The benefits of doing your own PR to promote your artisan business
Think of PR and a product placement in a magazine or a TV interview come to mind. These are the typical long-standing PR activities used to spotlight a product, service, business, cause or person by creating opportunities to be seen and build credibility in the eyes of the public. While that sounds straightforward enough, PR is often viewed as a gatekeepered activity that only well-connected professionals are qualified to do. That may have been the case in the past, but technology has challenged the status quo by diversifying promotional channels and providing tools that enable greater access to media contacts. As a result, doing your own PR to promote your artisan business has become easier.
What is PR?
PR, or Public Relations to give it its full title, is the act of sharing positive information about a business with the public to create a favourable impression. PR helps build a reputation by shaping how your audience views your business. PR also involves how you manage your information by controlling the messages you put out and where and how you do this.
Doing your own PR comes with several benefits:
1. It’s cost-effective
PR agencies can be expensive. If you are a small craft business with a modest promotional budget, hiring a PR agency can wipe out your funds before any meaningful return has been realised. As you begin to promote your craftwork by doing your own PR, you get to understand the nature of building media relationships. You also get valuable insights and advice on your messages, helping you to fine-tune them across all your marketing activities.
It makes sense to work with an agency when you are ready to take your business to the next level and have the funds to do so. This is something to consider when you want to focus on other areas of growing your craft business. At this stage, having navigated PR for yourself, you can confidently hand off the task while keeping an eye on things.
2. It’s easier to find contacts yourself
PR is all about connections and contacts with the people who can give you the right PR opportunities. When working with a PR agency, yes, you are paying for their expertise, but you are also paying for indirect access to their contact database. You don’t get direct access to the agency’s media contacts, which means you have no way of building a relationship with that specific contact who likes your work, unless they contact you themselves, which could put you in violation of your agency agreement. And, if you find yourself unable to continue with the agency, you lose access to their contacts.
The major advantage of doing your PR is that you get to build your own database and foster direct relationships with your PR contacts. Online access- digital and social platforms have made it easier than ever for you to find journalists and publication details. This works both ways, because sharing your work also helps journalists find and reach out to you. Offline has its advantages too, as networking brings people together, and printed publications often share journalists’ social handles.
Acknowledging that some media contacts can be elusive, again, when you are ready and can afford to do so, you can work with an agency with a much better understanding of what you need from their services.
3. You’re not restricted to a PR agency’s hierarchy
As a small business, you can get lost in a PR agency that has clients more established than you. This means they may not always give you their full attention. And, if the agency has similar businesses to yours on their books, you could be competing alongside them for a PR opportunity when your account manager selects who to put forward. An agency also gets to decide if it’s worth putting your product forward based on their opinions.
When you manage your PR, you get to control the products you want to promote and who to send the press releases and pitches about them to.
4. You know your business
If anything, one of the key benefits of doing your own PR is that no one knows your business better than you. You create the products or work closely with the people who do. You know the materials, processes, skills, heritage, history and stories that shape your artisan business. This makes you best placed to communicate all this with passion and purpose so that the media contact can truly understand the significance of the products you want them to feature.
Doing your own PR requires a plan. As with anything unfamiliar to you, you will need to learn the process. If PR is something you want to do yourself, take a look at my masterclass: Pitch to Press. It takes you through the exact step-by-step process on how to get media coverage for your artisan business if you want to do it yourself.
– Tapiwa Matsinde
[Image credits: The image shown belongs to alleksana, via Pexels. If downloaded and used elsewhere, please credit accordingly.]
