The press is a very powerful media. In terms of the business press, there exist around 400,000 news outlets in the UK. Most of these are offline in traditional paper format, many trade magazines now have an online resource of some kind. This presents a double benefit for businesses who create compelling content.
Every market sector generally has around four or five trade magazines. These are always good to consider as a first port of call, but don’t forget that your product might be targeted towards a different sector – you need to prioritise publications that your customers read, rather than your competitors.
Doing your research
There are many tools that you can invest in to examine the press within your chosen industry sectors. These tools are often subscription-based and can be quite cost-prohibitive to general businesses. They are only really used by PR firms. Google and other search engines are still a good starting for most businesses to find out which publications they should target.
Once you have drawn up a shortlist of publications, you should then visit their websites to download their media packs and forward features lists. Most publications make these available to download from their websites. This documentation will give you information on their readership demographics, advertising rates, and details of how to submit adverts. Often the forward features list will tell you their plans a year ahead – so a current forward features list would show you what is happening during 2015. For example, an engineering magazine may be running a feature on turned parts during March but focus on a different subject in April. This is useful for preparing your editorial copy.
Target your publications carefully
You should really plan your activities throughout the coming year as part of your press strategy. Once you have a plan of your chosen publications and monthly topics, make contact with the editor. Most emails will be ignored as they receive hundreds of emails every day from new people, so the best way to contact them is via a phone call. Tell them about the story that you are planning to write and get their initial feedback on whether the magazine would be interested. If the feeling is positive, go ahead and write your content.
Remember, having the initial upfront conversation with the editor will mean that they will be waiting for you to send the piece, making it more likely to be printed. Remember to ask the editor if there is something that they would like in the piece to make it more interesting for their readership. At GMA we have now reached the stage where editors are coming to us for editorial, rather than us begging them to use our copy. This is because we have become a trusted source now, and the vast majority of our copy goes in word for word without any editing – this makes the editor’s job much easier, as they are getting clean copy to fill pages.
Writing your copy
This is the tricky part for most businesses. As marketing professionals, GMA understand what editors will be looking for, whereas most business owners just want to talk about themselves and end up coming across like a big sales pitch. When you write your copy, put the shoe on the other foot, and think about what the readership would like to read rather than what you would like to say. For example, is anyone really interested that you have a new sales director, or that you have just moved premises, or that your turnover is 20% higher than last year? What people really want to read is newsworthy content. This could include interesting case studies – these have great benefits because you can interview the client as well as your own team and get a more balanced approach.
Advice pieces also go down well in print, especially when tailored to the readership’s environment. For example, you might want to give advice on organic SEO that many people might not know, or in the software sector you might want to talk about the benefits of cloud based software against server based software. Make sure the piece is advisory and newsworthy, but do make sure you get your business name in there.
A recent example of this whole process working successfully was an interview we carried out with a client of a client of ours. He was about to become the president of a large association within the engineering community, and we took the opportunity to create a piece with several angles:
(A) The company’s history and how they have grown
(B) How our client’s machines helped them to reach where they are now as the meat within the sandwich
(C) The owner’s integration and vision for the future of engineering as the president of one of the largest bodies within the community.
The whole piece oozed credibility and was balanced more towards the businessman that we interviewed rather than our client, but our client’s message still came across very clearly without it sounding like a sales pitch.
Because the editor understood the story – and our angle on it – beforehand, the piece went in without a single word changed and it was a page and a half of good editorial content. An advert of the same size would have cost about £8,000 whereas the editorial that we produced was basically free.
One final note
Don’t get the advertising department mixed up with the editorial department. They are completely different animals. Think about a publication – it begins life as blank pages which need to be filled with content. Some of that content is advert or advertorial, whilst the rest is editorial. The advertising team enable the magazine to survive by bringing in revenue, whereas the editorial team will ensure that the publication stays popular and continues to grow with readers, as it provides interesting and compelling content. As a general rule, GMA would recommend taking out an advert every now and then with your chosen publication(s) almost as a ‘thank you’ for constantly giving you good editorial, but ads can also reinforce your editorial message. Remember, they are a business so it will stand you in good stead to help them with their revenue once in a while.
For any advice on PR or dealing with the press please contact dean@gma.agency.
