Please note this transcript is created by AI. - apologies for any mistakes

Pippa Goulden (00:44)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of PR Made Simple. So today I am talking very specifically about whether or not you should pay for press coverage. It's something that comes up more than I thought it would actually from my DIY PR members and when I do...

free training sessions, it's often a question that gets asked at the end of the Q &A. So I thought it would be useful to just dive into it today to answer those questions and give you my take on it. And my answer to the question is usually no. And then it kind of expands on it and it depends on what the opportunity is. So let's dive in. So the opportunity or the question that a lot of small business owners are asking specifically about.

is the approach from the classified teams from glossy magazines. It sounds fabulous, doesn't it? Because they found you and they get in touch and they think that your business is absolutely fantastic. And they think that you're really aligned with their readers. And they're basically trying to sell you the space in the back of the magazine called the classifieds. They're not hugely expensive, especially in relation to kind of advertising costs in other areas of the magazine. But

As a small business owner, it's still a chunk out of your marketing budget, but you're kind of flattered that they've approached you and you think it could be just a good way to get into that magazine. But I want you to take a step back. Firstly, those classified sections, buying space in anything is not PR. It's not press coverage. It's a glorified ad in the classified section of the magazine. You know those pages at the back, kind of after the articles.

where they have lots of adverts from different businesses

several pages and then there's an article usually on the back page. I just want you to think about it. Have you ever read that section of the magazine? No, me neither. It's the one that everyone skips past when they've read the travel pages or the recipes or whatever is the final section of the magazine and jumps to the back page, which often has a good interview on it.

Have you ever bought anything from those sections? No, me neither, because I haven't read it really. But also if you do have a look at them, the ads are usually quite small. They're often not a really great way to get across what you do. They might work in very niche titles. I've never worked with anyone who has said they have worked for them. I have worked with a lot of people who've said they've tried them and they haven't worked for them. So I'm happy to be proven wrong on them.

Get in touch with me directly if they have worked for you. But I've never spoken to anyone who has seen the direct benefit of taking out one of those ads and done so thinking it's press coverage. And often it's the reason why people come to me saying, we've tried PR, but it doesn't work for us. It's because you didn't actually try PR. You tried taking out an advert in a magazine and it didn't work for you because you haven't got all the layers there.

you're expecting one ad to work incredibly hard for you in a section of the magazine that people don't really read. Now for argument's sake, you could say that it does give you that as seen in, which is really powerful for your business. Being featured in magazines and being able to talk about it and use that from a credibility perspective is powerful in connecting you with your target audience. But I would argue that there are so many better ways to get those as seen ins.

And to me, feels a bit fraudulent as you obviously have been in the magazine, but only because you paid to be there. You're not getting the endorsement of the journalist. You're not getting the journalist saying, Hey, check out this business. We think they're brilliant or try this product. really works or listen to what this expert has to say because their opinion is really valid. They're not writing about you or your business. You wouldn't be able to kind of include a click through to an article or a magazine, for example, on your website because

there's nothing there. So they can't really work hard for you when it comes to the rest of your marketing as well. So in conclusion, I really don't think they are the best use of your budget, your time or your effort. I mean, you could basically get a whole year of PR support in the PR set for less than the cost of one of those ads and make sure that you appear in many more titles in the right places that you're getting talked about by the right people.

in front of the right audiences and that is going to do much more for you and your business than taking out a small ad in the back of a magazine.

Pippa Goulden (05:20)
So that covers the classified sections at the back, are usually say four, six, eight ads on one page, often themed around a specific topic like travel, or it might be specific Christmas products in a Christmas issue. And they're usually three, four, six pages, As well as the classifieds, you also have other opportunities to spend with magazines. You can take out an advert, which...

you would usually create that advert yourself or your design team would and it would be very much in style of your brand and communicating specifically what you want to communicate. The other option is called an advertorial and again that is a paid piece within the magazine

Pippa Goulden (06:02)
it looks more like an article than an advert so it's done in the house style of the magazine to look like an article that would be written so it flows through the magazine and you can't really tell the difference too much unless you look in more detail

Pippa Goulden (06:17)
but

it's done in the style of the magazine so it's written by their journalists it's done very much aligned with the rest of their pages in the magazine. You have

control over what is said but it would be written in the style of the magazine. Now unless you're a brand with a big budget I don't really recommend doing advertorials again. I have worked on lots of them for clients but it's usually as part of a wider campaign and it's done when they have budget that they're spending with the publications and it's tied into their advertising.

and it really makes sense from a strategic perspective. If you've got much smaller budgets, A, advertorials are really expensive and B, doing one advertorial isn't going to do a huge amount for you. There is also the question of whether the reader trusts them a bit less than the editorial that they read in the magazine because the advertorials have written on them somewhere, this is an advertising promotion and it's quite obvious usually.

that a brand has kind of taken over them. So again, advertorials for small businesses wouldn't necessarily be a route that I would recommend going down. There are more effective ways to spend your money. However, if you are a bigger brand and this is part of a wider integrated piece of your marketing where your PR is working really hard with your marketing, then they can be a really great way of getting across your key messages and...

making sure that your audience is seeing you across multiple touch points.

