IN-HOUSE PUBLIC RELATIONS

IN-HOUSE PUBLIC Create a conversation around your distillery

RELATIONS WRITTEN BY DEVON TREVATHAN

Public Relations, or PR, efforts could be described with some accuracy as an octopus: one entity with many different arms, all working in tandem to create a conversation around your distillery. If you are running your own PR, it’s unlikely that you will be able to see satisfying returns from just one of the many tools in the toolbox. Instead, you will have to maintain several different continuous endeavors. Among them are content marketing, outreach, and social media marketing.

CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing encompasses multiple formats of company-generated content that adds context to the product or service you offer. Blogging is a big aspect in content marketing and can be a successful tool. With minimal startup costs and resources, blogging is one of the most accessible tools to young businesses, though it is important to try to post regularly. The actual content of the blog posts should and will change as you explore different ideas. What’s key is to remember that the blog acts as an opportunity to showcase your expertise in your field. You have inherent and potentially untapped value that you can offer consumers through the knowledge that you’ve gained about distilling, spirits production, and cocktails. To succeed, you should think of your content as an effort to create and communicate that value to your customers through multiple channels and in different, fresh formats consistently over time. Sounds easy, huh?

Yet it’s not as bad as it appears, or at least it’s more manageable that you might guess. First and foremost, don’t feel as though you need to immediately be posting on the blog twice a day every day. It’s unsustainable, especially at first as you get your bearings, and not likely to make the best impression on your audience. Focus instead on creating quality content rather than an enormous quantity. In the beginning, set an achievable goal — perhaps two blog posts a month, each totaling at least 1,200 words.

The content of these posts should be related to the aspect of your business that makes you unique, usually referred to as your “unique selling proposition” (USP). This can act as a great guide for the body of your posts, so if you have not developed and written down your USP then it’s recommended that you do so. Your USP is elemental to setting your business apart from the competition, and as such it plays to your strengths and is based on what about your products make them uniquely valuable to consumers. That same element should be featured repeatedly throughout your blog posts in a variety of formats, including articles, listicles, PowerPoint presentations, videos, and more. The format of these posts should be changing and evolving, and you need to track the response to understand what delivery options work best for your audience. Be sure to cross-post the content on your blog to different social media platforms to maximize the impressions that you can make. The key to what you create, regardless of the specific format, is to offer episodic content, or content that is delivered in digestible amounts over regular intervals. This approach encourages website visitors to return to your site regularly to check what’s new for your page.

Search engine optimization (SEO) elements such as word length, word choice, and backlinking will become important in time but don’t need to be top of mind right away. SEO can be an area of growth and focus as you continue to build out your online presence and the content offered on your website. Be sure to take time to research the basics of SEO before you start to apply it; the best approach when dealing with a website is a proactive one.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media has become an integral part of PR and marketing for nearly all small businesses. Its influence is impossible to ignore, and yet many entrepreneurs don’t feel as though they’re scoring a slam dunk consistently with their social media. Just like in distillation, there are ways to maximize the output that you get from resources that you’ve invested into this exercise. First would be to truly familiarize yourself with what different social media platforms are for and what kind of content excels on each. In this same vein, you shouldn’t feel as though your company needs to be committing the same amount of effort on every different platform; pick the one that best suits your selling point and invest more into that. Each platform that you choose to use can focus on certain aspects of your messaging. Don’t feel as though you have to do everything — do less but make sure that what you are doing is the best quality that you can offer. This is the time to brush off that buyer persona that you likely created early in the lifespan of your company and cross reference it with social media demographics to narrow down what channels will suit you best.

PINTEREST TWITTER FACEBOOK INSTAGRAM LINKEDIN

All about discovery Micro blogging social site limits each post to 280 characters Social sharing site with 1+ billion users worldwide

Social sharing site revolving around pictures and videos (up to 1 min especially) Business oriented

Largest opportunities: décor, crafts or DIY, cooking/recipes, health, fashion

User demos – 14.8% male, 77.1% female, 8.4% unspecified

440 million monthly active users Largest penetration in the US, can be one of the more time-consuming to gain traction

6,000 tweets sent per second

206 million daily active users Largest opportunities to communicate with consumers in a non-obtrusive way

1 million links shared by users every 20 minutes

Largest demographic of users between 25-35 years old Participation using hashtags

Brands like Nat Geo (very focused on visual representation/ media) flourish

1 billion monthly active users Corporate brands giving potential and current associates a place to connect

310 million users

57% of users are men, 43% women

Defining your objectives with your social media will help narrow down the options to find which you should invest in more heavily. On top of that, being clear with what you want out of the efforts is going to help you narrow down the format and style of your content. Some common objectives used by companies on social media include: • Improve and make more accessible their customer service by creating and investing in another channel through which customers can reach out with questions, concerns, or complaints; • Identify new leads or prospects similar to existing customers, possibly through clubs or online communities; • Generally gain exposure and increase brand awareness; • Discover and gain insight into the needs, wants, habits, and preferences of your customers and target audience; • Boost sales overall by increasing traffic to your site.

