More Holiday PR Pitch Tips

November 3, 2011 Leave a comment

For the past few blogs, I’ve been reviewing why and how to launch a PR campaign for the holiday season.  To quickly recap, the three primary reasons are:

1)      People are prepared to spend more money during this time of year.

2)      The media is more open to stories and pitches during the holiday season.

3)      You can more firmly establish your brand in the fourth quarter and carry that on into the New Year.

As I discussed earlier, whether you should launch a marketing and public relations campaign during the holiday season is not the question; the real questions are when will you launch and what will your primary focus be.  Remember your job when pitching stories to the media is to make the media’s job easier.  You want to give them stories that are interesting, entertaining, educational, intriguing and, during this time frame, pitches that tie into the spirit of the season.

That doesn’t mean all of our pitches have to be up, cheery and ho ho ho.  The holidays have different sides, if you can address helping runaways during the holidays, or holiday food drives for those who need a hand during the season, or dealing with holiday depression, those are not only important stories, but they make for compelling features for print and TV.  Regardless what your business or profession is, you can develop a holiday story idea to pitch.  Although I covered a few PR pitch ideas in my previous article, below are a few more to review.

Musician – Put on a free holiday concert that benefits a charity for the holidays.  Or let the media know that you can discuss which holiday songs are the most important.  Come up with a list of the most important holiday songs.  Make it controversial and fun.

Spa – Create unique holiday packages.  Come up with special holiday treatments to help reduce stress, or create holiday gift packages that are unique and original.

Jeweler – Create that perfect holiday gift.  Even if the design is overly expensive or just works for the holidays, come up with something different that makes for a good story.  The perfect luxurious holiday gift.

Attorney – Put together consultation packages that you can offer, or can be given as gifts for the New Year.  Then come up with the 7 most important year end tips everyone should know.

Nutritionist – Develop a list of perfect holiday recipes.  Make a list of holiday eating myths that you can debunk.  Develop a roadmap for how to eat right and have fun during the holidays.

Assisted Living or Long Term Health Care Center – Let the media come in and experience a holiday meal or sing along with the residents.  Invite a local grammar or mid school to have a group of kids come and sing holiday songs for the seniors.  Put on a seniors Winter Olympics.

Acupuncturist – Create packages and treatments for keeping healthy during the holidays.  Or develop an acupuncture facelift procedure.  Give the gift of youth for the holidays.

Although these ideas might not cover your business or profession, you get the point.  See how you can tie in what you do with the season and start developing pitches.  Get creative.  Have fun with it.  This is a time when purse strings are loosened and the media looks for stories, use both of those facts to your advantage.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2011

Filed under Beauty Industry PR, Entrepreneur PR, Marketing, Medical PR Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Traditional plus Social Media: The Beauty Biz Success Secret

June 24, 2011 Leave a comment

According to research conducted by The NPD Group, Inc., a leading market research company, in 2010, total  U.S. prestige beauty generated $8.4 billion, an increase of 4 percent in dollars, compared to $8.19 billion in 2009.

Beauty is a huge market and that figure does not take into consideration all brands and products.  The bottom line is that beauty sells.  As with fashion and entertainment a beauty-oriented company needs to develop a strong brand in order to be truly successful and nothing is more effective for creating a powerful brand and brand awareness than PR and media relations.   Through public relations your product or service is positioned as a news story, not as an ad or a commercial.  Through the media, you are also positioned as an expert in the field, as a beauty guru.  Soon the media starts coming to you to learn the latest beauty or skin care tips and secrets.  You help define beauty and style trends, while positioning both you and your company via the media.

You can then meld a blogging and social media campaign with your traditional media campaign.  For example, if you receive coverage in your local newspaper on your salon, or your new product line, you can take that article and link it on your blog as well as on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg and other social sites.  You have now turned a local article into a national article.  Or conversely, you can tape a very cool, interesting segment and post it on YouTube.  In the beauty world you can be a bit outrageous, so make it fun, make it interesting, give it attitude.  Now using your blog, Facebook, Twitter and other online venues, try and create a buzz around that video.  If you generate enough interest you can then pitch your YouTube phenomena to the mainstream media and garner media coverage in print and TV.  That’s not a slam dunk, and requires work and some creative thinking, but we’ve done it, so it is possible.

