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Lesson Info

Techniques for Building Your Media List

So now you know a few things about what it is that people love about your product and were organists. We're coming back to it. But we're just gonna, like, move away from it because I think people want to say people love this about my products. So how do we pitch it right and get right there, but really want to pitch it with an awareness of what? The media? You're trying to pitch that specific media outlet. What does it look looking for? So right now, we're gonna look at what it's kind of techniques we have for building your media list before we get into it. I'd love to know if there's some specific media outlets that we already have ideas that we want to reach out to. So I when I love asking this question cause there's always a big you know, variants on whether people know. So does anybody have a specific media outlet that they know they want to reach out to? Um, all the big city box still seven. My seven bold italic as a gate, some disco magazine, all of awesome. And do you read those...

right now? E. I read a lot of the bloggers online. Definitely. Okay, Perfect. So you probably have a pretty good awareness of what that kind of they look like at this time. Great that it's such a great place to be in. You don't know what I had. Start. You have doing that anyone else this year. Eso like lifestyle magazines. So real simple and also a lot of lifestyle. Blog's so like, Oh, happy day And oh, joy and people who are Yeah, really creating beautiful things and putting them forward Teoh House makers, homemakers. There we go. Awesome. And are you reading the blocks that you want to be reaching out to in the magazines I'm starting to? Okay, OK, Perfect. I have an instagram feed of all kinds of fashion bloggers that I do want to definitely pitch eventually ask. So I read that and get all their feet high. Definitely a social media, everybody. But I'm not like I don't have them enough physical list yet. That's great. We're gonna talk that Bridget you had. I saw you have some time. I would love to be featured in the kitchen. Great, Great. I love that. I love that. That's apartment therapy's site so great. Yeah, it is very cool. So we have a lot of people here that no, actually who they want to be reaching out to, which is really cool, because I But I know that there's a lot of people at home who might be watching, saying like, I don't really know which means that Let's I want to do yet And you wouldn't believe how many people come to us and hire us and that's the position there and they know they want to get coverage. They know that it will help their business little position their product in front of more customers, but they don't know what kind of media they should be reaching out to. So we're gonna be looking at what are some of those opportunities to get press for your products and do that? We do want to take a quick pause on why you're doing your PR right. Why are you doing PR? So you know, we might well be doing PR because we want to be getting our work in front of our people. That's obviously like that's the most obvious right? I want to do PR. I want to sell more product. I want to get my work in front of more people. You also want to earn endorsements from the influences your customers trust. So remembering always to be looking at the media outlets from your customer's perspective, right? Not necessarily your perspective. You want to be driving potentially foot traffic to your physical location to your store, to your restaurant or online traffic to your online shop. Um, and you also want to be converting this intention of the sales. So you want to make sure, though always, that you're focusing your efforts on the media that your customer consume your customers are looking at. And this is so hard because we often want to look at industry right. We're so interested in our work and our designs in finding inspiration to do our work better, that sometimes we might forget that we really should be looking where our customers are so always remembering to, you know, put on their shoes that feel like you're taking a walk through their day to find product will give you so much better results. Been talking of your peers who might not necessarily be buyers on. I see this issue a lot with creative entrepreneurs who might be reading a lot of sites that offer tutorials or techniques that help them build their businesses. And just no, not all of your customers are looking to build businesses. They might be working in offices. They might not be working at all. You know, eso they might be students. So just remembering to think about first where they're going for their media as you're looking at opportunities will help you so much. So we're gonna go through some exercises three exercises to build your customer focus media list. So what I'd like you to dio is actually bring your favorite customer of mine. Bring somebody, if you haven't, you know, worked with her directly. But if you have, if you've seen a picture of her online, bring her face or his face into your minds. Think about what is this person doing? What does this person do when they get up in the morning? What's on their to do list? Where do they go? What are they worried about? What are they avoiding? So your customers stops at a grocery store, so they're standing in line with her sister, so there's a bunch of magazines there. So what headlines Air catching our customers eyes? What magazines might might your customer decide on a whim to pitch? You know, thrown of this shopping hurt, right? Some of those down Now your customers of the doctors office maybe is there for himself. Maybe Is there first kid? And there's a ton of magazines in the waiting room. You know, there's always a ton of magazines and they're not doctor magazines, By the way, right? Doctors don't put out magazines about medicine, their customer focused dio. So you want to be doing what your doctors are doing, right? You want to be thinking about what would your customer pick up not what would you pick off? Not what you would pick up. What would your customer pick up or are there in their phone? Are they on the, you know, reading a reader or looking at some sort of feed? What are they looking at there, your customers shopping? Now they're They have this urgent need there in a crisis. They need something for like tomorrow. You know, maybe you can't ship overnight. That's OK, it's urgent. So what is your customer looking for? And think about what were they type into