Bresse in France my junior year. Folks might initially think I do French pastries. But it’s the meaning of Chez Moi that inspired the name: ‘My Place.’ As I work under a home processor license administered by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, that name reflects me on an even deeper level.”
North Carolina is one of the states with an expanded approach to home-based food operations. Her home processor license allows Jones to sell a broad array of products via outlets such as mail order, wholesale and her most recent venture: a food truck.
“The initial inspection and licensing process took a little time. But once I went through that, I’ve had a lot of flexibility, along with support from our department of agriculture, on growing and diversifying my business.”
Jones’ focus on rum and other spirit cakes came out of a clear understanding that she needed to differentiate her products. “To truly shine, you need to drill down to what you’re good at making and make sure it is something unique and not already offered. With a saturated cupcake market here in Durham, I saw opportunity in rum cakes.”
After launching in 2005, Jones focused strictly on holiday sales of rum cakes for the first five years. “Rum cakes fit well with the Christmas season. Even though it is distinctly different than a fruit cake, folks still associate rum cakes as something similar and a special holiday treat,” adds Jones. In year two, she pumped out orders for forty rum cakes. She then added two additional ovens to keep up with the volume.
Today Jones sells rum cakes year-round, primarily through direct and mail order along with a couple of wholesale accounts. For example, Cocoa Cinnamon, a local coffeehouse, sells her cakes by the slice. Chez Moi offers tempting twists on spirit cakes, which sell for twenty and thirty-five dollars in small and large sizes. In addition to her signature flavor, brown sugar vanilla classic rum cake, she offers ten other varieties, like black cherry bourbon and apple martini.
Chez Moi Bakery’s rum cake on display. COURTESY OF CHEZ MOI BAKERY
Jones advises other start-ups to focus on your key unique products and not try to do too much. She learned this herself. “At first I offered both the spirit cakes and what I called ‘Timeless Classics,’ cakes like carrot, red velvet and chocolate layer. That second holiday season I had forty rum cake orders and one carrot cake. I quickly realized my niche.”
Jones finds social media, particularly Twitter, her main marketing outlet. “Social media creates a personal connection between my customers and me. Best of all, it’s free,” she explains. “By tweeting anything, from where our food truck will be next to photos from my recent trip to Europe, it shows that I’m the face behind Chez Moi and folks feel connected to me.” She posts her tweets using various key hashtags that link with the right audience interested in local, unique food such as #Foodie, #BuyLocal, #GoDurham, #Entrepreneur and #DurhamIsTastiest. Social media and word of mouth are her number one sources of new customers.
“I try to post at least a few times a week and then, again, a few times while I am at an event with the dessert truck, then focusing primarily on where I’ll be and what I’m serving,” shares Jones. “Some people say more is better, but I prefer quality over quantity when it comes to posts. I re-Tweet others, especially other food trucks, and share photos of new items.” Jones sees Twitter and Facebook as serving two different purposes, with Facebook serving more like a website with easy-to-access, permanent information and Twitter more for instant and immediate updates such as the food truck location.
Rhonda Jones with a labeled cake box. COURTESY OF COCOA CINNAMON
In 2013, Jones further diversified by investing in a food truck and selling both sliced cake and ice cream “cakewiches” made with her spirit cakes at local events. This enabled her to strategically expand the business by diversifying her customer base. The ability to sell cake by the slice introduced Jones’ product to new customers who wouldn’t commit to buying a full cake before they tried it. The ice cream cakewiches, using alcohol-infused cake, gave foodies a new, exciting dessert treat.
“Because I do all the baking and assembly in my kitchen, I could save money as I didn’t need an expensive food truck with a full mobile kitchen. I just needed a mobile unit for sales and could use a redesigned van instead,” explains Jones.
She raised the $3,290 toward the purchase of this unit via a Kickstarter campaign (see Chapter 15 for more on Kickstarter). “Crowdfunding seems to work best when your company has been selling a product for a while and has an established, loyal base. I know some other local businesses which have raised over $20,000.”
“The incredible support of my friends, family and the Durham community keeps me going and growing Chez Moi,” Jones adds. While she currently runs the business as a sole proprietor, friends help with the larger events when she needs an extra hand as cashier and are “paid” in cake and appreciation. Jones currently manages Chez Moi while still holding down a full-time day job in conference planning and is training someone to run the food truck while she’s at that other job. But she’s working on her vision of making this a full-time gig. “For me to transition full-time, I want to diversify and supplement my income with a shelf-stable product, a cake mix specifically made for folks who want to make these spirit cakes in their own kitchen and sauces which can be added to any dessert.”
In the meantime, Jones keeps her local customers stocked with cakes — and happy. “Connecting with my customers is the best part of this business,” Jones sums up. “I love to see them take the first bite and enjoy their Chez Moi experience.”
