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Hello and welcome back to PR Made Simple. One of the biggest barriers I find for small businesses when they're doing their PR is actually just getting started. So in this episode, I'm going to talk to you about all the key things to think about to get your ducks in a row so you can hit the ground running and take action to get those results. So this is probably most relevant to you if you haven't got your PR started yet, although if you have,

I think you actually might find this checklist quite useful to make sure you've not forgotten anything. So the first thing is, and it sounds really obvious, but I don't think it always is, is making sure that you're ready for that PR. Now, I just want to caveat that. I don't mean putting off until you're bigger or better or any other excuse. I mean having your back end ready, so to speak. Having a website to send people to do...

send people to, having products to fulfill orders, a business that's ready to launch. If you're a brand new business, in most cases, I wouldn't recommend starting your PR until you've actually launched your business. Although I did work with a client recently where we focused on her profile and building her up as a leading expert in her industry to give her momentum because she was securing investment for that business and we needed to make sure that she was kind of...

on the radar of the right people that she was being talked about in the right places. So sometimes it is beneficial to be starting PR before you launch but in most cases I would say as a rule of thumb you kind of want to be combining your PR approach with the launch of your business if you are brand new.

If you're already established and up and running, then you don't have any excuses to put it off. The best time to start is now. The second thing that I want to talk about is your imagery. And images, they're way more important than a lot of people realize for your PR. It's something that I really want you to have a look at and try and be objective. And this goes for all types of businesses, B2C, B2B,

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service, product, whatever type of business you are in, your images are going to be really important. First off, I want to think about headshots and yes, you do need them. So many people, so many small business owners I speak to think, no one's ever going to want to include a picture of me in anything. And then suddenly they get asked for images and they don't have them ready and that can, you can often lose opportunities because of that. I used to edit a publication and we actually stopped doing any interviews or saying yes to

anything, profiling founders, anything until we'd seen that imagery to make sure that they work for the publication because think about when you're reading a magazine or a newspaper it's that image that pulls you into the feature, into the page that makes you want to read more and if your imagery isn't aligned with the look and the feel of your business then there's going to be some problems for you there. So I want you to do an audit on your photography if you have any

and if you don't then let's make it a priority. Are your images reflecting your business? Often people would send us a picture of them when they were say a corporate lawyer seven years ago when they'd launched this really cool new business for kids clothing for example or maybe a picture of them on their wedding day when they're say now a career coach. The images just weren't aligned with the businesses that they were running now.

You really want your imagery to reflect your business and it will connect you to your target audience as well. And also I would say if your images aren't working for your PR, then they're probably not working for the rest of your marketing either. You don't have to spend a fortune on your photography, but it is something that I really do recommend investing in some great headshots. Make sure you've got landscape and portrait shots. You need high resolution images.

Different people need different things, so it's always good to have a few different options available for them. I often get feedback from the journalists that I kind of work with that it's the clients who've got really great photography, they get more space on the page. And I would do that as well when we would be working with our designer laying out the pages that we were putting together for the magazine. Those really strong images, we would often give them more spaces. So say you have...

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three people commenting on a feature and you're using headshots of all of them, the lead image is likely to be the best image. It's not necessarily who it is or you know the specific person, it's actually how strong that image is going to look on the page so that's something to think about. And I know you might be thinking why would anyone want to feature me but you just don't know when those opportunities for you to be profiled or to comment on something

will occur and it's much better to be prepared. You will also need good headshots if you're doing podcast interviews, speaking opportunities, etc. If you're doing talks in other people's memberships, you know, think of all the different PR routes that you will be going after. It's highly likely you're going to need some headshots for those. And then if you're a product business, you'll also need high res cutout images too and lifestyle if you have them. Although the general rule of thumb is that cutout should be your priority.

but again, Lifestyle can get you more space on a page. When it comes to sharing your images, I recommend having a shareable press folder that can be accessed at any time. So not sending images via email because they're too big and they will clog up the journalist inbox and that just annoy them.

save them in something like a Dropbox folder or a Google Drive but not a WeTransfer link that expires because you don't know when the journalists going to be using them, you don't know the timeline and I've had it before where I've kind of saved all the images or the folders in a file that I want to access and then a few weeks later I've come to work on it and the WeTransfer links have expired and then that's really annoying because then you've got to go back to the brand and ask them to resend them or you maybe just don't and you just focus on the ones that you've got.

