How to Generate Press for Your Business
Nothing helps build recognition with your target audience like good publicity in trusted media outlets. It’s a very powerful tool that can easily attract investors, as well. Press generation is usually a lot more credible than running advertisements, and just like word-of-mouth recommendation, businesses can achieve it for an insanely low amount of cash.
“Small firms often neglect public relations,” insists John Boitnott, a famous journalist and press release curator who offers classes on Zeqr, an online learning platform. “But it isn’t something which is only relevant to big businesses. Even the smallest firm can use publicity to catch the eye of potential customers.”
With press generation, you have to know where to start, and it’s quite simple, actually. Our shortlist highlights the following steps:
Select your desired targets
Start by identifying potential customers and all the media outlets your audience is most likely to use. Sidenote: stay realistic at all times and at all costs, because it’s always easier to get talked about in local newspapers and magazines than nation-wide news portals. An abundance of professional businesses generate PR opportunities in a very natural way, and even you can take advantage of your upcoming events (like your product’s 10th anniversary, or a new business partnership, or anything like that) to engage both the journalists and your target audience. It’s as simple as maximizing the publicity value by coming up with an interesting story.
You’ve surely seen events like competitions with local radio stations and free product giveaways to every 1,000th customer. They are incredibly valuable for getting your brand name noticed. It’s only a matter of time before those CEOs start giving speeches at business events or entering sponsorships with local sports teams.
Your judgement is crucial here. Use it to pick the right media to approach, and don’t be afraid of it, even if you don’t have a single sentence about your business. It’s easy to reach out to people who can run a technical profile of your products, as well as local media who always show interest in something like fundraising, if it were organised by your business.
Write a press release
Nothing on this planet can provide information of good quality like a press release. Journalists enjoy covering people’s stories when they’re given an appealing paper of what you and your business are about. It’s by far the best way to inform your audience of a story.
The most important thing here is to think thoroughly about the message you want to send as a business owner. Always have a copy that is both lively and relevant to everyone showing interest in you, while matching the tone of the news portals you want to appear on. Keep it all on a single page of an A4 paper and use the ‘Press Release’ heading. Preparing your press release in advance is mandatory, because when you get an invitation to speak with a journalist, you always want to have all the information about what your mission and vision are with you.
Raise your personal profile
You have a higher chance of getting coverage from almost all media outlets if you’re able to build good relationships with contacts relevant or close to those journalists. Local business events are something you should definitely consider attending, because that’s the best place to meet and have a chat with business journalists. Doing so will make sure your business stays in the news and available to the crowd for a much longer period of time.
Resources:
https://www.inc.com/michael-schein/what-good-publicity-really-means.html
http://business.time.com/2013/06/24/5-ways-companies-win-by-giving-stuff-away/
The post How to Generate Press for Your Business appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.
