PR Masterclass for Startups with Juliet Fallowfield

sometimes meet people who are like, you don't need PR yet, you just need to do your own Instagram shop and that should be your priority. Look at Klaviyo, look at email marketing to support that. You haven't actually got a PR story to tell yet. So that initial strategy work at the beginning, knowing who you're talking to, knowing what you want to say, how you want to say it is crucial that you don't then waste time.

Hello everyone, welcome to our webinar today. On PR hacks for startup founders. My name is Emilia and I work with Founder Institute. And Founder Institute is the world's largest global accelerator for early-stage startups and it turns business ideas into fundable, scalable, and global businesses. Today I'm very excited. We have an amazing guest. She's a PR expert with tons of experience, but also she's the host of a startup podcast. Her name is Juliette Falloufian and she's going to join us now. Hi, Juliette. Hi. Welcome. Before we start the session, we want to know more about you. Our audience is usually global, so please use the chat to introduce yourself, tell us who you are, where you're joining from. And also, please take a moment to see the other features on the platform. On your right-hand side, there is a Q&A section. Most of you who have joined us before know that this is the place where you put your questions for our speaker, and then we find them easier later and we can ask her. Also, there are emojis down under the screen. On the screen, you can use them to help us get your feedback. And we want to publish a poll quickly now to ask you one question that will help us know, know you better and your needs, understand your needs better. So what is your biggest challenge with public relations? Is it time, money, or understanding it? So understanding is number 1 at the moment.

Good, nice.

Yes, so that's a very useful event. So I'm going to hide this, but you can still vote, it's in the bar. And now Juliette will do her intro, her presentation for about 20-30 minutes. Then I'm gonna jump back to ask questions for our Q&A session, and then we will meet in the networking lounge. So Julia, the floor is yours.

