PR Tips: Ideas for Press Releases

January is a great time for planning your PR throughout the year. If you need some inspiration to come up with an angle for your press releases, we’ve compiled some of the things which you might want to include throughout the year:

• Seasons - You can also tie in a press release with a holiday or special occasion. Could your business do something related to Valentines Day, Fathers Day or school holidays?
• Charity work - Do not hide your light under a bushel if your business is making a donation to charity. A press release is a great way to let people know about community service, whether you offer training or apprenticeships to students or sponsor a local sports team.
• New products - New services or products: focus on the benefits to your customers and the publication’s readers.
• Achievements - Issue a press release when you or your employees are recognised for outstanding achievements or gain qualifications. Focus the release on how the award or qualification will help customers or clients.
• Business launch - Launch of your business, or business expansion — of interest to local papers and trade and business publications. You could also mention the launch of a new or updated website.

How To Create a Press Pack

Right you have managed to create a great press release and want to include other items to reinforce how great your product/service is. Well a press pack can do this.

Press packs are a great way for promoting your business and here are some tips on how to create them.

Press packs contain your press release along with additional information and samples. Sending the pack through the post can be costly but you can be creative by doing it this way.

How can you make your pack stand out? If it is too costly to send a sample of your product out with every pack then why not add a ‘pillow gift’. This can range from a chocolate bar to a bottle of champagne! Or what about a sample of the material your product is made from? If samples or gifts are outside your budget, journalist’s are still looking for new and exciting products to feature without these extras.

Alternatively, why not select a few choice publications where you would really like to be featured. Call  them and speak to the most appropriate journalist and explain what you have to offer and find out if they’d be interested in receiving just the press release or need a sample too. Through doing this, you are making sure your samples are going to the people who are most likely to be really interested in them.

Here is a check list of items you may want to include in the pack.

• A page about your business or mini-biography
• Business cards
• Catalogue
• CD of images
• Dates of forthcoming events, you are exhibiting or selling at
• Page of your tips or short article

Remember to include your logo and contact details on ever sheet and any written inclusions succinct and to a single side.

PR: Think local

Something that wouldn’t interest the national media may interest your local paper. Develop a relationship with the reporter who covers your local area, and keep them informed about the latest developments at your business. Stories about new staff, increased employment opportunities, or when employees gain qualifications may make the business pages.

Did you know editorial coverage in a national newspaper or parenting magazine is worth thousands of pounds? http://www.parentingmagazinecontacts.co.uk/

3 Tips To Promote Your Business

Promotion is an important part of growing your business. There are many ways to achieve this and here are three top tips to help you with promoting your business.

• Recommendations are a great way to sell your product or service. Word of mouth is advertising which costs nothing yet can be more effect than paying good hard earned money for a spread in a newspaper or magazine. You know as a consumer that if someone has recommended something to you, you are more likely to buy that product than one you know nothing about. This is why making connections and forging relationships with key members of your target media is important. Having your business, product or service mentioned in the media holds a lot of weight and will drive more customers to you than paying for a large advert in the same outlet.
• You need to plan your promotion. Using this simple acronym, SMART, meaning specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely, will help you do this effectively. Specific means being clear about what you want to achieve from your promotion, Measurable means you should be able to measure whether you are achieving your desired goal, Achievable means can you actually do what you have planned. Realistic means are you realistically able to achieve what you have set out to do with the resources you have and Timely means you need to include a timescale within which you want to achieve these goals. By following this simple acronym, you have you promotion planned for the timescale you want to achieve it in.
• Objectives are not set in stone. Any objectives you have  planned for promoting your business are not final. You are able to change these goals if things change within your business or if you achieve them before you planned to. Businesses can have ups and downs and although it is great and essential to have plans in place, you are not entirely ruled by them.

Do you know your USP’s?

Firstly, what is USP?

Well your USP is your Unique Selling Points. Your unique selling points are the points which make your business or service different or ‘unique’ from other companies and if used to promote your business or service will attract the right customers to you.

Now you may think you already know all the points which make you business different from the rest but a great way to find out what you may have missed is to ask friends and family what they think.

Also another way to pin point your USP is to get some friends to sit and listen to you talking about what your business or service for five minutes. Explain to them what you have to offer and why they should choose you above others. Ask them to make notes of the key points that stand out to them and then you can use these to help design a slogan so customers know exactly what you have to offer.

Alternatively if you can not get anyone to listen why not talk out loud and write down they key points you think make your business what it is.

