Hype Yourself. Lucy Werner

lead

      Typically, short leads are your online publications. But again, even with them you want to be giving them a heads up of at least a week in advance. No good pitching someone your fantastic Valentine’s Day stunt on the day. And I think it’s always better to be safe than sorry. In my opinion, you can never be pitching your event, service or activity too early – someone can always say come back. But if you are too late, the opportunity is dead.

       EXAMPLE

       TIPS

      – Make sure you plan in advance where necessary (e.g., if you want to pitch to long-lead magazines or pitch to speak at a conference) to make sure the things that need a lot of consideration are included.

      – If thinking ahead for a full 12 months is too much, then start with monthly or quarterly content.

      – At the beginning of each month, I write a week-by-week plan to ensure I am keeping my strategy on track.

      – Sit and review your calendar at least monthly to make sure you are on track – schedule a monthly communications planning meeting with yourself/your key stakeholders and cross-reference against your objectives to make sure you are staying on brand.

1.7 Crisis Q&A

      When you put your business out there, it doesn’t matter how big the spotlight is. There are going to be people who like you and some who do not. With the age of social media, people can even share their disdain for you in a very public forum and the trick with this is not to react emotionally.

      Your current customers are your most valuable asset and you should spend just as much time serving them, if not more so, than trying to acquire the next customer. So being prepared is important. With this in mind, it is a good idea to prepare some crisis communication materials in advance.

       ACTIVITY

      Particularly for customer-centric businesses, I would highly recommend creating a crisis Q&A crib sheet. This does not have to be a huge document but think about the sort of criticism you might face; e.g.,

      – Your product was lost in the post.

      – It didn’t look like what was advertised.

      – Somebody felt like they received bad service from you.

      In the heat of the moment, the worst thing that you can do is to ostrich. With a crisis document in place, whilst you don’t want to give robotic responses, you have a framework to base your answers.

       TIPS

      – Whilst almost everything I have suggested in this book is for you to hype yourself for free, booking some one-to-one coaching or seeking some training in crisis response could be beneficial to pre-empt any disasters.

      – Don’t just ignore customers’ or journalists’ requests for a response.

      – Update your social media as soon as information is available.

       Chapter summary

      So, if you have completed all the above tasks can you clearly tick off the items below?

      – Do you have defined business objectives that you are happy with?

      – Are you clear on your communications objectives?

      – Have you mapped out your audience?

      – Do you know everything about your audience and what they are consuming?

      – Have you cross-referenced your USP against your competitors’ to make sure that the language is not the same, and that it can only apply to you?

      – Have you created an annual communications calendar with your key dates for the year for activation?

      – Have you ensured you have a framework in place for customer complaints?

      You may now be wondering why you have already got this far and worked this hard and I’ve not even told you how to do any actual PR yet. By looking at the checklist above, I hope you now have a well-thought-through blueprint with clearer directions for where your business is heading. The work in this chapter is essential for you to have strong foundations to execute your communications strategically.

      And don’t hate me, but you still have got to get through another quarter of the book doing work on yourself before I’ll let you out the gate. But it will be worth it, I promise. Once you start thinking about your business in this way you will start to spot opportunities for yourself out there. Let me know how you are getting on via social media and get rolling your sleeves up for Chapter 2. Because if you want to hype yourself faster, we’ve got work to do.

      CHAPTER 2

       MASTER YOUR MEDIA TOOLKIT

      This chapter is a media toolkit guide 101. It’s everything you need before you speak to media, event organisers, brand partners, sponsorship or collaborators. I want to get you thinking about all the essentials you need for pitching. If you need help driving awareness, sales or want to start building your credibility as an industry expert then this chapter is essential for you.

      Whether you use OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive or your desktop (but please don’t do that!), you should have a folder called press or media toolkit where you save all the documents that you need for your press and marketing purposes and you should update them regularly. When these documents are requested, to make the journalist’s job easier and to increase your chances of coverage, you need to be able to access these easily.

      So, this chapter will walk you through all the elements I recommend you have before your hype machine starts, including:

      – One-liner

      – Boiler plates

      – Images

      – Biographies

      – Thought topics

      – Feature topics

      – Press release.

      And yes, I put the press release last because it serves as a useful reminder that the press release is not the most essential part of your media toolkit.

2.1 One-liner

      This is where the work you have done on yourself in Chapter 1 is going to come into play. For book research, I’ve gone to a big bunch of networking events, panel talks and listened to a lot of podcasts. I tell you who I remember – the people who tell me what they do clearly and concisely.

      If someone can’t summarise what they do, I often only remember them by thinking, Gosh – you were boring. Nailing your summary sentence is a key skill and it should roll off the tongue. Just like you know the hospital you were born in, your date of birth and your mother’s maiden name, you need to be able to reel off what your business does with confidence in a pithy way.

       ACTIVITY

      – Think about how you would chat to a friend; how do you describe what your business does in one sentence?

      – If you are struggling, write down a paragraph to explain what your business does but then draft – chop out all unnecessary words by bringing out that red pen again.

      – Does it leave room for people to ask questions (but it’s not a necessity)?

       EXAMPLE