Pippa Goulden (07:55)
Now, I'm just gonna approach this from another angle because when I worked in agencies,

You know, we really told our clients that they didn't need to spend money if they were doing PR. And in many ways, I do believe that that is true. You know, if you are focused on your PR, I've built my whole business over the last four years, for example, without spending very much at all. I've started doing ads actually quite recently to complement what I do and to work with my PR, but I've never used paid for as a standalone kind of marketing tactic.

but that's the beauty of PR because it's actually free. You're not being paid to be interviewed on a podcast or written about editorially in a paper or magazine or you're not paying to stand on a stage and speak. In fact, sometimes you're often paid to stand on the stage yourself. Lots of people don't realize that PR is actually free because it's often associated with big agency fees. So I really want you to think about that in terms of PR should be free. It should be...

third party endorsement for your business, someone is talking about your business for free, you're not paying them to do so, otherwise that turns into kind of paid marketing and that's a kind of different, whole different kind of category. However, there is a caveat on this as always, because I used to edit a publication, I left the agency world, I wanted to change what I was doing and I had the opportunity to bring a magazine that a friend of a friend had...

launched up in the northwest and I bought it down to the southeast and I absolutely loved it and that's what actually sowed the seeds for this business because I saw how wrong lots of PRs who were being paid a lot of money got pitching to journalists. But working at that publication I also started seeing the value of paid activity but, and this is a big but, when it was done as a true partnership

So taking out a straight ad in a magazine or a paper or a Facebook ad, it's only gonna do so much for you. But because of the business model of the magazine, which is still going, it's amazing, it's parent folk, check it out if you are a brand targeting cool families, hip kids, it's absolutely amazing. And they do events and they have the online platform. So it allowed us.

and they still do and I still recommend them to the right clients to do brilliant partnerships with brands that give them multiple touch points. It's not just about the brand taking out an advert, it's about a partnership that works for both sides. So they do the magazine stuff, they get featured across online and socials and then they also have a present at the events too. So the magazine's audience, the parent folk audience,

have the opportunity to really get to know the brand and the business and see them across multiple times. It really works together because they're working really hard with the brand, with the brand that's taking out the kind of partnership. And that works really effectively. So now when I'm working with clients, you know, if it's a strategic part of the plan,

I don't say don't spend any budget, but I might say, look, if we're strategic about our spend with the right titles, and often they are niche, smaller titles or independent titles that actually have more flexibility, often they will give that importance of creating content that's totally relevant to their audience. So,

It's worth thinking about strategic spend that works hard for you. And that's the same for any partnership. I will do another episode on partnerships and making those work really hard for you. But I just wanted to flag that I am not anti spending money with titles. And actually I think if we want the magazine and the newspaper industry to continue and provide us with these incredible outlets that give us information and use and provide us with entertainment and

help us to find new and interesting things then we need to support them in various different ways and spending money is obviously a great way to do that but you are probably a small business owner with a very limited budget so you just want to think really strategically about how you use that budget. Another area that relates to spending and PR is affiliates. Now this is a bit of a grey area because it does really cross over PR and marketing and it does require budget.

We're seeing this more and more with online sites from big publishing houses, especially like Hearst and FutureNet and Condé Nast. So things like Condé Nast Traveler and Vogue and Red Online, Women's Health, that kind of thing. It used to be that there was an editorial team who would create the content and an advertising team who would sell the advertising space on the website. There's now a third department that works within those

organizations and they deal with the affiliate side of things. They're often called a commercial content editor or something similar and they focus on creating content where they can work with brands who have an affiliate offering so that the magazine house gets a kickback from any sale that's made from people clicking directly from the article that they've included the product in.

and it's an additional revenue stream for those magazine houses. And it's something we talk about a lot in my DIY PR membership and we've done sessions on because it's really important that brands are aware of it. And it's something that I do do with the right clients who have the right budgets. You need to be signed up for affiliate platforms. You need to be able to give a percentage of your sales back to...

the magazine or influencers use them a lot as well. But I just want to say for small businesses with no budget who aren't going to be able to do affiliates, don't panic. There are still lots and lots of opportunities for you online. You don't have to have an affiliate platform There are still places that they will cover you. My DIY PR members who don't do affiliates.

still getting coverage in the right places for their businesses. It's just worth thinking about and whilst we're having the conversation about whether or not you should be paying for press coverage I thought I would mention that and maybe we'll do a whole episode on affiliates and I'll get the right people in to talk about those. But hopefully that's cleared up whether you should pay for PR or not.

If you're paying for it, as I said, it's not technically PR, but strategic partnerships when they're done right can be brilliant and it's something that I can help you with. Classified sections are a no-no in my book. Spend that money on something else like the PR set instead. And if this has inspired you to get cracking and get yourself featured in places that will actually make a difference for your business and help you to build your brand, reach your target audience and grow your business, then you can find me

ThePRSet.com, I am Pippa the PR Set on Instagram, I'm Pippa Goulden on LinkedIn, and don't forget you can use the code POD50 to get 50 % off your first month in my DIY PR membership. I have my one-to-one accelerator as well. It's full at the time of recording, but I do have a couple of spaces open for the end of, mid to end of February. So get in touch if you want to chat about that.

and I will see you again next time for another episode of PR Made Simple.