Thank you so much, Amelia. It's fantastic to be back with Founder Institute. I've loved meeting everyone I've met so far over the years. I hope everyone is well, and I'm super excited to read where everybody's based. I should say I'm currently based in London. But I did get back from Antarctica 2 weeks ago, so I'm not that boring just being in London right now. I love the fact there's people in Toronto, San Agustín, amazing. International working and networking is wonderful. I'm a big fan. So thank you for your time this evening. Well, it's this evening for me. It might not be this evening for you guys. I, as Amelia mentioned, have had a 25-year career in communications. I started with Asprey in New York on an internship program, the Matt Button internship, opening their Trump Tower Fifth Avenue store, sponsoring Met Gala. I had no idea what I was doing, but it turned out it was PR and marketing. And from there led me to Givenchy, Chanel London, Shangri-La Hotels, De Beers, Graff. I've been through a few different wonderful luxury brands in-house roles. Between New York, London, and Sydney. I returned 10 years ago to the UK and became self-employed 4 years ago. So I'm, I think I'm still in the startup phase. I feel like we're now at the scale-up part of our business, but I'm very much in it with you. I started a business from scratch off the back of redundancy, having no idea what I was doing, and found myself 4 years later surrounded by a fantastic team, really gorgeous clients. And a way of working that I'm thrilled about. So I managed to step foot onto my 7th continent having done a Zoom call in the Antarctic, thinking, really, if this is self-employment, I'm pretty happy with it. So it's for the win. But I'm really excited to help you today go through some PR hacks that I hope is helpful. As Amelia mentioned, we're going to have a Q&A session, so please put all the questions in the chat and we will cover them later on. I find that if I can take you through a little bit of an overview, that might gives you some more ideas for more questions. And no question is a stupid question. PR is a bit of a dark art. There's a lot of misunderstanding around it. Please don't feel like your question means that you don't understand it. A lot of people don't, even people in the industry don't. So, have some comfort in that. It can be complicated and can be confusing, but I hope to demystify it for you today. I'm just gonna share my screen because I have a deck to present with you. Give me one moment to share this. Good old Canva. There we go. Unfortunately, it means I can't see the chat. So Amelia, if you lose me or anything like that, please just let me know. So a little bit of an agenda through the deck. I'm gonna go through, we've talked about Falafel and Mason. I started this 4 years ago. We'll talk about what PR is and is not, 'cause that can often really help people in their understanding of how to hack it. And then talk about really what does success look like to you? Because I find this across all business is a really helpful thing to think about, not just in communications, but just generally. Timing tools and press tools generally. I should also mention that I host a podcast called How to Startup, and it was born through lockdown of me receiving an insane amount of wonderful advice from other founders who found out I was becoming self-employed, calling me with great advice. And I made a very off-cuff comment that I should start a podcast capture all the content. And 3 years later, we chart in Apple quite often. We're in the top 25% of podcasts, and it gives me great joy. I have an amazing platform to interview successful entrepreneurs on what to do now, next, and never. And it has now become a revenue stream in our business because we offer podcast production, because we can do the messaging and we can do the technical. So who knows what's ahead of everybody in their startups. So just to kick off with what PR is and what PR is not, there's this great quote to say advertising is saying you saying that you're good, and PR is someone else saying that you're good. And this quote from Apple is quite useful when you're thinking about it, because what's more powerful, you telling someone that you're brilliant, or a friend telling someone else that you're brilliant? And we all know that word of mouth is really, really strong. So that helps segment the advertising versus editorial. Keep that in mind when we're looking at paid, owned, and earned here, because these are the three sorts of platforms that you can really think about when you're looking at communications. Paid is where you pay to be somewhere—back of a magazine, a banner on a website, an inclusion in a newsletter—is when you're paying and therefore controlling where your business is and where it's seen. Owned are your own platforms, so your website, your LinkedIn profile, your email signature is an owned platform, something to be aware of, your bio and your Instagram handle. Anything that you can control is your owned platform, and this is something where you can repurpose paid and earned content on. We'll come back to that. Earned is earned. It's hard. This is where you go out, you're not paying to be anywhere. You are earning the right to be on this third-party platform. It's being on the FT, it's being featured in Sifted's podcast. You're going out and pitching yourself. And this is where PR comes in, public relations or press relations. They get interchanged. We like to think public relations, because it isn't just about the column inches anymore. And this is where you're earning your place to be there— a speaker event, a panel, a newsletter, a podcast, editorial, print, digital— it's there, and you have very little control of that environment because you're earning it and you're not the editor of it. So these three all talk to each other, and you could repurpose content on them all. But when you're thinking about PR, you think about earned. So I hope that helps delineate between the three. And something that we do at Fallowfield and Mason, and this is where we scored quite well with B Corp that we managed to get certified last September, is that we teach the founder how to do their own PR because we believe that you are your own best storyteller. I'm working from home this evening. If I'm trying to describe my kitchen to somebody who's never been here, I'm going to be the best person to do that because I live and breathe in that kitchen and spend a lot of time in there. If I'm paying a third-party person, a freelance PR or PR agency, they're not going to know the kitchen as well as I am. And it's the same with a journalist. They're going to want to hear from the best person to describe the business. And that would be the founder. Founders are typically very busy and have about 30 million hats to wear. And this is where it's really important to think about PR and how much time you're spending on it. And we'll come to that in terms of one of the hacks, because you can't do it all, but you can do things well. So owning your own PR in-house is definitely something to be thinking about. They often say, I will happily pay my lawyer and my accountant. They will always be the industry experts in law and accounting. I will never be as good as they are. But to describe your story, you will always be that expert. And a question I wanted to ask you all at the end is how many people are already doing their own PR? So I might do a hands up at the end. And another thing that is important when you're trying to hack your own PR, because presumably that's why you're here, is because you want to learn how to do it yourself, which is super exciting, is what does success look like to you? I think a lot of the times you are very, very busy and you get stuck in the weeds. But if you can goal set a best-case scenario in 12 months' time, what would our PR have achieved and what is it bringing back to your business? What is its point? Why would you spend time on this? Why do you want it? We meet a lot of clients who come to us saying, I want to be on Vogue and I need to be on the FT. And my comeback to that is, why does the FT reader want to read about you on the FT? The FT doesn't care about anything other than its readers. It needs the readers to want to come back to read more. That's how they make money. They are a business as well. So why does that editor need to put your business in their article? So thinking backwards, look at your goals and look at what you would like to get delivered. Be realistic. You have many, many things to do within your business. What does success look like to you when it comes to PR? And when we've talked about podcasts, newsletters, panel events, awards, networking events, that's also public relations, articles, SEO'd content that you can repurpose in a blog. What does success look like? For us in our business, we have to do our own PR. For us, it's, I would like to be on 6 podcasts a year, be included in 4 newsletters that reach a startup market, do 10 speaking events a year, and potentially 2 articles. And that for us, we're enough. That's enough. That's good enough for us and we'd be really happy with those results because it is endless. And I say this, that you need some tangible goals in place so you don't get overwhelmed by it because you can always pitch to another editor, you can always find another angle, you can keep going and going and going, but it can be exhausting and really wearing when you don't see the results come at the beginning. So it's one of those things that when you're putting your PR hat on, Time cap it, look at what you're trying to achieve and why, and just go after those things. So define and then prioritize your goals of like, we want it to drive brand awareness, we want to increase our engagement or build a community. Those are really important things to think about with PR. It's also important to mention that PR is definitely brilliant for brand awareness or business awareness. It's harder to track sales. Because people will come across your business in the newsletter, on the panel event, then they'll read about you and then they might come to purchase. Often you're not selling something that somebody immediately needs and hasn't gone viral. So they need a few different touchpoints to come across it to then make that purchase decision. Or you're purchasing your services. We're a service-based business. They might need to speak to us or see us around for 6 months and go, you know what, I'm ready now. So that's where I think it's important to really look at what you're trying to achieve through PR. And I've just given some examples at the bottom there of what that could look like. Something that I have learned the hard way is time is more precious than money most often in a startup. So if you budget your time like you budget your finances, I think you'll have a lot more self-preservation in your startup journey. I think it's really important to do this, especially when it comes to PR, which is 100% proactive. You're— it's For me, it's like going to the gym, getting fit, or saving money. If I don't spend time and attention on it, it just doesn't happen. Same with PR. Journalists are very unlikely to find you and call you unless they've been referred by somebody else, another journalist, or they've read about you somewhere else. You have to go to them. Some good hacks here, and I'm happy to share this deck with you afterwards, so please don't worry about taking notes, is set up Google Alerts for keywords. Google Alerts is a free media monitoring service. You can pay thousands a month for a genuine media monitoring company, but to be honest, they're not any better than Google Alerts, I would say, at this time. So set up a Google Alert for your name, your business name, sector news, and keywords. So we have a couple of jewelry clients at the moment that we're onboarding and training them how to do their own PR. We set up keywords for jewelry, recycled gold, and circularity. We set up the client's name, key spokespeople in the, in the brand, and just So 8 AM every morning, Google will send us an alert because that's when we set up the alert, that's the time it will arrive, and we'll get a real gist of what media is writing about these key topics, and it will feed ideas for angles, and you can save a few, delete it if it's not interesting. It'll prompt, oh goodness, okay, that magazine's new, I haven't seen them write about jewellery before, that's a target for us, great. Read coverage that you want to be in. I know this sounds really basic and a lot of people will be like, of course I do that. But a lot of people are like, well, we want to be, you know, in all these magazines. It's like, well, have you read those and seen that your business fits in those? I think it's very important to know where you're going and where you want to be. And then the best thing with that is once you've read it, bookmark it, scrapbook it, keep it as a bit of a kind of pin on the board. I'm going to target these people. I know that we belong in that magazine or that newspaper. Aim— it kind of comes as a bit of another goal-setting exercise as well. And then you can use that to feed your media list. So as you're reading, going, oh, that person's cropping up quite a lot, looks like a freelancer, I'm seeing their name, I'm going to follow them on LinkedIn, follow them on Instagram, like engage with some of their content. That way your name will pop up in their feed as well and your name will become familiar. I would suggest doing it from your business account, not your personal account, but don't like 50 posts because they can see through that. Um, and then just really start thinking about what's coming up in the news agenda. As you start seeing these Google Alerts around your sector, you'll see what's trending, what type of coverage is coming through. You'll get a feel for what the journalist likes to write about, and you'll get a feel for where the market is going. So for us