ACPR Blog

I spend much of my time coaching small business owners to help them promote their own business. Here are some tips from my talks:

1. Start by being clear about what is unique and different about your business: it is hard to stand out from all the other businesses, especially if you want to use press releases to get free editorial coverage.

1. Make a plan: write down all the ideas you can think of for promoting your business - using sticky notes can make this easy to sort out. You might want to do it with a friend to help stimulate ideas.

1. Draw up a month by month activity plan: have a look at the promotional plan and action plans at PRBasics in the Free Download section to get more of an idea of how I’d lay out a plan and some promotional ideas.  Have a column for advertising, public relations, online marketing, events, and perhaps include leafleting and direct mailing and any other marketing strategies you will use. Note down when new lines will be coming on board, especially ones exclusive to you, when you will have sales, and seasonal events like Mothers Day with which you could tie in promotional activities. If ideas and planning don’t come easily to you, I can help with a telephone consultation which will really get your brain going, or even write your plan for you after chatting through all the issues.

1. Spread your promotional ideas out throughout the year, so you have something going on every month and week. Some people do PR every Monday, or the first week of every month, say.

1. Once you have your ideas, look at the fixed costs for e.g. attending events, getting flyers printed. Set aside a small amount for ads each month.

1. Think about your strengths and where you would need to get help in. If you like writing, you might want to write your own press releases: again there is a template at PRBasics.

1. If you can’t imagine how to start writing a press release, I can write one for you to get you started, and you could then adapt it to cover ‘new news’ the following month. Press releases cost £40 per hundred words and are usually around 350 words long.

1. If you have written your own press release and want a professional edit, I offer a press release ‘health check’ service.

1. To make it easier to get in touch with the people who can give you coverage I offer an extensive and up-to-date database of media contacts at parenting magazines (national and local), websites, and journos with an interest in parenting at womens mags and newspapers (£125). You can then email and phone with your news as often as suits you.

1. Finally, I have a limited number of slots to do PR for people: a single press release costs in the region of £600 with a reduction if you book regular work.

Men use the internet to indulge all sorts of hobbies, and meet like minded ‘nerds’ while women use it as a low-maintenance virtual PA service, according to Sue Unerman in this week’s MediaWeek. Visitors to your website are fixing up appointments, arranging the grocery delivery and keeping in touch with friends. So, how does this affect what you should be offering on your site? If you are targeting women, think about little extras like gift lists and reminder services that will make their life easier. Go for simple and usable design too: women are online to save time in their busy lives.

The latest ABC figures came out this week, telling us which magazines have gained readers and which are going down in popularity. In the last 6 months the credit crunch has hit many magazines, especially those featuring celebrities.

If you are looking to target women, you can’t beat coverage in Take a Break which has two or three times the circulation of most other women’s magazines, leading ABC’s sales tables after the TV guides. After that, the most read magazines include Saga, Reader’s Digest. OK!, Closer, Glamour and Chat.

If you want to reach younger women, Glamour and Cosmopolitan lead the tables: for older women look at Good Housekeeping, Yours and Woman & Home.

I have written a few articles in this blog recently about the ins and outs of running a community magazine. It is a subject that fascinates me. I have worked with several women who have done this and, as long as you don’t mind selling adverts, it is a great was to earn a good income from home. Mums returning from maternity leave are more and more looking at magazine franchises as a real home income opportunity. And of course, one of the things that most magazine owners enjoy is creating the content for their magazine.

Depending on your set up you may have free rein over the entire content, or have most or all of it supplied by the franchisor. If you have some input, or are setting up a magazine by yourself, you may wonder how best to fill your pages with gripping content that has readers retaining your magazine and passing it on to friends. Here are some tips to get you inspired: (more…)

I’ve just picked up my Bounty Pack with my new midwifery notes. It is three years since I was last pregnant and I am sure the volume of information in the pack has increased dramatically since then. This time, instead of a few promotional leaflets I received four bulky A5 magazines from Bounty itself, babyGROE and two medical professional bodies. It is interesting to see the trend to create small magazines instead of including loose flyers: I suspect the organisations creating the magazines make a good profit from their advertisers, even allowing for the hefty cost of distribution in the Bounty Pack. What is more, new mums, especially first timers, have an unending thirst for information on all things baby. I still feel, though, that this is becoming information overload, and four magazines in the Bounty pack is two or three too many.

If you have not yet signed up to Google Alerts, you are missing out on one of the easiest wasys to see if your promotional efforts are working. It is ideal for business owners or anyone in PR or SEO. Simply enter your business name - or if you work with clients, the name of your client’s company - and you will get daily alerts to new occurances of the brand on the internet. In their Link Building Article, KKSmarts recommend using it to track when other sites use articles you have written. I use it to see when press releases get used in unexpected places. Try it today.

I stumbled across website KKSMarts which has some great articles about Search Engine Optimisation and how to use Adwords. The articles are just the right length and each contains a few points for you to follow up, written in non-techy language. Have a browse. You might also want to sign up for their adwords or SEO courses: if you do, let me know if you find them useful.

Response Source is an affordable service to distribute your press release to thousands of journalists who have subscribed to receive updates. It can’t replace researching your own contacts, as you don’t know who has subscribed, but it can get your news in front of journalists and editors who you might not have thought of approaching. I’ve certainly had a good response when I have used the service, and as it starts from around £40 plus VAT it is an affordable way to make your news reach further. Here are some tips from the people behind Response Source on making the most out of online press release distribution: (more…)

An article in Media Week has suggested that you can get bigger discounts on advertising at the moment as businesses are cutting their ad budgets and ad sales teams become ever keener to get advertisers on board.

I’d be interested to know whether people have found it easier to get discounts if they have booked any ads recently.

The Womens Marketing Forum has had a revamp. Louisa who runs it is very knowledgable, and I’d definitely recommend signing up.