Ha ha! What an opener, ey?
I’ll tell you the reason I wanted to put this out there.
It’s because creating publicity for your business takes a certain type of person, whether you’re doing yourself or I’m doing it for you.
And guess what?
Not everybody’s cut out for publicity.
The good news is that most businesses are worthy of press and for the most part, it’s just down to a few fundamentals.
And here they are:
#1 You’re not clear on your audience yet.
Let me start by saying that pitching stories to the press means you’re essentially pitching stories for them to write for their audience. And guess what?
Their audience should be your audience.
If you haven’t worked out who you’re trying to reach then you’ll have a really hard time coming up with story ideas and you’ll have an even harder time trying to win over journalists.
But not all is lost. Try spending some time drilling down to who your audience(s) are and you’ll save yourself the headache further down the line – probably in many areas of business.
#2 You haven’t got time.
Now this one doesn’t totally matter if you want me to do your PR for you but if you want me to teach you how to get your own publicity then you need to make some time for it.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a firm believer in creating a PR strategy that takes up minimal time. (The strategy I teach is the result of trial and error with past students, where I discovered that if they tried to carve out too much time then they gave up.)
So how much time are we talking?
If you can dedicate at least one hour per week to building and nurturing relationships with journalists then you will get coverage.
Any extra time is a bonus that will reap rewards but the important thing that you need to take away from this is that you have to stick at it.
PR is a marathon and not a race so nurturing relationships week after week is essential – otherwise, you’re wasting your time.
#3 You think all publicity is good publicity.
Getting coverage and column inches for the sake of it is not a good idea.
When you’re pitching to the press you want to make sure that the resulting stories do some of these three things:
- Shows your expertise to your audience
- Increases your authority in your industry
- Teaches your audience about you
So if you’re a hairdresser and you’re using the press to air your views on Brexit then you might not be doing yourself any favours.
Thinking of getting publicity for your business?
Check out my FREE press bank – a list of places to start pitching your service-based business.
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