How to get PR for your handmade business and get your products in magazines
Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript
Hiya, how are you? I hope you're having a lovely week, whatever you're up to. I am still currently in Spain, absolutely loving it, I'm loving the weather, obviously it's still a bit cold and rainy back in the UK. So, yeah, it's just been amazing.
I'm in a little place, I think it's actually a city, but it's kind of more like a large town in many ways. On the coast, it's southwest of Valencia and it's called Denia and I just absolutely love it. It's still got quite a lot of the traditional Spanish feel, but then also it's got a really quite swanky harbour and it's got a couple of lovely beaches and lots of streets to explore and a really nice castle, which I have been absolutely loving going to visit.
I've actually got into quite a nice little routine on some of my days. I was popping up to the castle with my trusty notebook and making a few notes because I decided not to bring my laptop with me on this trip. I really needed some downtime, but I'm into my third week now and I'm here on my own.
So yeah, now that I feel like I've de-stressed a bit, the ideas and energy is beginning to flow again. So I got myself a notebook and I have been doing some writing. So yeah, some mornings I might sit and have a coffee and do a little bit of writing or I might go up to the castle.
As I said, it's only three euros to get in and it is just beautiful up there, really peaceful. You can find a nice sort of shady area and yeah, just do a bit of writing. Although I have to say, as I was walking back just now to my apartment, I had a slight minor panic because I suddenly realised that unlike when you're working on a laptop, if you're organised and sensible, you can quite easily back up what you've been writing by uploading it to something like Google Drive.
When you're working with pen and paper, you don't actually back any of it up! So I suddenly thought, what would happen if I left that pad somewhere, which is something that I could quite easily do. So I think I've decided what I'm going to do is just take like snaps on my camera of what I've been writing and my notes and ideas and upload those to my Google Drive so that at least I know that I've got a copy of them saved and backed up.
And I'm also going to do that with my videos as well because that's something that I always forget to do and I know that I should. So back up.
And if we haven't met yet, hello, I'm Rebecca from Rebecca Lucy.
I'm a jewellery designer maker and I specialise in silver clay. I teach workshops in person, at retreats and online. I also work with other makers to help you start a handmade business and elevate your current business with marketing or beautifully designed Squarespace websites.
How to get your products in magazines
So in this video, I wanted to talk about how you can get your beautiful handmade products featured in magazines. I've got my notebook here, so I probably will refer to it a couple of times just to make sure that I don't miss anything out. But I'm going to run through the process for you to hopefully demystify getting your own PR a little bit.
And this is something I do feel really passionately about because whilst you could outsource this and go to a PR agency, you don't need to, especially when you're first starting out. It's actually really relatively simple and easy to go about getting your own PR. And when I talk about getting your products into magazines through PR, what I'm not talking about is paid advertising.
And I'm not talking about advertorials as well. So that will be when you kind of have a, you've probably seen them in magazines, you get a bit of a write-up, but it's really obviously advertising a product. So we're not going to cover those because in all honest truth, I don't think they're worth the while.
Quite often you don't see the return on investment, especially kind of glossy magazines. They will charge, you know, hundreds to put your product or your business into a little tiny advert in the back. And quite often you won't see the return that you would have been hoping for.
Whereas with PR, the benefit of doing PR is it's absolutely 100% free.
So it's a really, really good way for you to get your products out there, to get them seen by more of your potential dream customers, and to also start building that kind of, you know, trust factor to start getting your brand known and to start getting your handmade products seen, and to start kind of people really getting a feel for what you're all about. So, yeah, it's a really great way for you to build credibility for your business.
Preparing for Publicity
So I am going to take you step by step through this process. The first thing I want to talk about is preparation. Preparation is key when you go about doing any kind of marketing, whether it be PR or whether it be advertising campaigns or running special offers or anything like that.
It's really vital. It sounds obvious, but it's a step that's quite easy to kind of overlook. But it's really vital that you get all the moving parts in place within your business before you start pitching to different magazines and newspapers.
