Not every retailer has the budget to implement a marketing plan, and two critical factors in making sure you succeed are, firstly, ensuring your customer service is the best that it can be in order to ensure repeat business, loyalty and recommendation, and secondly, to make sure you’re doing enough to publicise your offering.

No matter how great your service is, you can’t expect your business to flourish by word of mouth alone, you need to tell people about it to raise awareness and encourage people to cross your threshold and find out more about you. What’s the point in investing so much time and effort into your outlet and not blowing your own trumpet?

While posters and flyers are a great way of promoting sales and one-day discounts, if you’re doing something with the ‘wow’ factor, the best way to engage with customers is to win the support of the local press, who can help promote your business.

While simply opening your doors every morning or holding a sale isn’t enough to interest the press, there are countless opportunities for every business to promote itself through PR and reach a wider audience of potential customers – from opening a new premises, unveiling a refurbishment, recruiting new staff, becoming a champion for the local community or supporting a local charity.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve worked with both high street brands and independent retailers to help raise awareness, enhance reputation and get them noticed for all the right reasons. And we’re sharing our top ten tips to help start-ups and independent retailers feel more confident about approaching the press to promote their business.

1. Find a hook that would interest you as a potential customer, rather than a retailer – something that will attract interest from existing and new customers and lead to them coming to investigate. Whether it’s the chance to witness a world record attempt or take advantage of a butcher’s advice on how best to prep the Christmas turkey, offer them something different!
2. Tap into the local community – if you support a local charity, or you’re taking part in an initiative to support one, be it sitting in a bath of baked beans or running a marathon, shout about it and call upon others to sponsor you or join you in raising awareness and funds
3. Be sure to give the press enough time – don’t tell them the day before your event. Give them advance notice, a couple of weeks if you can. If the paper comes out every Thursday, aim to contact them on a Thursday, after that week’s deadlines have gone – that gives them the biggest time frame to consider it for the following week. If it’s an evening paper, share your story after 1pm, as the newsroom will be less frantic
4. Buy or borrow a copy of the newspapers you’re hoping to reach, and decide who is the best person to send your story to. Is there a specific reporter for your area? Is there a reporter who focuses on retail issues? If you can’t find a named contact, call and ask, or get a general newsroom email address where you can send your story to. Make sure that you’ve got it right, with dots, dashes and underscores in the right place.
5. If you’re sending an email, keep it to the point. A good subject line generates interest, so avoid ‘Press Release’ and instead, cite the story itself: e.g. Bradford bakery aims to bake the world’s largest loaf / Cannock boutique set to host charity summer fashion show. Keep the body of the email short and sweet, use the journalist’s name if you’re writing to a specific person and refer to the publication you’re targeting – let them know you’re not just sending a blanket email to every paper in the county
6. If possible, send a photograph with your story to capture readers’ imaginations. Never assume that a press photographer will have nothing better to do than come and take your picture. Aim to use a digital camera rather than a mobile phone – cameras offer a consistently good quality picture, whereas cameras can vary in quality and size
7. About that picture: Ensure everyone is looking the right way, that their eyes are open, and that they look the part – overalls/aprons if applicable, or that collars, ties and hems are straight. Double check there are no peculiar additions, such as road signs growing out of the subjects’ heads, and where possible, try to get your business signage into the picture
8. Include your picture caption on the press release, with the people and their title labelled left-right
9. Before you send anything off, spell check it and check for typos, and make sure that you’ve included your telephone number and email address should the recipient want more details
10. When it comes to following up with the press, continue to be mindful of the time you call, and be polite and courteous. While the story is important to you, it is one of many to them