How PR Can Help Small Businesses

Marketing

Aug 31

Pippa is a PR expert who started The PR Set to offer a flexible approach to PR for entrepreneurs and innovators to give them the confidence and knowledge they need to get the results for themselves. Pippa is passionate about making PR accessible for small biz owners and indie brands and demystifying PR to show them that they can do it. I asked her a few questions to give us a bit of an insight into how PR can help small businesses and utilise the images from our photoshoots together to help boost sales and gain brand recognition.

What is PR and how can it help small businesses?

A lot of people think PR is just getting your business in a magazine or newspaper, but it’s so much more than that. It’s what people think about your business, your reputation.

PR is about getting other people to talk about your business. So unlike advertising where you pay for an advert to say what you want it to say, PR is about getting other people to tell your audience how great you are. That is hugely powerful in terms of third party endorsement and creating trust triggers for your business.

PR can help you to build your brand, tell your story and position you as an expert in your field. It can keep you relevant, keep you visible and build your reputation. When it’s done properly it puts you in front of your target audience. That could be in a magazine, but it could also be on someone’s podcast, at an event, a guest blog post, for example. There’s lots of different ways you can build your reputation through PR.

In addition, PR also has other benefits including helping your SEO, creating talkability for your business, driving traffic to your website and driving sales, getting you in front of new audiences, creating opportunities for collaboration and building relationships with other businesses within your network.

The Modern Crafter, featured in Mollie Makes Magazine. Photographs by Diana Stainton

Viktorija Semjonova’s book ‘The Art of Gouache’ featured in Uppercase Magazine.
Photographs by Diana Stainton

Why is photography important for Pr?

Photography is so important for PR because it helps connect you to your audience instantly. And if your images aren’t working for your PR, it’s likely that they’re not working for the rest of your marketing either. I really recommend that people invest in their imagery before they start doing any PR (and you don’t have to spend a lot to get good quality images).

From a media perspective, images are really important. When I edited a consumer magazine we would rarely interview anyone or take a pitch further until we had seen that they had good images. Your photography brings the page to life and if your images weren’t up to scratch then often the feature or article wouldn’t work. Magazines don’t have big budgets for shoots anymore, so they are often reliant on using your photography. I recommend getting good head shots (even if you think you’re not going to be asked about your business – trust me, there will be a great opportunity that you don’t want to lose out on).

For product businesses, you need good quality, high res cut out images – it’s really important that they are print quality or a publication will be unlikely to be able to use them. Having good lifestyle images can also be a bonus too and will often secure you extra space on a page.

Rose and Skin featured in My Weekly.
Photography by Diana Stainton

Any tips to help businesses featured?

The key thing is to do your research – read the magazines and the papers that your audience reads, spend time looking through and seeing which part your business fits into. My top tip is to send a bespoke pitch to each journalist, so knowing what they write about and where you fit in really helps with this. Remember that PR is about story-telling, it’s not about giving you an advert for your business. It could be that your products fit with a new trend, or they’re seasonally relevant. It might be that you have a great story behind why you’ve started your business. Always think about the end reader – what are they interested in? What do they want to know about? That’s what the journalist wants to deliver. The more you can take yourself out of the agenda and put yourself in their shoes the better.

How can businesses get featured to increase Christmas sales?

Christmas prep starts now! Long lead press start their Christmas issues in July, so if you want to be in the relevant issues it pays to start as early as you can. But don’t panic if you’re not there yet, there are plenty of Christmas media opportunities until mid-December. The key is to start as soon as you can and not let it slip down your priority list (which I know is often easier said than done)

Gift guides are just one part of the Christmas PR puzzle though. I really recommend thinking about your target audience, who do you think will be buying your products at Christmas and building a PR plan around that.

Can businesses do their own PR?

Absolutely! I have a DIY PR membership and my members are evidence that small business owners can do their own PR, without big budgets and without a little black book of contacts. With my guidance, they are regularly getting themselves in titles such as Grazia, Daily Telegraph, Psychologies, Stylist, Red Magazine, Daily Mail and so much more. They are winning awards, being asked to speak at events, collaborating with brilliant brands, writing guest blog posts. All sort of opportunities that are helping them to build their brand and drive sales.

Part of the battle is confidence and believing in your business – and not worrying about what people think. The other part is knowledge; It’s not rocket science, I promise. Once you give yourself the skills the sky’s the limit!

What are your recommended file types / sizes for Press?

Jpegs are fine - so long as they are 300dpi / print quality then that works! Keep a folder of images in Dropbox, Google Drive or similar, so when a request comes in, you can send the images straight away

Thank you Pippa Goulden from The PR Set
www.theprset.com