So by preparation, what I mean is you want to make sure that you have all of your products finished and uploaded onto your online shop, that you have really good product descriptions that describe exactly what your ideal customer might want to know. You've got your terms and conditions ready. You've got your cart ready, and it actually does work.
So it's definitely worth doing a couple of orders yourself to make sure that the order process is all working. You need to make sure that you have your post, how you're going to post items, how much it's going to cost. You've got all your packaging sorted.
You've got all your inventory sorted on your website as well. And another step that's really, really vital is ensuring that you have some great product photos. These are both for your website so that when people land on your website, they can see exactly what you're offering and how beautiful it is, but also for you to send into the magazines for them to use.
So I have got another blog post covers this topic. But yeah, product photography is really, really vital, especially when you're working with magazines because they're going to want really high-end, decent photographs of your products. You could potentially think about sending them a product for them to photograph themselves, but in all honest truth, you don't need to do that.
And it means that you probably wouldn't get that product back. Whereas if you've invested in some great product photography yourself, it means you've got those photos to use in many different places. You can use them across your own social media, across your own website.
You can use them in other magazines as well. And what this does is it really makes the process a lot easier for the magazine editors as well. And ultimately that's what you're trying to do as a business owner.
You're trying to make it as easy as possible for those magazines to include your products within their issues. So the other thing with product photos in magazines is they need to be high resolution, which ensures that they can be reproduced properly in the print format. So by high resolution, that means they need to be 300 dpi.
It sounds very technical, but actually if you're taking photos on your phone, camera phone yourself, then most camera phones now have the ability to take high resolution photos. You just need to go into the settings and have a look. And obviously if you're working with a professional photographer, then they should be producing high resolution photos for you.
Quite often professional photographers, if you ask them, will produce two different sets of photographs, exactly the same images, but one of them is high resolution and the other one is a lower resolution, which are better for you to use on your website because it means they're not such huge, large images. So they won't slow down the speed of your website when your pages with your images are loading. So yes, I've gone off on a little tangent there with website images, but I do have more information I can share with you on that as well.
2. The types of story magazine are interested in
So let me know if that's something you want to hear about. So what do the magazines want from you? There's two different types of PR that you could go for with your product. The first one is kind of just a simple product shot, which would be included in a spread, which I'm sure you would have seen in magazines of sometimes it's what's hot right now.
Quite often it can be linked to different times of year. So like an August edit, summer edit, winter edit, Christmas gift ideas, that kind of thing. And this would involve a shot of your product.
Quite often they want to have your product just on a plain white background. So it's just really simple. It's your product with a small blurb and then a link to your website and the price, obviously.
And you'd be in with a bunch of other products, which normally are tied around some specific theme. The second type, which is really, really good, and I would definitely encourage you to go for this if you can, is a feature, which is a longer article, which is quite often in the form of a kind of behind the scenes, meet the maker style piece. And this is really great because it showcases you as a designer maker.
It will often delve into a little bit of your story, how you started your business, the kind of thing that you like to include, kind of themes around your products.
And it's a really nice way to kind of, for people to get to know and feel connected to your business. And that's one of the key things with something like PR, or in fact, any of our marketing, where people really want to, well, we're all a bit nosy, let's face it.
And they connect with people. People often connect with people, unless you're a huge, great big brand, but we're not. We're small artisan, handmade business owners.
And so your story is something that people are going to find really fascinating. And you might be thinking, my story is not interesting to anyone, but actually, don't do yourself a disservice. It is really interesting.
People just find it fascinating to hear about how someone has followed their dreams and set up a handmade business and all the steps you've gone through and what's your inspiration. So that kind of piece is a really, really great way to get your business seen by more people. Quite often with this type of piece, because it's a much longer write-up, they might actually do an interview with you, either over the phone or send somebody to your studio or your house and do it face to face.