The key to a successful beauty PR campaign is to create a compelling story around your product or service.  Make it interesting, stylish, and compelling.  Always keep your target market in mind. Then study the media outlets that reach your target market.  Now develop a number of different stories to pitch to a variety of different media outlets.  Each media source has needs and interests that are specific to it.  The primary secret to launching an effective media relations campaign is to focus on what the various media outlets need, and pitch each outlet accordingly.  For example, beauty trade publications will be interested in a business angle, whereas your local media will respond to a pitch with a local slant and a national TV show is going to be more willing to run with a story that has a strong visual component.  Being in the beauty field offers you strong visuals, so be creative and use them.  Also remember that the ingredients, the look and the packaging itself can offer you a compelling story.  If you use eco-friendly packaging, or if your ingredients are non allergenic, or if you utilize customer recycling initiatives, these can all be angles you can pitch to the media.

More and more, savvy beauty-oriented companies are spending zero on traditional advertising and utilizing a creative mix of traditional public relations combined with a creative blogging and social media campaign to build their business, grow their brand and achieve success in the beauty biz.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2011

Filed under beauty, Beauty Industry PR, beauty products, Marketing, PR, traditional media, TV Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Using PR to Build a Beauty Business

December 14, 2010 2 Comments

Even in a down economy beauty sells.  The cosmetic industry was born in the Great Depression.  This is one industry where it pays to promote when things are good, but pays even more to market aggressively when times are tough.  As in the fields of entertainment and fashion, a strong public relations campaign is critical when it comes to establishing a beauty product or cosmetic brand.  It’s important to develop a basic game plan and work it on a weekly basis.

Initially, your most important job is to come up with compelling, interesting stories.  How is your product different?  Do any celebrities use your product?  How does it make your customers feel?  Is there an interesting story around how you developed and launched the company that you can use?  Come up with as many angles and pitches as you can.  Make sure to have good visuals both of the product and of people using your products.  Strong before and after photos are always a plus.  Once you have your stories ready to go, come up with a strong target media list.

When we launch a beauty-oriented PR campaign, we generally start with local print media, we then branch out to the national beauty and style-oriented publications followed by print publications in Los Angeles and New York.  From there we drill down to other regions.

As the brand builds and you are able to develop compelling, visual stories, you want  to start focusing on TV coverage from local NBC, CBS and ABC coverage to the cable networks such as CNN, MSNBC and Fox, to the national outlets such as the Today Show,  Good Morning America and the View.

As you start to land print coverage in magazines and newspapers, utilize that media online via social media and blogging to magnify that coverage and generate media interest and start establishing the brand.  Do some brainstorming and develop a social media strategy, to capitalize on your TV and print media coverage. Utilize social media as a tool to help maximize your overall marketing efforts.

It’s important to develop a steady build and to have the pieces in place to be able to capitalize on the media as it comes.  For example in the past when we’ve placed clients on Oprah, the Today Show, or the  NBC Evening News, we’ve worked with the client to make sure that they are ready to successfully utilize that type of exposure.  It’s possible to land major media coverage, before you’re ready.  The exposure can be too much too soon.  We had one client who was launching a product.  He didn’t explain how small his company was and encouraged me to pitch the national TV media.  We landed a prime spot on the national news and received half a million calls in a month.  The trouble was he was in no shape to answer or process all of those calls.  That’s an example of why it’s important to be realistic and launch a campaign that will offer you a slow, steady manageable build.

If you can hire a public relations firm, that’s your best choice, but if you’re not in a position to do so, don’t wait.  Launch a basic campaign on your own and bring in a PR company to help, once you’re in a position to do so.   If you develop a good marketing and PR strategy, it will pay off for you in a big way.  Not only will it sell products and grow your customer base, it will establish your products, build your brand and  grow your company.

Copyright © Anthony Mora 2010

Filed under beauty, Beauty Industry PR, cosmetics, skin care, style Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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