Make sure where possible that the images are labeled as well. So include, if it's your headshots, include your name and your website. And if it's a product, ideally you would include the name of the product, its price and the website. It can really help save mistakes from being made and it saves the journalist time, which means they'll like working with you and they might well come back for more. The next point.

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is knowing your target audience and I know you've heard every marketing person under the sun say this and it's boring, I know, but it's because it's true. You really need to know who you're trying to reach because it helps you to focus your activity. You're going to be having a very different PR approach if your business provides private jet services to high net worth individuals for example versus, I don't know, a peanut butter brand or you're selling candles and understanding that

target audience, it's going to really help you focus your activity and it's going to save you time in the long run. And that leads me on to the next thing, which I think it's really important to know your business objectives, not just your marketing objectives, what you're trying to achieve with your business. It's important to understand why you're doing your PR. It's going to help you build a strategy. As you get to know me more through this podcast, you will know that I'm very hot on having a PR strategy. It means that you get results that work. It also saves you time in the long run.

And your PR strategy is gonna be really different if you're trying to secure investment to someone who's focused on their Q4 Christmas sales, for example. So knowing why you're doing your PR before you start doing it is a really helpful exercise just to think through. It's something that we do a lot in my DIY PR membership and I've got within the course, I've got workbooks and all that kind of thing where you can just plan these things out. You don't need to spend a huge amount of time on it. You don't need to build like a 65 page PR.

Strategy or PowerPoint like we used to do kind of in agency world, know one page of thinking around this is more than enough Now the next thing you may need or you may not Most of the businesses I come across need to do some work on their mindset One of the things I really noticed when I was editing the publication when when I was getting pitched by founders by small business owners was

the difference in the confidence that people have in their businesses and how that then translates into how they talk about it, how they put themselves across. It comes through in energy in that email when it lands in your inbox. So if you think of two different emails, you've got one where somebody's kind of like, I'm terribly sorry for taking up space. I've got this little business that I run and it's just a bit of this and all we, you know, and you can tell that they're not owning it. They're not feeling confident in that.

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If you compare that to another email that I might receive where the founder is excited about their business, they believe in what they're doing, they're passionate about it, they're proud of their achievements, as an editor you are much more likely to be interested in what they're going to say. So I would really recommend doing some work around the belief in yourself in what you're doing before you start doing your PR. And don't get me wrong, I do see

that confidence grow through, I mean, my members come in, sometimes they're like, I don't know if anyone's going to want to feature me. And then they start, you know, the ball rolling and they start getting featured and they start getting interviewed or for whatever it is. And that belief does grow. But I really think that you need to think about how bringing that kind of that energy to the table before you begin your PR. The next thing I want to talk about is skilling up. So I often get asked how much time

should spend on your PR and I really don't think there's one perfect answer for this unfortunately. It depends on how quickly you work, on how much knowledge you have. I think on you know I generally say I think you can do it in an hour or so a week or a few hours every couple of weeks or half a day a month or whatever whatever it is that works for you.

But the one thing I really do recommend before you start is up skilling yourself just so you have the confidence to get cracking and you're not overthinking and you're not worried about what you're sending. I am not one for doing lots of courses as a method of procrastination. I just want to kind of put that out there. But we have a course within the membership. It's there to design to help you take action to get results. And if it's gonna get you started,

and it's going to get you surrounding yourself with the right support to take action, then that is what I think is key. So have a think about what you need in order to get going from a skills perspective. The next thing is putting together a press release or bio. And I will talk about this more in a future episode. There's a bit of a debate out there amongst PRs about whether you need a press release, but having edited a publication,

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and also I've spoken to lots of journalists about this. The general rule of thumb is yes, a press release is basically a body of information that gives the journalists all the information that they might need. So you will generally pitch to them a bespoke pitch to that journalist, but you will include the press release within that email to give them...

all the additional information that they might need in order to write the article so they don't need to keep coming back and forth with you and having lots of different conversations. That press release is all the key information that you might need and again I cover this in my membership, we do it all in my one -to -one. The only caveat on that is if you are an expert, so say a nutritionist for example, I'm just thinking about a client that I worked with recently, we actually didn't use a press release for her but we did put together

expert bio which highlighted all of her credentials, all of the areas that she could talk about, her areas of expertise, the areas of expertise that kind of aligned with the kind of things that the media are writing about at the moment. So my general rule of thumb is yes you probably need a press release and especially if there's some new news you're launching something you've got something new to talk about but

If you don't need a press release, then you probably need some sort of expert bio. So I just want you to start thinking about putting one of those together, if not both. The next thing is to start thinking like a PR. Do your research, read the magazines, pick the free magazines up at stations, listen to the podcast, go to the events if you need to.