in the last few years, diamonds, obviously with everything going on in Russia, have been much more scarce, the price has gone up hugely, that's a great talking point. If there's a diamond brand who are working with a new source of diamonds, that's a really relevant piece to put into that trending news agenda. And another thing in terms of timing with your many hats, we tend to say block out, say, a Friday morning to do your PR where you're going to be less inundated and disturbed by other people. Just do one thing and do it really, really well. I've been listening to lots of podcasts recently about how multitasking is not good for us, which is a shame because that's what you do as PR. Um, so time block your PR moment in your week, and then you can use schedule send function. This is my favorite hack in terms— it's not a PR hack, it's just an email hack. Apple have now brought it in, Gmail have it. You can use the template function within both of them to set up an email template, tailor it per person, draft all your pitches, schedule send for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday morning. Don't bother journalists out of hours. They don't like it. Just good manners. Do as you would be done by. And that function is really, really helpful. Here's a list of some basic press tools that you should have within the business. It might look like a lot, but I can break it down for you. Vision and mission, just your business alone, is really, really important because it keeps you on the straight and narrow of like, who are we talking to? What do we want to say? What are we doing this for? Within that, your brand lexicon, 10 keywords you attribute to your business that sit well. And like, if someone read those 10 words, they would see your brand or your business, which will feed your brand values as well. And this is something there in the rise of B Corp. Um, I think there's now over 1,500 in the UK alone, but it's growing. Um, know what your brand or your business is, um, standing by, because when you come to talk to journalists, they will ask you these things. Something that we do in our first module with clients is a huge SWOT and comp set analysis. It's competitor set. It's really important to know who's in your field and what they're doing with the press. Maybe set up Google Alerts for their businesses as well to see where they're appearing. Another really helpful tool, but this is a massive piece of work, is a forwards features calendar. So in the UK, where we do a capped handful of retained PR for clients, we have a whole roadmap of the next 12 months of all newspapers and magazines in the country, when they're featuring their special issues, what are their key themes, what are their print dates, what are their submission dates. And so we have like one A3 piece of paper that has a roadmap of everything that's happening. So we'll never miss an opportunity. So if we're pitching skincare, we know where all the skincare issues coming out, pitching travel, we know all of those. We spend 4 months at the end, well, 3 or 4 months at the end of the year before putting this together. And it's so worth it because then you've got it for the year ahead. Audience personas. I really wish I could ask you questions right now because I want to see how many hands are raised when I say, who do you know who your client is? Who knows who their client is? Do you have 3 personas of who they are? What are the shopping habits? Where are they living? What's their disposable income? Where are they consuming media? Internal Q&A doc, super important as well. It answers all the tricky questions that might get thrown at you. Before they're asked. So I'm a big believer in carrying the umbrella so it doesn't rain. And this is something we again work with clients on, is like, what's your sourcing pipeline like? How do you validate that? Have you like drilled down on supply issues? Like, anything you feel slightly uncomfortable about, uncomfortable about now, write it on a piece of paper, think about the answer, and get it down. And then you probably will never have to use it, but at least you're prepared. This feeds into the banks of hero copy, describing your business, describing your product. Write it once, use Google Docs. The biggest game changer, I cannot tell you, in my career has been live cloud-based document. The years that we spent at Chanel sending attachments back and forth with copy amends, and there would be 10 different versions. I just can't bear to think about it. So now one version, one live copy, it lives and breathes and grows. There's only one version of it. You can see track changes and everyone can see it, comment, edit. It's game-changing. So in here you can put your key quotes, your banks of hero copy of describing what you're doing. So you never have to then sit there and retype something when you're in a rush. My other hack for you, and my team laugh at me, they think I should be an IT help desk rather than a comms person, is the Apple auto text replacement. Um, you type an acronym and it pre-populates already written copy. So I've taken this to an extreme that I have addresses, email addresses, file paths, anything I know I'm typing more than once, I'll set it as an auto text replacement in Apple settings. I think it's available on Android as well. So I will have introductory paragraphs for all of our clients, ourselves, myself, my team, and I'll type en, and it will come up with the whole paragraph and it'll just save so much time. Means that I'm on the tube, I'm not wasting any time. I'm just replying to emails super quickly and tailoring them top and tail where I need to, but it's not wasting time retyping anything. So as you can tell, we're very words-based in our business and where you can have these banks of copy, it's an absolute game changer when it comes to time. I think the biggest hack in a startup is finding more time. So anything I can do to help with that, I will. Founder biography, self-explanatory. PR angles, unique talking points, industry talking points. It's very good to really put these down as well of like where you're unique, but where you're also standing out in the industry and knowing your competition. Someone said to me once in one of the podcast interviews I did, it's the shark you can't see that bites you. And it's like, just be really aware of who your competition are because then you're informed. Image library is super important. Here's an idea of how to label the pictures so they don't get lost with the picture desk. Brand press release, campaign press release, who, what, where, why, when. As long as you're answering those, you're all good. Never forget your contact information. So many journalists get emails who are like, well, what's the price? When's it available? How do I find out about it? And journalists now, knowing what I— knowing a few journalists and they know what I'm doing now, they'll send me some best and worst case examples. And someone today had an email, uh, "Dear freelancer, we'd love to invite you to this," blah blah blah. Clearly a bad mail merge. And then she wrote back saying, "I also got this one, 'Dear legend,'" and obviously not a mail merge, but she's like, "I kind of like it, although they should have tailored it." So tailor your press's pitches. Um, coverage tracking document. It's amazing once you get going how quickly you can lose track of the coverage that you're getting. Keep an Excel, Google Sheet tracker of this. Create your press page on your website and just keep a log of who wrote what, when, and where, because then you can go back in a year's time saying, we'd love the story you wrote, we'd love to do a follow-up. Hopefully you'll get to the point where you'll have loads of coverage and you'll have this amazing tracker and it'll just inform all future things. Media list, again, Excel or Google Sheet, and keep a column. A really good hack with managing a media list is have a column with a date at the top of who emailed that journalist about what and when. You are busy, you will forget. When I was just doing one brand PR in-house, I could remember all, it was all in my head. There's no way I can do that when I'm doing payroll, accounting, legal, lead gen, da da da da da. I have a media list, it's like, oh yeah, I spoke to Sarah 4 weeks ago about that particular topic, I need to follow up now. Okay, fine. Um, and then lookbook, if you're a product-based business, a lookbook for stylists to see your imagery to shoot product. That's really important. If you're lending product to shoot, a shoot loan form that's templated, you can make a new copy every time and it just keeps everything tracked and you're not going to lose product. Um, a SWOT, I'm sure you're all very familiar with, but it's incredibly important to do this from a business and then a comms perspective. And it's something that we spend a lot of time on Module 1 on this because it informs all other things that you then go and do in communications. This is the Forwards Features calendar that I mentioned. You can see on the left all the different titles. It's a terribly bad screen grab, apologies. Month by month, special issues, blah blah blah. So it gives you an idea of, say, FT Special Reports on February 5th, on the Monday, they've got their Sustainable Education first issue. And that means that if that's coming out February 5th, I should have been talking to them in December if I wanted to pitch to that because they're a short lead. So that just keeps us accountable. And knowing your audience is another really important thing to hack your PR. It will save you time. You can send thousands of emails, and if they're to the wrong people, it's a waste of your time. And we do not want you to waste any time. So finding out who your clients are, what they're reading, and then that will inform your subsequent media targets is really, really important. Knowing your relevant talking points is also a time saver because, again, you don't want to throw so many things out there that it falls on deaf ears. And if journalists keep getting emails from people that are not relevant, they'll just block you, delete you, and it'll end up meaning that your emails will tend to go to spam more often. So really target and tailor. And you're better off sending 10 really well-researched, targeted emails than 100 blanket blasts. It's a journalist's very busy people, probably get 100 emails a day. They can— this one of them told me they delete by email title, which is heartbreaking of the amount of time you spend on the actual content of the email. But it's really important to make it relevant. Dovetail your news to what's relevant to them. Work backwards on lead times. Make sure you're giving yourself enough time to pitch, pitch again, follow up, go to somebody else at that title, and then come back again dovetail it into what's happening in the market. So Valentine's Day, bridal tends to be January through April, but I think Thursday is National Margarita Day. We in our forward features calendar have lists and lists of those key dates, fashion weeks and BAFTAs, whatever it might be that you're targeting. It's really good to be aware of those dates. Timeline, this is to give you an idea if you're pitching long lead, typically 4-month minimum, but that doesn't give you that much time to then pitch to someone else, follow up, especially if you're doing an exclusive because you need time for them to think about it, research the story, pitch it to their commissioning editor, get the commission, research again, come back to you. That's probably 3 or 4 weeks and they're already gone. And if it's a no, you then need to take it to someone else. So 4 months minimum, but first month brainstorm, research, plan. Second month pitch, follow up, or retarget. Month 3 wait because patience is a virtue that lots of comms people do not have because you just want to get on to it and you want to get to see the coverage. But journalists do need that time to think and live and breathe the story and then hopefully launch and the coverage comes out. This is a case study that we did with a jewellery client based in Hatton Garden in London, Ruth Tomlinson. We started working with her a couple of years ago, founded a business 20 years ago, incredible jeweller. She came to me, said, I've learned how to mudlark in lockdown and I found garnets in the riverbed of the Thames. Do you think that's a story? And I was like, my goodness, this is an amazing story. So this story took, I think, 7 months from that conversation to this coming out in print. Um, and it's just to give you an idea of going after a feature like this, it takes a lot of time and effort. There's so many details that need to be fact-checked. There's a photo shoot that needs to happen. The story needs to be really researched, fact-checked, everything like that. So just to give you an idea that it can take that much time, but when happens. It's absolutely amazing. And she's still 2 years later selling off the back of this digital story because it came out online as well. It works. So that is a very quick rattle through. Let me just stop presenting here of some key hacks around PR. And I hope that was relatively helpful. But given that we have rattled through it, we have more time for questions, hopefully. So I think Amelia is going to help us with that. Is she there? I'm just going to read Zara's question. If you aren't native to marketing or PR, I can totally understand how overwhelming this information can be. I'd find Applicable methods to your team's resources and time. Example: your business can target local PR in the PA area. Yes, um, Press Association is really helpful. They have lots of freelancers that can help get the story out there. And actually, if you have a story run with Press Association, it will go to many, many, many, many news desks. So Press Association is a fantastic first go-to if you haven't got much time at all. Seed it in there and then you'll be absolutely good. Aha, we have Amelia.

