Public Relations for Retailer - Part One

Solomon reviewing a press release

Solomon Daniels

Public Relations for Retail

Part 1

It’s time to use the tool that corporations use to build the ideal image for your business.

WORDS BY SOLOMON DANIELS

But now that we are living in the social media era, testimonials and reviews take second place in a lot of markets. There is a high level of trust here also, though not from one person, and not necessarily from anyone a potential customer knows. It’s a trust built from an aggregate of opinions: If that many people agree, they must be good! As a business owner, manager or marketer, how do you get customers to walk through your doors? Thousands of retailers agree the overwhelming answer is word of mouth. It will always be the No. 1 source because of the trust value: Of the three top ways to get customers, advertising is last on the list. We inherently distrust ads because we know from the get-go they have one purpose: to sell us something. The strategy of the advertiser is to expose the buyer to information enough times that they relent to considering the benefits for themselves.

PR Review

PR also differs from advertising. The most obvious difference is the disparity in trust level. More importantly, when you advertise, how you present products and the benefits you highlight means your message caters only to a specific customer group or demographic: budget-minded shoppers, soccer moms and dads, teens, busy commuters, audio enthusiasts, etc. With PR, you send your message to media sources that individually appeal to these different groups. Then they format your story to bring out the content benefits that appeal to their audiences. In effect, you get a potentially wider reach with a high trust factor. Public Relations is a $13.5 billion-dollar industry according to the latest figures. Just about every major corporation has one or more PR agencies on retainer to shape their messages within the media, and in turn, the public. What works for them can work for us. PR doesn’t replace marketing; it works in conjunction with word of mouth, reviews and advertising. Implemented correctly, PR will help to increase the awareness of your store’s brand, products and capabilities within your market.

The Press Release: Your Tool to Talk to the Media

When we want to submit our news to the media for consideration, we do it in the form of a press release. It’s basically your story in written form with all of the information necessary to get a media outlet interested. But there is a format to it. Here are my must-have components in all of the press releases I produce.

Engaging Headline.

This is probably the most important part of your press release, because it’s essentially the first impression. Media professionals read your headline to determine if your story is newsworthy or not. So while it should be accurate and not misleading (“Thousands Show Up for Sale” when it was more like 200), it should also grab a reader’s interest. Consider these two headlines when describing a prize giveaway during a weekend sale:

• Joe’s Car Audio Gives Away $2,000 Grand Prize at Yearly Tent Event

• Mom of 3 Goes In for a Stereo, Comes Out With Oversized $2,000 Check

Which would catch your attention? You get the point.

Informative first paragraph. Once you’ve caught their attention with the headline, your first few lines of copy had better deliver the goods. The first paragraph of a press release should contain a synopsis of your story and answer the five important questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? In the case of Sound FX’s new website, the Who is the store, the What is a new website with 70 pages and 1,500 images, the When is today and the Where is at www.sound-fx.net. The Why ties in directly with owner Brian Layton’s mission—and headline—to create a more informed customer.

Additional detail.

This section gives you a bit more freedom, but not too much. Within two to three paragraphs, you’ll provide background information that sets the stage for the news or event. For the Grand Prize example, you’d mention it’s a yearly event that attracts more than 500 customers each day and features a car show. You would provide some information on the winner (with permission, of course) as it relates to her visit or the grand prize. Here’s the important point: You want to write as if the reader has no clue about car audio or your business. (We are often so subjectively involved in our industry that we forget not everyone understands what we do.) That means you say “carmaker” instead of “OEM,” and “SEMA” is “the Specialty Equipment Market Association show (SEMA), which caters to professionals in the automotive aftermarket industry.” Also, don’t be too technical in product descriptions. Instead, try to describe features based on their benefit to the consumer. The term “50Wx4” becomes “enough power to make your existing speakers sound fuller,” while “5V pre-outs” turns into “connections that let you expand your system by adding amplifiers for an even better-sounding experience.”

A quote.

In every press release I write for clients, I always include a quote from someone. I have two reasons. First, it adds a personal aspect to your news. People want to know why something was done or how it’s impacted someone personally. If a new person is hired, the store owner is excited to bring the person on, or the person is looking forward to becoming an effective part of a team. A new product line stems from the store owner wanting to meet the needs of customers who asked for certain features within their budget.

Second, it gives you the opportunity to provide an opinion. Press releases are based on facts, but your opinion is your own. For instance, you can’t claim you are the No. 1 remote start supplier in the three-city area unless it’s actually verified. But you can say that “with our service-first sales team and skilled, knowledgeable technicians, we feel we are the best place to help you select and install your remote starter.”

An image ... at least one.

One of my biggest pet peeves when receiving press releases submitted to the magazine is getting a release with no image. The web is a visual domain. People expect to see pictures along with content. If I’m getting 25 press release

per day among 100 email messages per day, I’m going to go with what is easiest to save time. And ‘easy’ means it has everything to give me the option of posting it online or including in my print publication. If it’s missing something, it goes to the back of the pile in the hopes I get to it later.

As a general rule, you should supply a high-resolution JPEG that is at least 1,500 pixels wide. Print resolution is 300 pixels per inch, which results in a 5-inch-wide picture (1,500/300). If you are not familiar with how to resize images, here’s the main thing to remember: Always resize down, NEVER resize up. You will retain detail if you make a 4,000-pixel-wide image into 1,500 pixels, but a small picture doesn’t magically gain detail if you make it bigger. What happens is the pixels become farther apart as you make the picture bigger, and the program you use tries to fill in the gaps by adding pixels and guessing what colors they should be. The result is a fuzzy image.

Here are some final tips on creating your press release: No typos. No one is perfect. I have a lady in Temecula whom I’ve never met in person who proofreads my press releases. A second set of eyes is essential to catch misspellings and grammatical issues, or even provide an opinion on how something could be worded differently. Save and distribute your press release as a PDF. If you are sending your press release to a few media outlets, save as a PDF to protect against people changing it or misquoting you. If you’re sending to a larger group of media outlets, you should consider using an email marketing service provider such as MailChimp or Constant Contact. More on this later, as well as developing a media list and working with media professionals, in part two of this article!