Before you can really think about writing a story about your fab product or service and pitching it to media outlets to get lots of yummy free editorial – you need to get in the minds and lives of your target audience. Once you know who you’re talking to and how to talk to them, I promise, getting oodles of editorial will be easy.
Target Audience – who are they?
- Who is your target market? Define them by demographic, geography and industry.
- What do they like to do in their spare time, where do they hang out most?
- Where do they go out for dinner/drinks/ lunch/entertainment/nights out?
- What are their hobbies?
- Do they have a family?
- Are they married, single, divorced, kids?
- What books, magazines, stories, newspapers are they reading the most?
- How are they consuming their media?
- What don’t they like?
- What do they associate with most, what makes them happy, sad, excited?
- When do they watch TV? What do they watch on TV?
- What do they do for a living?
- What blogs do they read?
The more you know about your target audience the better you’re able to communicate with them.
Your target audience is essentially your customer. With small business, you usually start the business because of a need, experience, or situation you’ve identified with. This means you’ll usually be your best example of your target audience.
Understanding how they consume their media; TV, INTERNET, RADIO and MAGAZINE, means you can target your stories to the right media outlets. No wasting time on telling stories to media that your target audience doesn’t find interesting.
Example: if your target audience is young fitness loving social media savvy types, who only read the Sunday papers, then you’ll want to get to know, inside out what newspapers run on Sundays and what types of stories they run and how you can then angle your business into a story of relevance to your audience.
Journalists – How to build the best relationships
Alongside understanding your customer, you need to become experts on knowing the media. Pulling together a media list of journalist that covers the stories most relevant to your business and your target audience is one of the most important things you can do for your PR efforts. Actually it’s probably the most important thing.
If you understand the intricacies of how the media works, you’ll have a lot more success in getting your stories covered.
Important things to know:
- Which journalists cover the topics/segments most relevant to your product/service?
- What is the publication/TV station best known for covering?
- What segments make up that show?
- How do they like to be contacted?
- When are their deadlines?
How do you do this?
- Read and watch everything your target audience would consume on a day to day basis. Become an expert in media consumption.
- Watch a different morning show every day, listen to a different radio stations at different times of the day, read a wide and varied selection of magazines, newspapers and other publications. This also helps you become familiar with the journalists that cover these stories.
First work out who your target audience is and where they go for news. Then research each target publication to understand what kinds of stories they cover and then find an angle that fits in with each publications specific interests.
Keep your eyes out for stories that are trending:
- hot topics that have taken the media stage that day/week/month
- celebs that are in, celebs that are out
- special holidays or days that you can also hang your story angle on
All of this helps to keep your stories topical, relevant and interesting to the journalist who you’ll pitch too.
Top 3 Take Outs
- Get to know who your customers are inside and out
- Consume as much media as possible all the time
- Get to know the journalists who are most important to you and your story
Stay tuned for my next blog about how to write a press release.
PR 101 Course
Discover the power of PR for small business and how you too can make your products, services and events irresistible to the media.
Even if you don’t understand the first thing about Public Relations, the PR 101 course will get you armed and ready to take 2014 by storm!
This course consists of 3 parts:
Part 1: PR Tool Kit Webinar – a live, one hour online presentation where I will show you how to create a PR Tool Kit for your business. We look at what it is to be newsworthy so that your business has exactly what the media is looking for.
Part 2: Live Q&A – we stay on the line for a live Q&A session – I answer all the juicy PR questions you can throw at me!
Part 3: One on One Strategy with Belle – A 60 minute one on one session where we will work together on refining a PR strategy that is perfect for you and your business.