Hello! Hello! For the delay, uh, yes, thanks a lot for sharing your secrets, all the tools and the hacks. It was amazing, very useful. I personally learned a lot from you. So, uh, yes, uh, everyone, uh, Juliette, follow Field, follow her. We're going to send you the recording and all the contacts about her and her agency. Follow Field and Mason. And now we have here in the Q&A section many questions. Okay, let's start with this one with the most votes. It's from a— this is a good one. Yes. How do you justify a return of investment on PR time cost investment to your board for an early stage B2B services software business? Yes. Okay.

So I, in my previous roles for luxury brands, had typically a 60-year-old male CFO that couldn't understand what PR was about. And I learned very early on explaining how it worked and getting their buy-in before it even happened meant they were far more sympathetic as to the trials and tribulations, as to how long it can take and what it can cost. So one brand who will remain nameless, who are very, very high-end, uh, diamond brand, Well, why do you need to buy them coffee? Why can't they buy their own coffee? It's like, well, the competitors are flying them to Italy on a private helicopter for a press trip for 5 days and putting them up in a very expensive hotel. So I think we can afford to buy them coffee. So I feel like that's an extreme example of internal comms can be as important as external at early stage. PR typically doesn't cost, it's the least expensive, unfortunately. For PRs, the least expensive service within the marketing, um, choice where you're looking at paid PPC, newsletters, someone to manage your social. PR, if you get a great freelancer to support you and put budget towards that so they're effectively in-house for a couple of days a week rather than an agency you never see, that can be really effective. But because once you get the coverage it's very hard to see the return unless you're really good on your Google Analytics. But even then, it's never going to really prove how much value it's brought back to the business. I think that's why it's even more important to get your internal board on board as to why you're doing it and have a debate with them at the beginning. Say, look, we want to go after PR. Here are the reasons why. What do you think? What are your experiences with PR? And maybe get someone like me or someone else I can 100% recommend to come in and give them a PR 101 of this is what it is, this is what it isn't, this is how it works. So it isn't you trying to preach to the unconverted. It's typically a really hard thing for finance people to get an understanding of because they're like, well, where's the return? Prove the return. And something someone said to me recently was like, well, what is the cost to the business if they don't do it? And that's a really interesting way to talk to finance people of like, well, if we don't do it, we're not going to get brand awareness. We don't have this third-party integrity against our business. We don't have a press website, we can't use the FT logo on our social media, we don't have a profile to then go after speaker events. You can go at it that way as well, but it's a really good question because you will never prove exactly how much it's worth. I remember once walking into the Chanel fine jewellery boutique and we'd done a huge PR campaign and someone in the store was holding Tatler and pointing to the full-page feature that we'd got saying, I want this tiara, which was millions. And I was like, oh, it works. It'd be great if you could tell me when you have these reactions. Oh, people do this all the time. It's like, tell me. But you're never going to have an exact ledger of this piece of coverage equals that sale. You can work with influencers with codes and track it that way. But again, an influencer might put out content and someone will go, oh yeah, that's nice. And then a week later go, now I'm going to buy it, but I'm not going to use the code. So it's really frustrating. I have clearly OCD and I'm in the wrong job because I want to prove my worth. It's that gut feeling of like the kind of building the buzz, building the excitement. It fills your press page, it helps SEO. There's many, many reasons to do it, but I think you do need your board to back you before you go out to market on PR. Because if you get their buy-in at the beginning, it's better than trying to ask for more budget at the end, I would suggest. Sorry, it's a very long-winded answer, but it's a really important one.