Google? What are those? Search terms. So that's really our first technique, actually, is that what we like to do first is actually simulate what those search terms are. I think this could be a really fun exercise to do and could be really illuminating. And it is so dead simple that most people don't believe me that it works so well. So the first thing you want to do is you actually want to go to Google, turn on, like incognito browsing or private browsing. What that does is right now, if you use a Google search and you have any sort of Google account, it will pull things within your own community. It uses your data to customize your results. We don't want that because we're not talking to your peers were talking your customers. So you want to do private Barrows ing Incan Nino browsing and search So watching right now, you can actually do this right now so you can put in something like I did on personalized gifts. You know, I was thinking about Testa's coasters, actually, like what would be a personally is get what was somebody searched For now, this could be a little tricky, right? Because when you start something like personally as gifts, you see there's a lot of results here that aren't actually relevant. You have personalization mall dot com WalMart New York Times But they're store the sun. Helpful things remembered. So sometimes when you do that, I know this is a problem that a lot of makers have where you put something into Google and you're trying to do this work. And have you tried this? If you have this experience and then you get a bunch of junk Yeah, I thought so. So the next thing I did here, then it's winter Pinterest. I love Pinterest and I typed in personally as gifts again. When Here. You actually are getting some media results because these are things that people, when they're trying to sell the need, are saving for themselves. So there's Buzzfeed was an article out here something called darling divas. I don't all these sites, um, you know, So there's a bunch of articles actually that came up that were, listen, roundups of different products that would fill this need. So if I were building a media lists and I was somebody who offered something that could be a personal gift. This is where I would go and I would start putting these things either in a piece of paper or right now you could pull up a spreadsheet, you know, and put in Media Outlet, and you would fill in what the media outlets name is. He would put in a link to the sample article, and you might put in the name of the person. You know, we're just getting started here. So if there's a person's name associated with article that's gonna be really helpful to you when you're doing pitching, otherwise you have to go back and do it. So start your media list up by putting, you know, doing this search and putting these things in there. You could do this right now. And then here I showed you like I clicked on buzzfeed because you want to check out the article. So here's an article. So I click down the buzzfeed one that came up in Pinterest and this came up and it was 35 personalize gifts to get this year. How awesome would it be to being around up like that And how easy was that? That took me literally. I went into Google. Okay, That was garbage. I went a Pinterest. Okay, Looks interesting. And then I clicked on an article and boom, boom buzzfeed. Tash, that's on your media list. And this is a big misconception. People say, like, Oh, they have covered that before. They won't cover it again. But what editors Air Often looking for our new spin on the stuff they cover all the time, right? They're not looking for something totally out of the box. People always hear that from editors. I need something unique. Well, what they really mean is that they want a different headline to put on really similar content. So we're gonna see through that, and we're not gonna work so hard. People, I think, sometimes work a little too hard. So, you know, other times you're gonna find it right away. So foodie experiences San Francisco thinking about going to get a burger on. And so I googled that you know what would be a foodie experience in San Francisco. And here I was thinking again of gifts. You know, gifts are such an easy way that people are often doing roundups around. What can you give to other people that it's a natural one to go to? So I'm thinking like, All right, so maybe it's around the holidays. I want to give somebody a gift certificate. So then, when I type this in here, you know there's first we feast Violator Cloud nine Living. So there's a bunch of blawg results that came up in the top 10. So what I would do is exactly what I did before is just click on the 1st 1 Chef picks the best under the radar eating experiences in San Francisco. Done. You know, you want to make sure, like do a little bit more digging does this does the rest of the content? So I actually took the liberty of looking at this, and there's a ton of round ups at restaurants in different cities, and so you also might want to look at the publication you knows their content, feel good to you, like all those things before that they're looking for you can look for Are they recommending places that are, you know, kind of similar to mine? Are they aesthetically similar with the same kind of person Would my person go to this website? If not? All right, Skip it. There's enough fish in the sea you don't necessarily to put down there. Okay, so how does this feel before moving on the 2nd 1? Is that feeling pretty simple? Yeah. Everybody feel like they can try it. Okay. Awesome. I always give this technique and people was like, Oh, that's too simple. I won't work for me. So now finding your fit in magazines, this is a little trickier. So what I actually did is I took some scans of some magazines I have at home, so I'm a big fan of sunset. Here we are in San Francisco, in the studio. It's very relevant. So, um, you know, I was looking at an old sunset, and I was thinking like, Okay, so what would be a product opportunity in sunset? So this is how I would go about looking at this, Which means it's how you should go about looking at it. So what I do first is I go to the table of contents. So here you can see the table contents for Sunset magazine. And the reason why the table contents is because it shows you exactly what they're putting and every single publication. So here's where you find their regular columns and features that they're putting in every single publication. So you can see best of the West travel home and garden. So this best of the West actually in a