OUTREACH

An essential aspect of PR, reaching out to publications and journalists, is perhaps what people think of most concisely when considering this topic. While intuitively most business owners will know this is something they have to do, they might be concerned about exactly how they should go about it. Five essential rules to keep in mind are: 1. Research your target publications – Make sure that the publications you’re contacting are read by or appeal to the audience that you would consider your “target.” By doing so you are not only ensuring that the effort you put in to make contact doesn’t go to waste, you’re also offering the publication something exciting for their readers. 2. Discover your story – As makers of a product, you must realize the power and potential inherent in the story you’re trying to tell. The product might intrigue your consumer but the story behind it will keep them coming back.

3. Create a pitch or press release – Whether or not a pitch or press release is appropriate to send will depend on the circumstance, but you should have both at the ready for when you are contacting journalists and publications. A press release is a better tool when you’re announcing some kind of change or update, such as a new product release, and a pitch is best deployed when you initially make contact with a journalist. 4. Connect with the journalist – Just as important to making contact with a journalist is attempting to connect with them. With social media and the online presence most journalists have now, you can easily interact with them well before you approach them with a pitch. Doing so is easy and fosters a relationship before you make a request. 5. Leverage – Once you’ve received coverage from a journalist, do not be shy with it. Post that to your website, all your social media accounts, and include it in your newsletter if you have one. It might be wise, as well, to add icons to your website such as “as seen on.”

Courting social media accounts or influencers follows some of the same basic principles listed above, though in this instance there’s even more reason to interact with them regularly before you make a request of them. Influencer marketing has become extremely popular the last few years, but the approach you take should be tailored to it specifically.

The easiest way to leverage the networks created and sustained by influencers is to pay them directly for posts. The next logical question, however, is how much you should pay for said post. It’s hard to understand exactly how much each post is worth and, more importantly, there’s a chance that an influencer might expect you to quote them an amount first. To get a better sense, consider the following:

TYPE OF INFLUENCER RATE

Micro (10,000-100,000 followers) $100-500 per post

Mid (100,000-500,000 followers) $500-5,000 per post

Macro (500,000-1,000,000 followers) $5,000-10,000 per post

Mega (>1,000,000 followers) $10,000+ per post

This is a baseline, and there’s a good chance that influencers you would want to interact with won’t fall strictly in these boxes. Be sure to get metrics from the influencer that you hope to work with and do some calculations to see what price is worth it. If a person has 500k followers and is promising you $5,000 in sales, then you likely would be comfortable spending $800-$1,000 for their services.

There are also different ways to compensate influencers for their work beyond simple cash. You can set up a commission system so that both you and the influencer will have a reason to work as hard as possible on the post or series. A portion of any sale that has been generated by the person you’ve arranged to work with will be returned to them as payment for their time.

One strategy to use when approaching influencers is to create an arrangement that guarantees you a minimum of 5–7 posts. It’s very hard to make a lasting impression on an audience with just one picture or post, so creating a series spread out over a couple of weeks would vastly improve your chances of seeing a return on your investment. If you do so, try and leverage the more consistent work to bring the price per post down to a place that you are more comfortable with.

The best approach when it comes to PR is to just do it. Rarely will you feel as though you are always conducting your PR outreach perfectly, but that’s not your job, and most people will understand that. Don’t allow other moneyed brands to muscle you out of your earned media — go forth and get your story out there.

Devon Trevathan is the co-founder of Liba Spirits, a nomadic distilling company that focuses on capturing a sense of place in every bottle. She also continues to write about spirits and cocktails, including the science behind distillation and the history of drinks culture. Devon travels constantly these days; if she's not working, she's probably exploring her surroundings in the best way she knows how—her mouth (AKA through food and beverage). You can find her online @devontrevathan or @libaspirits across all platforms.