Yes, and we started with it. Thanks for the comprehensive reply. Next one is from Mark Wright: could you please talk about shoestring lean PR in social entrepreneurial enterprise models? It's hard.

A lot of people talk about what's the cheapest we can do with PR. And I think if you're coming at it that way, it might not be the thing you should focus on first. I think try and do a few things really well than trying to do everything half-heartedly, or not even half-heartedly, that's the wrong way of saying it. You can't do 23, 20 things at once. I would pick 3 ways of marketing your business and really deep dive and focus on that. In terms of social enterprise, that isn't my area of expertise, but I would suggest that Writing out or doing lots of research around the right events to be showing up at and meeting people. Public relations, as in you talking to people and networking and meeting people, is really important. LinkedIn webinars, offering out content and educational pieces, um, free of charge to build your community and build your authority. That's a content machine. You can then repurpose that on LinkedIn and engage, and other people can share that. There's ways that you can create your own content that will earn you media elsewhere. And with our podcast, my business coach at the beginning said, I just don't understand it. The podcast is over here and your business is over there. And I was like, no, I completely disagree. The podcast is an excuse for me to be active on LinkedIn without selling. And I mean, I'd do it if no one listened. I learned so much from the people I get to interview, but it's a piece of content that I can then earn media on the guests' platforms as well, so it's owned, earned content. So thinking of it that way, you can create events or happenings that you can then use to get out there. And in social enterprise, I imagine that's really important to build your integrity behind what you're doing. By all means, email me more precise questions on that, and I can do some research and look to connect you with a PR who is an expert in that area. I hope that helps.

