The Tasks

Task One: session 2

I’ve been concentrating on the idea for the launch with the press. I kind of pulled together a proposal and contacted a few different places about where it might be able to be done and who might be interested in offering up the space for that. I have a place and am really just at the stage where I’m finalising the nitty gritty of the ideas between myself and Liberties Tea Room.

They’re happy to host it. Which is great, I’m really excited because it’s a lovely location, but obviously it’s linked as well which is perfect, it’s not just a random place.

What sort of event did you go for?

Well, that’s what we’re just finalising at the moment. I put together some ideas. Obviously they want to be able to kind of make it work for them as well. I put together two different ideas. Typically, just when I was hoping to get to the bottom of it and set a date, the manager has gone away on holiday.

I’m now waiting for that person to get back and get to grips with the idea and what they want to go with. One of my ideas is to bring in different teas into different senses; so it might be taste, or visually, smell... all kinds of different things. But also, they’ve got some brilliant cocktail bar tenders, so there’s that angle as well; maybe cocktails and cakes. There are loads of different ideas.

We’ve got the Tea Room there, but if we felt that we wanted to do it in one of the other places in Liberties, we’d be able to use the champagne bar of the cafe on the second floor. So the Tea Room is in-keeping but we can use the other spaces as well.

Excellent, well done! If that comes off it’ll be fantastic!

I just thought immediately, there’s something there for people to be interested in, and if we can agree on the nitty gritty, which I’m pretty certain we can, then it’s just a case of setting a date and going for it.

I’ damaging they’ve got their own PR people as well, who’d be able to advertise it too?

Exactly! It’s a nice coup. And on the other side of things, I just need to get cracking on sending out the little tips. I’ve compiled the list, and concentrated on the main event when I’ve got five minutes. I thought it’d be really quick and easy to do but it wasn’t quick and easy to do.

So my priority, this week and this month is to particularly home in on actually starting down that avenue, using the list that I’ve compiled, and use that to get out to people.

Sometimes compiling a list, especially for people like you because you need to get out to quite a few people, is very time consuming. Now you’ve got that done you’ve got the main donkey work out of the way.

That’s what I thought. There was a lot of ringing around to make sure I had the right email addresses and stuff like that. I’ve compiled that, and also, we’re doing quite a large number of events over the summer so I’ve come up with a few PR opportunities around those as well. So my PR time needs to be split between different things.

For example, the Real Food Festival, there was a good opportunity to get involved with that, so I’ve had to balance it out really.

Okay, well I had a couple of other suggestions of other things that we could be adding to that today. Bearing in mind the stuff you’ve already got going on with your food festivals and things, I don’t want to overload you. Let me just suggest them and we’ll see if either or both fit in with what you’re currently doing...

The first one is competitions... do you do any of that at the moment?

I do them myself, we obviously run our subscriber newsletters and we have done some in a couple of paid-for local publications. But we haven’t done anything further afield.

One of the suggestions I’ve got, which I know a number of my clients have used quite well, especially in the food industry, is to actually set a competition strategy together. Aim for a certain number of competitions a month, and it could just be one, but a number going out each month.

I know that Delia Online works very well; lots of subscribers came from that for one of my clients. BBC Good Food Magazine in also a good one. Also things like food bloggers and women’s websites. Mainly concentrating online, because we’re talking about getting people coming through to your website, and also getting subscribers to your newsletter.

Set yourself a goal of setting up a certain amount of competitions a month. And because you’re doing different festivals, I would imagine that most of these would have their own websites anyway; so you might be able to very quickly set a competition up with those.

So I approach them with a competition idea basically.

Yes, things like Delia Online, there will be someone who deals with online content. So you need to find out who that is. You need to find out if there’s a minimum prize value, as sometimes there is. If you keep coming up against that you may want to partner up with someone who does perhaps designer teapots or something...

Okay, so it’s linking up to make it more interesting I suppose, and of more value?

Yes. If you even just do one of those a month, that’s 12 competitions in a year in publications that could introduce new readers to you. When you set up the competition, try and set the questions so they have to come to your website, they have to visit you.

And another thing to think about is, often when they run competitions, the replies will to go to them, but if you ask to handle all that, it’ll be extra work for you, but at least you can email everyone back and say sorry you didn’t win this time, but would you like to subscribe to our newsletter, or something like that... it’s a great way of getting subscribers, as well as just general PR and SEO.

So if you think you could fit that in, that could potentially be an easy win for you.

The other thing is Twitter, do you do any Tweeting?

Lots. Well, we’re not on it all the time, but we do Twitter.

How do you grow your list?

What I’ve done so far seems to have worked. I’ve got about 800 followers, which is growing and, I don’t know... I do an awful lot of, sounds really weird; I’ll drop in a lot of more lifestyle based stuff. For instance on Easter Sunday I said, “Just reading the papers with a pot of vanilla mist and crumpets, now to crack open the Easter egg”, things like that; and just getting into conversations about things that are relevant.

Do you have many press people following you?

I’ve got some women’s magazines, lots of food bloggers, food magazines; I’ve had some stuff off the back of that particular industry caterer and restaurant magazine and things like that...

It sounds as though you’ve got that covered in a way. If you thought you wanted to devote some more time to it, my suggestion would be to concentrate on actively following more journalists in the hope that they might follow you back. You may feel that that’s in hand already.

I think pretty much twitter is something that I recommend to other people all the time, and it’s something that I’ve got into in a way that I’ve found really positive. I maybe just need to find some more press people. I’ve found that the more direct, obvious approach seems to work best, rather than the subtle approach. We also link up to the Facebook page, things like that.