So now you know what your USP’s are start using them to attract new customers by adding your new slogan to all your business stationary, including emails and website.

Top PR and marketing tips for mums with businesses

Daryl Willcox Publishing is a company which helps small businesses raise their profile in the media. In the first of a series of five weekly blogs, its founder and chairman Daryl Willcox gives his thoughts on ‘How to market your business on a shoestring’.

Find out exactly who your customer is.

The first step really is to identify your customer.  This is the basis for any marketing, whether it’s on a shoestring or not, but it becomes more important if you haven’t done a great deal of marketing before.

Stop thinking about advertising, stop thinking about direct mail or anything else that you might associate with marketing. Put all of that out of your mind and think about who you are trying to reach.

The best way to do that is by looking at your existing customers and thinking about who they are. Where do they live? How old are they? What things do they do with their time? If your product or service is aimed at businesses, then how big are those companies? Are they generally smaller or larger? If you have a consumer product then you are going to look much more at lifestyle, age and sex.

Try and build up a profile of your client and try to imagine a single individual who embodies everything a typical client would be.

Thinking about who your customers are will be very helpful – not only for your marketing but also for your product development. It will give you all the initial clues for what sort of marketing activity you want to be doing.

For more in-depth advice and a series of podcasts on how to begin or improve your own PR and marketing visit www.dwpub.com/smallbusiness

PR Tips from Natalie Trice of Tally Communications

 What PR is? PR stands for ‘Public Relations’ and is all about your reputation, in a nutshell it is what others say and think about you. PR is a valuable tool as it is used to gain trust and understanding between a company and its audiences, be that clients, employees, investors or suppliers – they all count!

What’s the difference between PR and advertising? With PR, you don’t pay a newspapers or website to include information. PR coverage is all about third-party endorsement which is far more powerful and credible than an advert that has been placed on a page by you. Think of PR as a personal recommendation.

What do PR people do? PR consultants use a variety of activities in their everyday work to keep clients in the media. These include talking to journalists and building relationships (media relations), writing and sending out press releases, organising online viral campaigns, setting up competitions and product placement, managing events, preparing biographies and  case studies, these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Short term and long term PR. PR can be about the short-term, such as product launches, but ideally it should be centered around longer-term strategic aims that are in line with overall business objectives – such as brand building, helping to drive sales and raising awareness. A one off press release may generate coverage in some media, but you will need to send regular releases throughout the year to get the best results.

USP? Know what your Unique Selling Point is and keep that front of mind! From the start you need to be clear about why your brand is different to competitors and why clients should use you. This needs to be used in a consistent manner in all your communication materials and needs to come across loud and clear.

Press Releases. When it comes to a press release bear in mind that it should be one page maximum. Journalists get 100′s of press releases everyday and decide in seconds whether they are going to use it or throw it away, so make yours snappy, to the point and make sure it stands out!

Don’t expect one press release to change the world overnight. It is vital that people are exposed to your message repeatedly. As long as it is news worthy, consider a series of releases that reiterate your key messages so they are reinforced over time and the media get used to hearing from you.

Be honest and transparent, the last thing you want is a key journalist catching you out!

Don’t use jargon – unless you are talking to a specialist, niche publication, resist the temptation to use acronyms and jargon. If you do use it, check that the journalist knows what you’re talking about or you could come unstuck.

Online Marketing: PR Online

There are an enormous range of activities you can carry out to promote your business online. On one level, you might take online PR simply to be sending a press release to websites which reach your target audience. If doing this, you may need to customize the content of the release to match the style of the site you are targeting. You also need to remember that while magazines work months in advance a website can publish content straight away.

However this is looking at a very limited interpretation of online PR. You can raise your business profile online through the use of social media. You might choose to:

• Participate in forums focused on your target audience
• Communicate via blogs using a system such as WordPress, Typepad or Blogger
• Communicate via micro-blogs: Twitter is the main player, but there is also Plurk, Pownce and Jaiku
• Communicate via social networks including. Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace etc.
• Communicate via social network aggregates like FriendFeed
• Communicate via online event networks including Upcoming.com, Meetup.com

You could also upload videos about your business to YouTube or Vimeo, make images available through Flickr, take part in social bookmarking or tagging of articles about your business through Delicious, StumbleUpon or Google Reader. I’m sure you can think of more ways to use the power of the internet to promote your business too.

You could read this BTTradespace post about Online PR if you want to get some more ideas. Then, add the ideas which seem right for your business to your promotion plan. (This is simply a plan of activities to promote your business every day - you can find an example here).