What is PR?

Wow. What an amazing interview I have for you today. So this is a little free part. I recently did a direct booking master class all around PR with the fantastic Megan from Rural Roots. So what I've done is I've taken apart the one hour video that we did and I've got three little videos and podcasts to share with you and today is going to be one of those videos. This was real action taking podcast and I would love everybody to pay special attention to what we're going to be talking about. If you want to find out more, head to booster.co.uk podcast. You can go to the YouTube channel, you can go to Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcast you can go and check out video, audio, blogs, etc. Everything's@boostly.co.uk podcast massive. Thank you to Megan for doing this and I will be back tomorrow with another episode. As always. But again, for now, please keep attention, pay attention, make notes, but most importantly, take action as we talk about PR marketing and how it can help you generate direct bookings and not spend any money doing so.

What is pr? Why should we be paying attention to it? What is the most simplified version that you would say to somebody over the last five years?

Small business owner it is the protection and building of your reputation. So it's aside from marketing, a lot of people get advertising and PR mixed up and you know, advertising is what you pay for. PR is what you pay for is a really good example of that. So PR is actually other people talking about you. So if you can get a journalist coming along and talking about you, or work with the local newspaper or a local radio station and they're talking about you, then that is pr. But then in this digital world, it's things like your Facebook reviews, you know, people tagging you on Instagram, anything that's going to build your reputation in the eyes of other people. And in hospitality and tourism, visitor experience massively comes into that category as well. So. And that's what sets PR in hospitality and tourism apart, really, the visitor experience side of things.

Let's start then with small business owners. I love that where you say advertising is something that you pay for and PR is something that you pray for. I love that quote.

That's fantastic.

So let's say that small business owners, and you see them using pr. Now you've been in journalism and you've been doing this, you've been on both sides. Now where do small business owners get it wrong? What's the most important mistake that you see people make when they, when they try and do this. So whether it's from a journalist side or you on like the agency side helping, where do you see when people are getting started without your help and guidance? Where's like the main way that they go wrong with this?

Oh, that's a whole can of worms. Well, obviously the biggest mistake they make is not doing it for a start. They just think that their business isn't important or no one would be interested in their story. And actually people are hugely interested in the story. Think about the posts that actually do do well on social media. They're usually the ones with you in them or the ones where you're talking about your story. So first mist is always thinking that they shouldn't be doing or they can't do it. The second one is not having good images. So anyone who works with me will know that I talk about this a lot. But having decent images is so vital to PR because without them you're much less likely to have your story published. So making sure you've got really good high res images is vital.

So images, let's say that somebody comes to you and goes, okay, Megan, so.

I'm not a photographer, I've got a.

Phone, it's got a decent camera on it. Where do people have to go down the route of getting a professional shoe? Or can they get away with it by, by using one of these? Like where, where, where does it draw? Where do you draw the line in these, in these recommendations?

No, camera phones are so clever these days, so you can take your own images. All I would say is everyone generally holds their phone like this, don't they? Portrait. If you want to work with the press and the media, turn it that way and do landscape. So, you know, make sure you've got both, that's fine, Sorry, I'm probably making everyone dizzy. But try and get some really good landscape images and if you can get people in them, that's really vital as well. I even saw a journalist tweeting about this a few weeks ago saying that a hotel had just sent him 150 photos and only one of them had people in. And they want to show people experiencing that hotel, not just pretty landscapes or just an empty restaurant, they actually want to see people enjoying it. So make sure you get people in them is really, really vital too.