That sounds like that’s in hand. How about the competitions, does that sound like something you’d like to go for?

Definitely. We’ve linked up with a couple of companies before and run competitions either as a prise or as a combination. That’s worked pretty well, but obviously we’ve only done it intra-company, we’ve not taken it outside anywhere. That’s a really good idea to home in and do a similar thing, but actually take it further afield. I’ll have a look through pretty much online stuff, and identify the people that handle the competitions on those websites, I’ve got ideas of people I can get in touch with in order to try and make it a much bigger prize.

I know Channel Four’s got an excellent food site.

Yes they have. With regards to prizes, say you team up with a designer teapot or something, do you presume that that person is happy to get involved because it promotes them, or are you expected to cover the cost of the teapot that’s put up as the prize?

If it’s a partner I’d be getting in contact with them first and say would they be interested in doing a joint effort, promoting your teapots and my tea. And you’ll probably need to have a little photo shoot which shows off both as one product. You’re effectively looking for a partner. And they might well have some contacts that they can use to sort out some competitions themselves.

I usually look for companies that are more prolific than us in the PR world, and who are more prevalent, because obviously they’ll be able to help more.

With regards to email addresses, people who enter the competition; if we handle that, do we have to state that the information is going to be shared between the two partners, is that how it works or does one person predominantly get all the details?

Quite often when you enter competitions, you’ll have to tick something to say your details can be used, so I think as long as you had that covered you’d be alright. If it’s an online competition with a bigger company, like Delia Online for instance, they’ll have that covered, they’re not going to risk it are they?

And you think that you should aim for about one a month?

You can aim for as many as you want. But it’s better to aim for one and do that without fail every month, than it is to aim for seven and not be bothered because it’s too many. And it will probably take a few months for some of these to happen. And you might find that in some months you get more than one. Obviously you said it might take a few months for it to happen, but I guess with anything like this it’s just a case of persevering..?

Yeah, I’d imagine you’d be able to set up something with food-blogger sites pretty quickly; they shouldn’t take a few months. But equally, sites like Delia Online might take some time and a little bit of perseverance, a bit of reminding people that you’re there and that kind of stuff...

I did something at Liberty Tea rooms a couple of weeks ago actually with six food bloggers. It was a tea tasting that they’ll obviously blog about, but I suppose I could have linked a competition with one of those.

You could do, but if they’ve written about it already, it’s probably better to go back to them later with the idea for a competition than to have it all at once. That way you’ve got double the exposure.

Excellent! And with the tips that we spoke about, obviously the tips and recipes information, I found some of those harder than I thought. Maybe I’m thinking about it too much...

How many teas do you have in your range?

We have about 25, but there are about 12 to 15 that I predominantly focus on as they’re much easier for people to get hold of and get into...

Well, the other thing you can do if you find that tips are a little bit off beat is to have a product of the month, and tie it in seasonally. So there might be a tea that’s perfect for winter, and you can just do it month by month.

So I could just mix it up, if I’ve got some tips and some products..?

No I wouldn’t mix it up, I would just keep to one. Because the idea is that it’s brand building, so you want the same thing, or the same brand going into their inbox each month.

Okay, just keep reinforcing and jogging their minds.

Yes, it’s just straightforward simple product of the month, with a nice picture, that does it.

The other thing you could do, thinking about competition wise, when you get the event sorted, you could perhaps run that as a competition for someone to come along. Obviously that would have to be a nice title you ran that with, so think carefully about it about who it would be appropriate for... In fact, the BBC’s not far from there, and they have their own in house magazine; that could be quite nice for them.

So, do you want me to throw some more things at you to do, or do you feel you’ve got quite enough to get on with?

If there’s anything particular... obviously the event’s in hand, it just needs finalising. And Twitter is already ongoing, so maybe another idea...

The other thing really, PR wise, is article writing. There are so many things you could do with it. You could write an article about the different teas and their history and put them on article syndication websites.

You could get together with a women’s magazine that has stories in it, and sponsor a competition where it has to include one of you teas. Once you’ve stepped that up it can be quite nice as it’s essentially everyone else doing the work. And that can also be good as there’s the whole thing about reading a story with a nice cup of tea.

Brands like Costa, they use that concept quite a bit don’t they...

Yeah, they use music as well. They have their music of the month... I like the idea of featuring tea in a story and linking it up that way.

Yeah, you can either do it with a women’s magazine or a writers’ magazine, or you could even do it for your own website. I don’t know if you have any contact with writers, you could find some writers to judge. You could even have an annual award..!?

That sounds like it could be a good idea. I did a survey on our website to find out what peoples’ favourite thing to have with a cup of tea was. And the favourite thing that came out was tea and a good book. So that links in really nicely.

You could link it in with an initial press release saying about how as a result of this survey you decided to put together this award, and competition.

See, that’s how your mind works. It’s how my mind should work. It’s thinking, covering all those things and making the links. That’ll keep me quite busy.

That’s quite a long project, these awards and competitions generally have quite a long lead time, say around six months, so your closing date is going to be somewhere around November or something like that... but yeah, that could be very good. Have you got a provisional idea of when the Liberty thing is going to be?

Well, I obviously wanted to give it enough lead time, and I was hoping to do it in April or May, but we’re in April already, and she’s on holiday until next week. And so I want to get that nailed. Would four weeks be a good enough lead time?

I imagine the end of May would be good, or even some time in June. But I’d get it done before the end of July. Hopefully by our next session you’ll have a date set for that so we can talk more about the practical side of that...

I’ll make sure that I have that by next time we speak.