If you’re a small to medium-sized business then chances are there isn’t room in your budget for a professional public relations service. Too many businesses make the mistake of forgetting PR altogether either because they haven’t the confidence to try it out for themselves or the time. Generating positive media coverage is essential to building a brand and thanks to the onslaught of social media networking it also doesn’t have to cost anything.

My advice to modern businesses is to ignore PR at your peril because if you’re not controlling the environment around you in regards to what message you want your potential customers to be receiving, then you can guarantee your competitors are. I mentioned social media briefly because of the range of opportunities it presents for business growth. However these are too vast to discuss in one article and for the moment I want to focus on one of the more traditional mediums – the local press – and how a small business without a public relations manager might seek to get positive coverage in their local rag.

Before the days of the internet, newsroom fax machines spilt out paper by the second as companies jostled to win their press release a coveted spot in the local news pages. With the advance of technology, such physical paper jams are a thing of the past but in their place have come flooded inboxes. News editors can now dismiss your press release at the click of a button which means you’ll need to pull out all the tricks of the trade to get yours read – let alone printed.

• Choose a good headline. News editors are busy people and might not even bother to open your email if you don’t flag it up appropriately. A headline needs to contain the most interesting aspect of your release and really sell it to the news editor.
• From the headline onwards, a press release should contain the most important and interesting information in chronological order. Your message needs to be delivered in the first paragraph so you can grab attention. Press releases which leave the ‘news’ until paragraph four will inevitably end up in the recycling bin.
• You don’t always have to have ‘news’ to send out a press release. PR experts make a lot of money spinning information which is already available within the business. Journalists love figures because they tell a story much more vividly than flowery language. Data is a great way of getting your business featured in your local newspaper, especially if you can identity a trend.
• Where possible, send a photograph with your press release. Column inches equals publicity and the bigger your article appears in the newspaper, the more attention it will receive.
• Include a quote from yourself or anyone within the business which can help colour the story. Quotes bring articles to life and will allow you to describe things more colloquially. But avoid waffle as releases which contain more than one or two pages will be an instant turn-off.
• Make sure you include your contact details. If a newspaper wants to turn the information in your release into a bigger story or feature, they’ll want to interview you and arrange their own photographs. So I hope these top simple tips will help so the next time your company has got something to shout about, it may well now get heard !!

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