There is— thanks— there's another question. It's also about Nis, this time for the luxury market. Is it the same?

What's the best way to validate PR in the luxury market? Mine is a reminder service for busy executives that are killing it in their professional life but getting killed in their personal life. What's the best way to validate PR strategy in the luxury market? I think validating PR strategy, I think it's really doing that initial work of like, what is it going to bring back to your business? We often, not often, sometimes meet people, we're like, you don't need PR yet, you just need to do your own Instagram shop and that should be your priority. Look at Klaviyo, look at email marketing to support that. You haven't actually got a PR story to tell yet. So that initial strategy work at the beginning, knowing who you're talking to, knowing what you want to say, how you want to say it, is crucial that you don't then waste time I think we can all get stuck into stuff. You can open an inbox and suddenly 4 hours have gone. It's not opening your inbox and sitting there and looking at a blank wall going, why am I doing this? What is the end goal for me to do this PR work? What does it need to bring back to the business? And that I think you can validate to yourself. But in terms of validating to others, let me know which audience it is you want to validate it to, because I think that's important.

Yes, just to remind everyone, we have a networking session after this, and Juliette might join us, but if there is no time for that for her, you can always contact her, email her, or find her on LinkedIn. So our next one is, can you provide ideas and suggestions on finding business partners, the key points you look during the evaluation process, the legalities around it, and possible groups, accelerators that folks could join for facilitation of the process.

So I would put my business hat on rather than my PR hat on, on this. In terms of business partners, are you talking about people to join your business as an actual company director, or are you talking about business partners coming on as a board? Are you able to DM a little bit more specific around that and which sector you're in? Just looking at the DMs, perhaps we can come back to that one if the next—

Ah, yes, okay, we can come back to that one. It's by, uh, James So if they can jump in again. Okay, let's go to the next one. Okay, let's take this one. This is a lot of setup. Are there PR services that will do the initial setup? They have the company self-managed, I suppose.

I promise you I didn't put this question in here, but that's exactly what we do. And it was purely based off the fact that when I was made redundant, I'd had 20 years of hearing journalists say, oh, I hate PR agencies, we never get what we need when we need it. And hearing friends in business going, I hate PR agencies, I pay them and I just don't know what they're doing. I was like, hang on, I can fix this pain point. I love my career. I've changed jobs every 2 or 3 years and I love learning about new businesses. You come in, you learn about everything, and then you move on. So I thought, hang on, if I set up that small business's press office, they're going to be happy because they're not externalizing budget anymore. The journalist is happy because they're getting to speak to the creative director immediately and getting what they need when they need it, and I get to move on to the next one. My business coach, on the other hand, is like, this is a terrible idea, you're making yourself redundant with every client. And I was like, well, it's the right thing to do because the business owner is their own best storyteller. So what we do in module 1 is a full audit of everything you've got currently, so we then don't double-handle in module 2 where we set up all the tools, we do all the writing, the message the calendar, the planning, the mapping, the angles, everything. And we take you through it to check that you're comfortable with it. You obviously have an opinion and we tweak it if we need to. And then by end of module 2, whoever does your PR will have all the necessary tools to take it out to market. But module 3, we then spend 3 months training you how to use those tools. And then we sort of edge away quietly and leave you to get on with it. But we're there in the background if you get stuck. It was, I was trying to do this in about 6 weeks and I learned very much through feedback. It was too short, and one client's feedback was like, we would have paid more to keep you near us, nearer us for longer. So that's where we've actually just, um, stretched it much further so people aren't overwhelmed by the amount of information that we impart. And it's worked really well. But I love it because we have Google Alerts for all of our clients, and so we see their coverage coming through like, oh my God, you're in Vogue, this is so exciting! Um, and it gives us great joy because our brains are happy, we get to learn about these amazing companies and see what they're doing. The journalists are happy because they're getting exactly what they need. And that's where we scored really highly in B Corp because we're kind of breaking the PR agency model. I haven't— doing our own concept analysis, I haven't yet found other people that do it as in-depth as we do. I think every business is different and everyone— every business needs a proper thorough strategy that's relevant to them. I don't think it's something you can automate too much. And we do do a messaging module for people who are just getting going, who just need a bit of help to get started. That's a 6-week project as opposed to a 5-month project. But if you find other people who are doing it, I would love to know. In fact, there is one woman in Australia, Odette Barry, I think is her name, who's killing it. She does cohort training. So she's based up in Queensland, I think. I can send you her details. She's phenomenal and has amazing case studies. But yes, if you come across other people, do let me know because I'm always all ears. Thank you for the question. Give me a great opportunity to sell our wares. Repeat? No, I know.

Sorry. Okay, so now, uh, we have tons of questions coming in, so I will just, uh, choose a couple And this one many people ask during the event, so—