YouTube: youtube.com
A free, movie-sharing website, particularly useful if you have the talent and interest in creating videos around your products and their use in the kitchen, perhaps as cooking demos.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com
This professional business network can connect you to people once impossible to reach, if you can get into their inner business circle. It’s all about degrees — or links — of separation. Try it out and see if you’re only six degrees of separation away from everyone you might want to meet.
Just because you have 742 Facebook “friends” doesn’t mean these friends see every “status update” you post. Make no mistake, not only are Facebook and other social media sites mining personal information about you and your online life, they’re making money off you, too. In fact, if you have your “cookies” disabled on your browser, you cannot even sign in to use the site; cookies track everything you do. Facebook and many other social media companies have proprietary and secret algorithms they use to control how many people see your updates.
If you want to boost your reach and increase your audience on social media, you have to pay for it. This is called “pay-for-clicks.” You can focus on people who like your page and their friends, or broaden your reach to people you target. Right on their main business page, the social media site will show you how you can increase your reach and how much it will cost you; heck, they even create a sample advertisement out of the content you just provided.
All you have to do is enter your credit card and set your parameters, including your budget, target market and duration of the campaign. Then with a click of a button, your ad will reach a segment of the population so specific that it’s a bit creepy, at least to us. The good news, however, is you can effectively target a market at a potentially very low cost; your update will show up in their “news feed.”
Listing on Free Directories
While most cottage food businesses can’t sell by mail or cross state lines, getting listed on one or more of the many free national Internet directories can help locals find you. This will also be another means for media to access your information.
Forrager: forrager.com
It’s billed as the “cottage food community,” a space where home cooks, bakers and decorators can learn and share with each other. Solely focused on the cottage food industry, Forrager has grown from an information portal into an online community, where people can ask and answer questions, connect with each other, and add their cottage food operation to the directory.
Etsy: etsy.com
An e-commerce website developed to sell handmade items. There are only a few food product companies listed, perhaps due to laws that restrict online sales.
LocalHarvest: localharvest.org
Only for farms with food products for sale.
Agrilicious: agrilicious.com
For all things local food, connecting potential customers, farmers and food-related businesses.
Eat Well Guide: eatwellguide.org
Go to “suggest a listing” and suggest your company and its products.
CSA Center: csacenter.org
Only for farms operating with the community supported agriculture model (Robyn Van En Center).
All Organic Links: allorganiclinks.com
For various organic products.
Product Demonstrations and Sampling
Sampling out your product, whether on the table at a farmers’ market or in a “sampler box” you give a prospective company that hosts regular morning roll days or birthday gatherings for employees, is an effective way to get potential customers to try it without any financial commitment on their part. If your items taste as good as your market feasibility studies suggest, then you’re just an order form away from landing a new customer.
Every happy customer can lead to two or more down the line. Most catering and cake decorating companies, for example, thrive off referrals. It may take months, or even years, to build this buzz, but once it happens, the work you’ll have to do marketing your business will be greatly reduced, depending on the sales goals that you’ve set for yourself. Remember to thank those loyal and supportive customers, perhaps with special gifts during the holidays or discounts with every referral they send your way.
Samples Anyone? A Word of Caution
If where you sell offers the possibility of sampling your product, that’s one of the best ways to clinch a sale. But thanks to numerous regulations and requirements, you may find this more problematic and a hassle than it’s worth.
At many farmers’ markets around the country, trolling health inspectors have effectively put the kibosh on sampling out products because of fears of food spoilage, customers contaminating the samples or on other grounds. You’ll need to check with the individual venue to see what their specific rules are. You may be required, for example, to serve samples wearing food service-grade disposable gloves. Check with other vendors, too, since they can tip you off if the market or craft fair, for whatever reasons, is on the watch list for the health department.
HeathGlen’s Farm & Kitchen products with single-use sampling spoons. COURTESY OF HEATHGLEN’S FARM & KITCHEN
PR represents your reputation and brand image. It’s what both you and the public say about your business or product. Securing solicited or unsolicited media coverage can be far more cost effective than any paid display advertisement or classified ad.
By sharing your product story effectively and strategically with various media outlets through a PR campaign, you will:
• Increase visibility of your products and business
• Add credibility to your operations
• Enhance your image
• Sell more products without having to spend a cent
• Create more interest in a “buy local” movement and economy
Ways to Generate Media Coverage
Everyone’s business and food products could make a great topic for an article. But what’s your hook and news angle to get free media coverage? The following ten steps will help increase the likelihood of receiving the media exposure you deserve.
Hosting Private Product Parties
If your state permits it, another option may be to host a private “product party” along the lines of a Pampered Chef or Tupperware gathering. Invite over your friends, neighbors and other community members in your target market for a private party to taste your products and learn more about how you make them. If you make the event an invitation-only private party, you may sidestep legal regulations; the health department, for instance, should only concern themselves with public events where food is sold or served. Private is the key word.
