How to...Contact a Blogger

How to…Contact a Blogger

Bloggers and blogging have taken the world by storm – bloggers have the power to influence millions of consumers. In this digital age, consumers are more likely to trust the word of a blogger than other more traditional marketing tactics and businesses should be paying attention.

So where do you start? How do you approach a blogger without ending up in their spam folder? Why do consumers trust bloggers more than ads or journalists? What are bloggers looking for? What do bloggers need to feature you and your product or service?

The Sunny Bird PR team sent out questionnaires to our network of bloggers to get the answers to these important questions…

- What sort of assets do bloggers look for to feature a particular product or service?

Tip: Ensure all this information is in your pitch

Price point, back link, social media handles, information on the service or product and a link for them to download high res imagery. If the blogger is interested in featuring your product or service, they will be able to get everything they need from your initial email.

Give them the opportunity to receive samples as this allows them to use the product first hand and hopefully fall in love with it! 

- If you were contacted with a pre-written article and hi-res imagery, would you write a blog post around that particular article?

Tip: Tailor-make each blogger approach

Bloggers don’t want recycled news stories or stories that have been covered before. If it is tailored to their blog and audience, they will be more likely to include your story or product in a round up.

- What are your pet hates when it comes to being approached?

Tips: Do your research!

You need to do your research! Be friendly but not over friendly and think to yourself “how would I like to be approached if I was a blogger?”

As a PR company, it is our job to know bloggers and their blogs inside out and back to front.

- What would you say is most important when it comes to how you are approached?

Tips: Make your blogger your friend

Send them emails, read their blogs, follow them on social media, share their posts and show them that you care. A good relationship with your blogger will reward you with good coverage.

As PR’s we understand that it takes time to build a good rapport, but if you stick to these tips with the right pitch, positive attitude and research conducted, there’s a strong chance your product will be all over the blogosphere in no time!

If you would like support with your blogger campaign or outreach give the dream team a call on 01202 293095 or email hello@sunnybirdpr.com.

Instagram’s New Feature: Instagram Slideshows

As with any new tool on any social media platform, if you find the most effective way to use it, it can earn you 100’s of likes, additional followers and even help you achieve influencer status. Instagram’s latest feature is a brilliantly creative one and we couldn’t wait to get involved and start posting.

As we were doing our mid-morning scroll through Instagram today, we came across the news of Instagram’s latest feature. We’ve been dying to share lots of photos to explain more about the creative concepts behind our PR campaigns without bombarding our Instagram page and followers with too much information. Thanks to Instagram’s new Slideshow feature we are able to share more visual detail when it comes to our Instagram posts.

Without creating a collage or cluster of images on another app, it can be hard to tell the full story of your product, service, experience or a piece of coverage with just one photo. But the day has come for users to now post a collection of up to ten images in one single post. The slideshow posts have a line-up of small blue dots at the bottom of each post to show followers how many images you have in your slideshow and to show them to swipe to the left to see more.

Whilst this brand new feature will require more time to create your everyday post, we have fallen in love with the brand new feature.

How to use Instagram Slideshows:

1.       Gather a collection of images to tell a complete visual story on your phone.

2.       In Instagram, click on the ‘Add Post’ icon in the bottom centre of the app.

3.       In the ‘Add Image’ screen that follows, you will see ‘Select Multiple’ highlighted in grey. Click it.

4.       Select up to 10 files you want to include. Simply tap on the images in the order you want them to appear in and Instagram puts a small blue dot in the upper left-hand corner of each image thumbnail showing you the numerical order your images will appear in the slideshow.

5.       Click ‘Next’ at the top right of the app.

6.       You can apply filters just like a regular image post and then write your caption just as you normally would.

7.       Tag featured businesses/vendors/brands that appear in the images.

8.       Post and celebrate your slideshow!

We’ve created our first slideshow which can be found on our Instagram feed here and we think it’s a great way to get your message, experience or brand concept in front of your followers in a fun and original way. Head over to our feed to check it out.

How to... Contact a Journalist

A good relationship with the press is absolutely key for PR, without this your story will never see the light of day but how do you cultivate one of these elusive, sacred relationships? Journalists are absolutely inundated every day by 100s of emails, calls (mobile and office), direct tweets, old fashioned post and people turning up at their offices armed with product for them to try. On top of this barrage of communication on all fronts, journalists still need time to research and write their articles. So how do we get through all this noise and make ourselves heard without becoming a nuisance and being ‘ghosted’?

1. Journalists are human too

- Don’t send them blanket emails, don’t just BCC your pitch out with a generic ‘Hi’ or ‘Good Morning’ as it will end up unopened in the trash – they’ll know that you’ve sent it out to the world and its dog

- Take the time to read their articles before sending them information on your product/brand/service/story to ensure that it is suitable and refer back to one of their articles so they know that you’ve bothered to do your research

2. The early pitch catches the coverage

- Email journalists earlier in the week and in the morning because fewer journalists work on the weekend and your email should appear in their inboxes when they’re planning out their work for the week

3. Know Thy Journalist

- Going back to ‘journalists are human’, they all have their own preferred style or method of communication. Some will never respond to emails, others will only reply to emails and never take calls, some like that personal touch and can spare five minutes for you to see them face to face, others use twitter to get their stories. Unfortunately there’s no shortcut to this – you just have to learn and remember. We make a point of finding out from our journalists and here’s a peek at some of their bugbears and preferences...

We’ve spent years cultivating our relationships with journalists and have worked hard to make sure that we know them well enough to pitch the right stories to them at the right time with the assets they like best. This has paid off, not only do we get stories placed in the most coveted titles but they even like us! You can see what some journalists say about Sunny Bird PR here... https://www.sunnybirdpr.com/testimonials/

4. Keep your eyes peeled

- If a journalist says they’re going to run with your story, politely ask for an expected date so you can keep an eye out for your coverage – no one wants to go through steps 1-3 and then miss the coverage after all that hard work!

- If it’s a hard copy, make sure you get a copy when it does come out, hell, get two or three copies

- If it’s online, save it down so you always have a copy in case they take it down in the future

- Share it far and wide on all your social platforms – make sure it’s well presented if it’s a scan or an accessible link if it’s online

5. Remember your manners

- Say thank you!

- Send a handwritten, personalised card and some chocolate (that’s what we do) to the lovely journalist that featured you – if you keep them sweet they might even feature you again :) 

We hope this blog post has been useful and will fill you with confidence next time you’re approaching the press. We appreciate that it’s incredibly time intensive and there’s no short cut to creating these relationships. If you would like to get your story into the press but don’t have that much time on your hands feel free to give us a call on 01202 293095 or drop us a line at hello@sunnybirdpr.com.