Ah, okay, I go back over that. So advertising, you pay to be there. PR, the editor is putting you there and you're not paying for it. So advertising, you're saying you're great. PR, someone else is saying you're great. And PR can be Public relations or press relations. Pre-pandemic, pre-2000s, it was always PR, press. It was in a newspaper when we only had newspapers. My team laugh at me. I was like, well, you know, back in the day I used to scan coverage and fax it up to Paris. Like, what? Um, these days you've got digital platforms and social media and everything's changed. You've got many, many, many ways of getting your brand or business out there. But advertising, you would have to pay, and it's expensive to have a presence because you, it's expensive because you're controlling that and you're controlling the environment. So when I was at Chanel, their mandate was we have a global budget. It's extraordinary. With this extraordinary budget, Vogue and Hearst and Condé Nast, we will not follow Dior. If you put us behind Dior, we're not paying any pennies and we're canceling all budgets. So they would have a real weight behind them to negotiate their placements. And it really mattered that they were on the right-hand page, not the left, and all this kind of stuff. That costs money. The reason people want PR and like PR is because if an editor is saying something great about your business, it's far more believable. Like, who's picked up a magazine and flicked through the first 10 pages and then got to the actual editorial written content? That's editorial. Anything that looks glossy and perfect is advertising. Editorial is where the magazine have put the pages together. In fact, I should have a magazine in front of me, really. I don't. Um, but yeah. Outside back cover advertising, front cover editorial is quite a good way of remembering it. Does that help? Please ask more questions or more detailed questions on that because it's really important to know the difference. And if a magazine— this is a really— I've been often asked this— if a magazine is coming to you and offering you a great placement or an editorial opportunity, it's normally an advertorial, and it normally means they've had someone drop out and I would really be suspicious of it. If they're coming to you and it's too easy, it's not where you want to be. A lot of small trade titles do that to a lot of founders and target people. It's a sales job. If they're asking, there's something suspicious about it. If you're going after them, that's probably what you want.

Some of our attendees ask about services like PR Newswire. One, and then there is another one I put on stage. So it's an example, I got PR for the Wall Street Journal. What are the steps to amplify? How do I find follow-on journalists that may want to cover us, did coverage from Wall Street Journal?

Great question. So firstly, congratulations on getting in the Wall Street Journal. That is huge. Um, The UK have something called the NLA and the CLA, the National Licensing Company or Agency. There's a body of publications that have got together and pay for the NLA to exist to go after businesses that use editorial on their commercial sites and find them. So there's definitely rules in the UK. As to the US market, I don't think there are yet, but you've got to be really careful if you get in a publication that is listed on the NLA's you will have to pay a fee to use that piece of coverage on your website if you're selling. There's ways around this. I will share our guide. So in our Module 3, when we do the training, we have 20 guides as to around PR. One of them is how to share coverage legally. I will share that with you because it's really important you don't get this wrong. But there are ways around paying for the license, probably a hack, but it's legal. So it's not really a hack. Um, it's helpful. It's— you can use the logo on your website, and as long as you're linking off to the coverage— so for your business, on your website you have WSJ logo, and that if someone clicks on that, it links to WSJ website— as long as you're directing traffic to their website/business, you're fine. You can't use a quote, you can't repurpose the copy, you can't take a picture and put it on your social. That all flouts the rules. This is definitely UK-focused. This is because publications are businesses themselves. The way they make money is getting people to buy those publications. It's their product. So if you're repurposing their saleable product on your site and commercializing it, you can see why they may get a bit annoyed. All PRs loathe NLA, but I'm really quite sympathetic to it given I'm now a business myself. What was the second part to that? Oh, leveraging the content. So once you have looked at that guide and worked out how you can repurpose coverage legally, it is really important to leverage this. Our now internal content team, I say that because it's just 3 of us who do this out of the 4, we meet once a month, look at what we have, check that we have a LinkedIn content strategy, a blog content strategy, content for Instagram and content for our newsletter that all talks to each other. And this will be one of our podcasts and pull out some key quotes. We can do that. We own that asset. That's fine. We will look at what's trending in the media. We will look at a guest blog on our website. That's fine. They've given us permission. If we've got, say, for example, today I was in Retail Jeweller magazine. I have a page once every other month. Talking about a key topic. Because I wrote those words, I'm allowed to use those. But if I hadn't and they had featured me without me writing those words, I would be able to link to that coverage on our blog, repurpose that blog post to our LinkedIn, put that blog post in our newsletter, and make sure that it's linked to Instagram. And through Linktree on our biography and our Instagram, it links onto our blog, all to drive traffic to our website. We're a service-based business. We want people to land on the website to discover us and then come to us and hopefully work with us. But that feed, it's taken us a while to hit our groove of like what leads to link to what, but you need to— once you've got this coverage, the team kind of laugh when we get coverage for clients because we're just like, oh, now we have to do the coverage tracker, the Instagram post, the blog post. We have to then generate more content around it. So it's a blessing and a curse, but it's a good one. You want it, but you should And it breaks my heart. We have one client we have so much coverage for and they haven't updated their press page for 2 years. And I'm like, guys, you're losing all this SEO opportunity. This is amazing. Like, come on, do it. Um, so if you can get into a rhythm and a structure of like when the coverage comes in, you thank the journalist first off. That's always something really important to do. Go with a thank you, say we'd love to meet for coffee, we've got more news in the pipeline. Leverage it that way. Thank the journalist, say I've read your recent stories, we've got more news coming your way, we'd love to keep you in the loop. And then the fatal thing a lot of people go is to another journalist saying, we've been in WSJ, you're now going to want to write about us too. The FT is not going to want to follow WSJ. FT want to lead. So don't tell other journalists where you've been. They can do that due diligence themselves. Don't worry about that. The important thing is to make sure that it's on your own platforms without alienating future journalists to write about you. Does that make sense? I hope so. Journalists are funny fish. They want to be the ones to break the story. They want to be the ones leading the trend, but sometimes they're catching up. So it's important to, you know, give them the information, go to them with something of value, but don't tell them that, you know, we've been in all of your competitors but not you, and they're like, oh, Why did we miss that? I hope that makes sense.

Yes, that helps for sure. And what about, did you mention about newswire?