This unique format could welcome people into your home kitchen to see where and how you make your products. Besides sampling, you might offer suggestions on hosting a brunch based around your products or pairing them with others. You could do a blind tasting to get people talking about how your product is better. Such parties can be ripe for testimonials, provide new product ideas and create a buzz in social media. Everyone likes being invited to a party, especially if the food is homemade and delicious — and free.
You may want to generate press clippings, gather endorsements, collect testimonials or grow your customer base. If you cast the net wide enough to include invitations to some local newspaper reporters, it’s possible they will create a news story about you and your new products (covered in the PR section of this chapter). To make your private product party more newsworthy, tie it to national event, like Bake Cookies Day in December (if you’re a baker) or “Canvolution,” organized by Canning Across America (if you’re a canner or have your own line of pickles).
Step 1: Identify your media goals
In addition to increasing awareness of your products and business, what specifically do you want to accomplish with your PR campaign? You may want to generate press clippings, gather endorsements, collect testimonials or grow your customer base. For example, do you want to introduce a new product or invite your community to a product demo party event?
Step 2: Create your compelling story
Identify your strengths, unique characteristics and what makes your products and background special. Keep your story simple and describe it as if you’re talking with a friend.
Step 3: Develop a media list
Compile a list of media contacts, including the names of writers, journalists or producers who regularly cover related topics. Start a file of articles published or aired by those journalists, since this might be a way to make an initial contact. If you have the time and inclination, build relationships with journalists before you pitch your first story idea. Thanks to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, this is easier than ever before. When contacting someone, it often helps to tell them how much you enjoyed a story they wrote or produced.
Step 4: Write a press release
Follow the standard press release format. See the sample press kit on this book’s website (homemadeforsale.com) for a downloadable template.
Win Some Awards
You know you have a great-tasting product, and your current customers do, too. But to reach new customers and grow your business and reputation, there’s nothing like winning an award for your pickle relish or artisanal sourdough bread. Whether it’s a “People’s Choice” award, a state fair ribbon or a prestigious Good Food Award (goodfoodawards.org) from Seedling Projects, such an accolade can boost your reputation and solidify your position as a leader with a third-party endorsement. It will also allow you to add “award-winning” to your marketing materials and may even include attractive medals you can use in your market displays. Depending on the nature of the award and the fame associated with it, you may also attract media attention and new customers eager to try out the next great food product.
Step 5: Capture visuals, both photographs and video
A picture is worth a thousand words, it’s often said. Don’t miss an opportunity to share your story visually. High-quality digital single-lens reflex (SLR) and GoPro video cameras make taking great shots a breeze. Make sure you capture images at a high resolution so they can be used in print or even on TV. With photos or video, you can turn a small mention into a larger feature or product profile. Shrinking budgets at various media with limited photography capability may allow you to showcase your story more effectively. Visual content is in demand more than ever, by magazines, newspapers and even the Associated Press. Plus, you can capture the images you want, presenting your products in the best light.
Step 6: Time your press release
Most magazines work ahead from three to six months (or more) when covering a story. Newspapers work a week ahead. Don’t forget about local radio, since people interact with the media in many ways; those who watch lots of TV may not regularly listen to the radio. Internet media, like food bloggers, are always eager to cover stories and enjoy passing out free samples to their readers; plus, their blogs can sometimes go viral, which means what they write gets picked up, over and over again, by other bloggers.
Step 7: Submit your release
E-mail your release to a specific person or media contact, then follow up with a telephone call or e-mail about one or two weeks later to make sure they received it. Ask the assignment editor, producer or journalist if the story has been “assigned,” or if it’s still being reviewed. While targeting major outlets, focus on the media you believe you have the best chance of reaching; perhaps these media cover topics related to your products or regularly include “human interest” features.
Step 8: Accept and manage the interview (and photography session)
The interview or meeting can be the most enjoyable part of working with the media. Relax and just be you. Your enthusiasm will carry the interview, but make sure you share your story about your products. Avoid “going off the record” about anything and minimize detailed or complex issues. A little warm hospitality goes a long way with journalists; send them home with some of your product.
Step 9: Offer thanks for the media coverage
After an article or story has run or aired, send a thank you note and keep in touch as future story ideas arise.
Step 10: Keep track of it all
Keep a list with links of media articles about your products and your business. An easy way to do this is to set up a free “Google Alert” via Google with your name and the name of your products and business. Google will send you a link via e-mail every time they track something with your name in it. Set up an alert here: google.com/alert. Once you’ve received a glowing review or business profile, don’t let it stop there. Share the media article or coverage on your website or via social media, making sure to tag the writer or media source using the @ or # sign, depending on the social media, so it shows up on their social media page.