And they may send out a photographer as well to get some kind of shots of you at work doing what you do, making your jewellery, making your craft, making your pottery, to kind of go alongside the product shots with this. If you've got those shots already, you could tell them when you contact them that you've got those shots. But quite often, they'll have their own specific style and they'll have photographers that they work with.
So they might want to send someone out to get photographs for the piece. And this is just a really brilliant way that you can showcase your business. And once you've got that publicity, it works in two ways, because firstly, you get in front of their audience, you get to widen your audience.
But secondly, you can share the piece with your audience as well. So as I said, it adds to that credibility, gives you more content to share on your website and your blog and your newsletter and your social media. So yeah, it's really great.
I would definitely recommend giving that a shot.
3. How to get PR - the process
So what is the process for going about getting the PR? Now, I really want to demystify this for you. There's no kind of, you know, secret magic process.
You don't need to have a little black book of contacts or anything like that. I mean, I have actually worked in PR, but quite often, in a way, although PRs are good at acting as a go-between, the editors and the journalists would far rather work directly with the person that they're trying to interview or get the story from. So you're in a really good position to kind of do that yourself.
So the first thing you want to do is think about where you would like to get featured. Have a think about the type of products that you have and what magazines your ideal customers are likely to be reading, because obviously, you want to get your products in front of more of your dream customers. It also gives you a much higher chance of being featured.
So once you've decided where you want to get yourself featured, go out and buy a couple of issues. You can normally get back issues from their website or online as well. And have a flick through, have a read of them, make a note of all the different sections and have a think about where your story could feature or what kind of, you know, where they like to include products.
And make note of the different journalists and the editors who write for each of those specific sections that you think you would be a really good fit for. So then you just need to reach out to that editor via email. You can quite often find their contact details in the front of the publication, or if not, you can find them on the website, quite often on their website.
So if you scroll right down to the bottom, it will have a list of contacts. Failing that, you might need to give their advertising department a ring and ask if they could pass you the editor's details. But normally, you would be able to find the editor's details quite easily.
So yeah, as I said, you just really want to make their life as easy as possible. So in your email, you want to be including information about your products, information about your story. You could even include a link to downloadable high-resolution product photos as well.
So it just makes the life of the journalist or the editor as easy and simple as possible. They're going to love you if you do that. They're going to think you're an absolute dream to work with.
And the benefit of that is that they're more likely to remember you, so that if they have some other opportunity in the future, they would call on you again, which is what you always want to happen if possible. You want to be so well-known that the editors are contacting you and not vice versa. And don't worry if you don't get featured straight away.
That does sometimes happen, but you just want to be as helpful as you can. Ask for feedback. Ask them if there's anything else you can do to help.
Ask them if they've got anything coming up. Just make yourself available to them as much as possible. And just remember that you're doing them a favor as much as they're doing you a favor, because the way that magazines and newspapers work, things turn around so quickly that they want to have these fresh new products and these fresh new stories that they can feature.
So if you've got something that's ready packaged up and easy for them to just roll out, then you are doing them a huge favor. So one question I do quite often get asked is, do I need a press release? And the short answer is, not really. Slightly longer answer is, press releases do have their place.
Quite often they're used when you've got a big mass news story that needs to be distributed far and wide. You could, if you were pitching your personal business story, lay that out in a press release format in order for them to kind of lift that and put it into their magazine. But really, I think the best thing for you to do is to send a really lovely personable pitch email.
You don't want anything that's too long rambling. You want to keep it short and succinct, but with all the key points. And you want to be building, think of it as building a relationship with the editor, not just pitching your story or pitching your products out there.
You're kind of, yeah, you're relationship building really. And hopefully if done well, you will build up this mutually beneficial relationship for you both. So I would absolutely love to know if you have found this useful, anything else you would like me to cover.
And if you've gone out there and got some PR for your small business, if you've got your products featured. So let me know if there's anything else I can help you with and have a lovely week!