Sorry, yes, you can pay for a newswire service where you put out your press release and it sort of pushes it out to like Press Association is an example, PR Newswire is another. It's a platform where journalists will browse and look for information. We, to be honest, have never really used it because our clients have tended to be not ones that are breaking news. If you're about to land on Mars and it's breaking news, Newswires are great for that service sort of thing. And for more evergreen stories, um, it can be useful. Journalists do use them. And there's a— what is it called? I can add that to the deck. There's a, a platform in the US that you can put up your soundbites or news tidbits, and journalists can scroll and keyword search and then come to you. I haven't had much success with those in the past, and typically, because I've got access to a media directory where we create media lists for all of our clients, I know exactly who I want to target and tailor to. So I just go to them direct, and I go to them before they've had a chance to think about coming to me. But I, and also things like if someone's writing an article on AI, who isn't doing something around AI, then they're gonna sift through hundreds. It's not really gonna stand out. It's, it's worth experimenting with and doing trials for, like they all should offer like a week or two week trial, test it, but make sure you've got a really hard-hitting title in your press release that stands out on your keywords that journalists will be like, that I need to read that. And take it from there.

Awesome, so much high-level advice, and we are almost out of time, but one last question I'll put on stage. It's a little bit on the other direction. Beyond the TOEFL code email you mentioned, once you identify your best target publications, what's the best way to get in front of relevant journalists.

It's the, the cold email with a punchy title, key statistics. Say for example, we were helping a sexual wellness tech startup in New York, and there was so much data that was being published by health organizations around how 18 to 25 year olds weren't accessing safe places to discuss sex. And this app solved that problem. So we put together all these amazing statistically backed punchy titles with angles around what was nationally relevant and then how this business was solving that problem. If you lead with the reader problem of like why that editor wants to give this information to their reader, they're much more likely to land that story. But short of that, once you've done that and you followed up with them a couple of weeks later, you found another colleague of theirs that you've then pitched it to as well. You found them on LinkedIn, you found them on Twitter, you found them on Instagram. They all behave differently. Some of them love it. Some of them hate it. Just find where they're active. They will typically be active on one. Follow them on Substack. They're all going there. Engage with them genuinely for content that you like. Reshare their content. Repost their content. If they're on LinkedIn, repost it saying, love reading this article. I've learned so much about this. Add value to those comments. Don't just do it to be seen to be doing it. Your brand name or your name will become regularly recognized by them, and then go back and pitch again. And then if that's not working, like, see if they're speaking at an event. Like, it's— I don't know if I should say this on webinars that are being recorded, but it's soft stalking in a way. You get to know them so well. We see you on Instagram when you're on holiday. Do pitch them when they're on holiday, but welcome them when they're back and give them a couple of days to settle in and then be useful to them. I remember following one Instagram— one journalist who was on Instagram. This is something else I should mention. You've got journalists and influencers, and then you've got journalists with an Instagram following who are also influencers. So there's a Venn diagram where they cross over, but then you've got people of influence who are not influencers, but they influence people genuinely rather than taking selfies. So you've got this kind of mix mix of personalities. I saw one journalist that I was really trying to get to for ages, and I knew she'd love this product. And I saw that she'd put saying something like, my roof's falling in, does anyone have roofer recommendations in Southwest London? And I DM'd her 3 that I had got from friends, and I'd used one of them and gave her that information. She said, oh, thank you so much, that's so helpful. I recognize your name. Why do I— what? And I said, oh, well, I actually pitched you about blah blah blah. And our conversation started that way. So when I say be genuinely useful to them, it doesn't necessarily always have to be about work, but they are all raising their own profiles. The media landscape is shifting very quickly. They're getting on Substack, they're doing their own podcasts. Like, there's other ways to get into their universe and get their recognition. It can feel like a slog at times, and this is why it's really important to make sure that you're going to the right journalist with the right angle at the right time. And that's something we help with, um, because when you— when it works and it gets there, the journalist is thrilled because you're giving them information that they really actually want. And then that, that flow starts, and they— you're getting back to them on time, you never let them down, they trust you, they'll come to you again. There's a lot of people— and this is what I want to change with what we're doing and PR— people like, oh, PRs are just like car salesmen and realtors. And HR recruiters, it's all talk, no action. It's like, I've never once let a journalist down. I always manage their expectations. I do what I say I'm going to do. If I can't get the answer, I tell them and why. Just be really frank, really professional, and build that relationship. And they will come to really learn to trust and love you and come to you first. Like, I'm on deadline, I need a quote, can you help? And they're like, yeah, sure, no problem. And that's where you want to get to with your top 10 media targets. And that's enough, that's plenty, you'll be busy with that.

This is incredible, I hope everybody can get the best of everything you shared today and with that we will close our Q&A session. Julia, would you like to share, to say something for an end, a parting message?

Thank you, well, thank you for listening, I know it's a lot of words and obviously I'm sort of paid to talk in my career, but I'm really thrilled to have the opportunity to try and like demystify it a bit because I can, I know, I completely appreciate how overwhelming it can be, but I really hope it's helpful and just stay in touch. Like, we'd love to hear from you. Actually, we're launching our new season of the podcast. It's all going to be a focus around branding. We've just finished on investment, so if you guys have any questions you'd like successful entrepreneurs to answer about branding Voice note me or DM me or email me and we'll edit you into the episode. And we'd love live questions like, my biggest branding question is, and we'll get it answered for you. That would be amazing, but no pressure. But thank you for your time.

Sounds great. Thanks again for joining us, and everyone, feel welcome to join our networking lounge. Also check our other events and subscribe to the newsletter. You will find the links in the chat. So see you in a bit in the lounge. Bye, Juliette.

Thank you so much.