magazine is a really great place to break into their called front of the book. So when you first opened up a magazine, you know, after you get through the 1st 20 ads, there's gonna be maybe 5 to 10 pages of front of the book features, and they're all really quick hits and new finds. Usually it's one of the best places to break in front of the books. And so here you can actually see I pulled a picture, a picture from a page of sunsets, front of the book, um, fresh coat. So there's maybe four or five pages in the publication of this, and they're doing, you know, design profiles, different activities to dio here. One of their product was about this line of paints. So what you want to do is say like okay, so if I were sitting here thinking my product in sunset was a match. You know, for my people, I'd be thinking like, Okay, so I know that every single issue of Sunset magazine, their editors are looking for stuff to put these quick hits in the front of the books. So that would go on my media less that this is on my target. So that's another thing you can do at home is go through the media magazines that you have or go out to a book store. I love to go and spend like, 1/2 day in a Barnes and Noble and just pick out. You know what kind of magazines look like my customers might like and look at their table of contents and just scan and you can scan them. And so then you're reading like a publicist, right? You're not just reading, like, for fun. You're reading like a publicist, and so you can scan those for some great opportunities and some great ideas, and then you can go ahead and put those in your media lists if they look like a good idea Now, you Yeah, glad when you're looking at magazines. So, like in this kind of front of the book section, lots of these, like, don't have author. So how do you know who to write to? Yeah, So we're going to get to that in just a second. Let me table that for one second, but that is a great question. Um, so let me give you the other techniques, and they will come right back to it. So the other techniques are you know, you have your Google search. You have You're looking at the publications. You can also look at the holiday angles and do competitive research. So holiday angles means, you know, any kind of gift guy that somebody might give your product into. Also Google that you know, what is your customer looking for? What are they buying for thinking through whether search terms might be, um, Because you can predict, like, when the gift guides will be. And actually, in the simple PR program that we're doing, We're also talking about how do you find those editorial calendars? So we'll have some more information for that and then competitive research. So super sneaky. Look at your competitors. Find out who's covering them. It will be other website, right? Because you were braggin. You're like I got this press cover is you want everybody to know if you're not doing that, do it, Um, and so they'll put you know whether they might not link to the article. But they'll probably tell you, you know, put some media mass has on their website, so you can actually see you know who's covering our competitors. And if they're covering your competitors, it means they're covering your kind of product, which means that all you need to do is come up with a different angle. And in the next lesson, we're gonna talk about that. So here we come back to this question, how do you find the right contact? How do you find the right contact? So if you're on the web, this is pretty simple. Usually they might have a staff listing. So, you know, here is the kinfolk, you know, you know, other website they actually have this staff listing is so longer must be 100 people on it because they also have all their freelancers, which is really cool. So you might feel look at their staff listing. There might also be a byline there. Is that something to look at? So, um, definitely a place to look. And with a magazine, you can look at their masthead. So this is the Sunset magazine, and this is their masthead. And what this is is actually a listing of all the people who are employed at that moment magazine. So the masthead is located, usually near the front of the publication. You can also google like Sunset magazine masthead if you don't have one in front of you and find it, or you can take I've done this, like take a photo while you're in prison. Um and then so you want to look at this mass head and figure out who the most relevant person is for the place you're pitching Now, some tips on this specifically for products are usually you want to go to either the market editor so market editors or the people responsible for sourcing product for gift guides and roundups or the relevant assistant editor for your section. So you always want to go to the bottom of the totem pole, right? You don't want to pitch the managing director, the editor in chief, unless you're pitching a tiny publication that only has three people on staff, right? Then don't worry about it. But if they have a listing of 15 people you want to say, like Okay, so maybe I'm gonna go into home to core. Who's the assistant editor for Home to Chlor? If you're doing TV to you would be pitching like a producer. So if you want to do a TV segment for product and you want a demo product on TV, you want to go to an assistant producer will be the person there, and usually they don't have topics for TV, so this is a really easy way. You can just look at the mast head and figure it out as a bonus for this program, you have my magazine contact cheat sheet, which actually gives you. You can download it on the Web. It gives you, AH, formula for putting together once you have somebody's name, their email address for 100 different publications. So it's like first name dot last name at whatever, so it has a bunch of meeting outlets there, and it's a huge resource. Otherwise, you have to do some creative googling for it, or you can call call a number and just say like, Hey, can you give me the email address for this person, and often they'll do that. So your action for this lesson is to research 10 media outlets that you want to get started with. Like I said, you might want to put these on an Excel spreadsheet. That's really what I recommend so you can start your spreadsheet and you'll have the name of the media outlet you'll have. Um, you know the name of Sam article if its imprint or linked to one, if it's online, and then if you can find the name of somebody really quick to put it, put it in there, and that's how you get your media list started.