Stay in your own lane always, but sometimes it's helpful to have a little look at what your competitors are doing, where they've been featured. Find the media opportunities for you. Do that reading. I really think that if you can start thinking like a PR, if you can put your PR hat on and start looking for opportunities, you are going to find them more easily and you will know where to start. A key thing of this as well is I really recommend starting to build a kind of media list.

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So I do it in Excel probably because I'm old school but you could do, I know some of my members do their media lists and things like Notion, anywhere you find useful in the notes on your phone. But I find Excel really useful because I have a column for the journalist name, a column for where they, the title they write for or the titles that they write for, their email address which you can find by a bit of detective work or kind of come into the membership and I can help you out there.

Often they have them in their bios on Twitter, on social media, you can often Google them. A lot of the magazine houses online actually have them now as well. you can, email addresses are actually out there for you to find if you need to. I've got a few tips and tricks that I will let you in on as well as we kind of go through this.

But yeah, start your media list and also links to things that they've written before. I find that really useful so that when I start pitching to them, I can have a look at the things that I know that they've written about that are relevant to say my clients, for example. Start that list. It might be a list of podcasts. It might be a list of events that you want to be reaching out to to kind of speak at that kind of thing. It might be brands that you want to collaborate with.

start putting it all in one place so that you can then work through that and I find it really useful to write notes so I'll say I've pitched them on this date, I've sent them this press release etc etc. That will help you to again start thinking like the PR that I know you're going to be thinking like. And the last one is just fucking do it darling. I always think of my lovely friend Lorna Haywood who quoted

her lovely granny at an event years ago at one of her Pizz Up events, if you don't know Lorna go and find her on Instagram she's amazing and it's stuck with me ever since. A great place to start is with your network so who could you collaborate with, what could you do with them, who can you reach out to, you've just got to get on and take action thinking about it, overthinking about it, I know it's really easy for me to say this.

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but it is the way that you will get this moving forward. And I know it's nerve wracking, but you need to start getting comfortable with getting uncomfortable and stop holding yourself back. Because actually what's the worst that can happen? It's how I started my business. When I first launched the PR Set I reached out to friends and people in my work world, people that I knew I could collaborate with. And some of them said yes, and some of them said no, some of them didn't get back to me, but that was totally fine. It was a no, didn't, it really didn't matter. It didn't affect me.

A really useful exercise once you finish listening to this is to write down five people or five places, five publications, five podcasts or a mixture of them. Where do you want to get featured? Where can you get started? Write those down, write down how you could work with that person or that publication and then give yourself 20 minutes and go out and reach out to them. Send them a message. Send that person that message after you've listened to this saying

do you fancy doing an Insta live next week? Or could I write some tips for you for your website? Or should we have a coffee and chat about ways we can work together? Use this as the push you need to get started. Okay, so there we have it. The key things to do before you start your PR. Make sure your backend is ready. Get your imagery prepped. Know your target audience and your business objectives. Get in the right mindset. Do that work.

skill up where you need to, prepare your press release and or your bio, start building that media list and your roots for PR and just fuck it do it darling. And if you're inspired to get your PR started then come on into my DIY PR membership the PR set with the code POD50 that gets you 50 % off or get in touch with me to talk about my one -to -one accelerator if you want to put a rocket in your PR and a Pippa in your pocket.

if you want me to do it for you too I can do that so let's chat and please remember to rate and review this podcast it helps me to get found by others and follow the pod for future episodes too and come and find me on Instagram on LinkedIn if you want to anything PR it's what I'm here for my mission is to help you get started and to help you get those results because I know you can

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so I will see you again very soon for another episode of PR Made Simple. Bye!