It was important to get some behind the scenes footage of the provenance of my luxury alpaca knitwear so that I could share these images in my marketing output and of course add them to my ecommerce website. We took photos and videos of the factory workers, the yarns, the snow-capped countryside and the hustle and bustle going on in the street markets.

I created this fledgling startup on a shoestring (I say shoestring because the maternity pay had just dried up) and I wasn’t allowed to return to my office job in the marketing agency. It was very much before the times of working from home being the norm, I decided to start an online company selling beautiful brightly coloured knitwear that I designed and imported. The concept was not dissimilar to my mother’s mail order company importing beads from around the world.

Marketing wise, I was having to compete with the ‘Big Boys’ – large companies who were well established and by all accounts dominating the industry. They were all very well known, and I was a ‘best kept secret’.

At the beginning, the main elements of my marketing strategy were: SEO, networking, awards, social media, exhibitions, advertising and pop-up shops.

My first step in attempting to reach new customers was to try to boost the SEO (search engine optimisation). I was addicted to seeing the Google analytics of visitors and would shriek out loud when I’d see No Of Users Currently On The Site with the green button showing which pages that visitor was on. It was really exciting. But it wasn’t the flurry of multiple visitors, that’s for sure.

I was selling something that was competing with cashmere, and at that time, the fibre alpaca was relatively unheard of, which is why my SEO efforts weren’t skyrocketing as people simply weren’t typing into Google: “alpaca knitwear”.

I joined several local networking groups, and on one occasion got into trouble with the chairman of the tennis club I had just joined as I had been, with hindsight, over-mentioning to the ladies team my upcoming sale I was doing at a local village hall and he’d received complaints. Oops!

The results from networking were mediocre as it was mainly service based business in the room, not retailers but it was good for introductions to other service providers such as accountants and social media experts…

…which led me to my next foray in trying to raise the profile of the new company: social media. Bearing in mind this was back in 2008/9 when Twitter had just been ‘born’ everyone seemed to be trying to work out how to optimize this along with Facebook and Pinterest.

This is where I got on very well and I set up a customer gallery in the albums part of my Facebook page, so whenever I’d do pop up shops, I would ask the new customers to pose in their latest purchase, which they were very happy to do.

In the end I did around 125 pop up shops whilst juggling two toddlers but this was a brilliant education in marketing in what to do and what not to do.

At the exhibitions and events I’d take my knitwear to, I’d observe what the other stall holders would do, or rather what hardly anyone wasn’t doing, and this was ‘data capture’ – collecting names and email addresses (this is life before GDPR) so that they could be added to the newsletter circulation.

I also spotted that very few people would have any branding present, so the customers would only see the products on sale, and not the company name and brand, so that if they had been added to the mailing list it wouldn’t be a shock to see who has just sent the email.

We three impactful created roller banners with quotes from what customers had said about the products, and these became ‘catch phrases’ that I could repeat in the marketing. For example, one person was trying on the cardigan and stroked it and said: “Ooh, this is as soft as silk!” so the next roller banner had this in big writing!

However, my sales still weren’t exploding plus I was exhausted driving from pillar to post to set up the pop-up shops.

Until one day I entered into and won a Dragon’s Den style award where we had to pitch our business to local dignitaries.  Before the awards the finalists were invited to a photoshoot which was published in the local newspaper and then the winners were profiled again in the papers.

Aha - I had my first taste of PR (public relations) and I LOVED it! This was going to be my new way to market my company and I set about buying all the publications that I assumed my target audience would read (a big tip is to see where your competitors are advertising or where they are featured by journalists).

I then made it my mission to get press coverage. My first ever email pitch netted a big splash in the Independent and this led to my inbox beeping with new sales.

This flurry of sales literally came on a Sunday and the day before I had done yet another pop-up shop and had zero sales, so this really made the PR aha lightbulb flash brightly!

Sales were coming in from places in the country I had never heard of, so it reminded me of the iconic lager advert: Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach'. From my experience, PR reaches new customers that other marketing methods cannot reach. Period.

I also remembered back to the days my mother ran her successful mail order company and had one small mention in the Daily Mail and this literally turned her business around. She went from invisible to household name over the years as she and her PR agent scooped so many PR successes and her database went from 400 to 40,000 names purely by the power of PR. 

So armed with the names of the shopping editors, stylists and features writers I made phone calls, sent samples, wrote emails and in the end, I could say that I was featured in most of the daily newspapers and women’s glossy magazines.

Along the way, I mastered the art of pitching to the press with fortunately more wins than mistakes (such as getting blacklisted by one stylist who I had called 5 times but I hadn’t realised this as I wasn’t taking notes of my contacts!). I loved this new way of marketing my company, especially because it worked as I was getting direct sales as a result.

PR is the oft forgotten piece to the marketing puzzle and I learnt this the long way. I spent money on google and magazine ads that didn’t convert, did face to face sales, but the one thing that worked and boosted the business each time I was featured, was the PR.

In the early days, I attended business events as I was keen to learn from the experts about running a business and promoting a business. I secretly really wanted to be up on the stage teaching people what I had learnt along the way and one day this dream came true. At one of these events, I met the business editor for The Sunday Times and a few weeks later, I was being photographed and shortly after that I made my first appearance in the publication which is known as the UK’s most widely read Sunday broadsheet newspaper.

I was invited by my tutor (when pregnant with my second child, who is currently doing her GCSEs) I had attended a local night school for a six-week course to learn the basics of setting up a company) to give a talk on the difference between PR and advertising. He had seen the progress and was impressed at all the publicity I had generated.

Little did he know that was the first business talk I ever given and that he was sowing a seed for the future. After the talk people booked me up to show them how they could get publicity for their start-ups and I started to pivot into what I am doing now and that is mentoring business owners, marketing and communications executives and VAs on how to become their own in-house PR agent.

If you are considering pitching your company to the press, I’d like to share with you five things you must do:

1. Have a compelling and timely reason to pitch your company, this is called a Press Hook. Don’t just talk about why your company is so good. Pitch when it’s relevant to the news cycle, such as an awareness day, an event, a survey, a government legislation, even a latest celebrity mishap or accomplishment 
2. Do the “Daily PR7”: That is, allocate just seven minutes of your day to do your PR activities. This is an achievable amount of time and you’ll get into this healthy marketing habit. I have a client who has had over 50 press mentions using this method, and better still, she only has 34 followers on Twitter, so anyone can do it!
3. The headline is one of the most important elements to your pitch. Be sure to have an eye-catching email header that encapsulates the whole pitch in just 5-7 words. Get inspiration from magazine front covers.
4. Be targeted: don’t waste your time and energy on publications (podcasts, TV and radio shows) that your target audience doesn’t consume
5. Warm up your dream journalist – before you pitch them be sure to follow them on their social media platforms and like, share and comment on their latest posts – generally be helpful in a non-stalking manner. Then when it comes time for you to pitch them, your name will be slightly familiar as opposed as you going in cold

Good luck and remember, don’t forget about the incredible power of PR to reach new customers, establish credibility, build your authority and to grow your brand’s awareness. It works!