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.

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.

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.

Entries open for Home Business Awards
Enterprise Nation is  looking for some of the UK’s best home businesses for the second Home Business Awards competition. This year the Awards are bigger and better than ever! There are more prizes to be won - and new categories too. Read on to find out how you can enter.

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www.findatvexpert.com gives experts who want to be considered for TV&Media opportunities the chance to showcase their expertise to the industry – and gives the industry a fast and easy way of finding experts to comment on a subject or be part of a show. TV&Media companies might go to the site to find a specific expert for a specific article or programme - or they might go to the site to browse through the photos and profiles and get the inspiration for a new series or the next ‘big thing’. (more…)

Miranda Levy, formerly of Grazia, is the new editor of Mother and Baby Magazine. Kyrsty Hazell joins Junior as Editorial Assistant, always a good person to start with for your PR efforts.

To find out more emails and addresses for contacts at pregnancy and parenting magazines and websites, buy the Parenting Media Contact database. It is bigger and better than ever, putting you in touch with the people who can write about your products and services.

When you are writing your own press release it can be hard to be sure that you have hit the mark. Here are 12 quick checks you can do to make sure you are writing a press release that will get coverage for your news:

1. Have you read the publication before writing the release? Make sure you are writing in a similar style to what is on the pages of the magazine or newspaper that you are targeting.

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Do you find it hard to tell people what is great about your business? For many people, business promotion is too much like blowing your own trumpet. And, of course, why should they believe what you say: it is in your interest to say that your business is great. A much better way to gain the trust of your potential customers is to use testimonials.

A testimonial is simply a statement from a customer or client about their experience of your products or services. Use these complimentary comments on your website, in your newsletter and alongside the offering that they refer to. You will find it makes a real difference to how customers perceive your business. A genuine third party opinion has far more weight than copy you write yourself.

How can you generate testimonials? (more…)