Last week on the ACE Webinar, we spoke to PR Specialist Katy Moore who worked in PR for over 10 years. Here are 3 must-haves for any Café wanting to put themselves on the map:

1) Imagery is essential!
This can be the difference between getting a story across the line or not. If you are going to invest in something, invest in this! If you cannot afford a photographer, get the best quality photos you can with a good phone. Video Footage is incredibly valuable too.

You are going to want to consider taking:
•Pack shots- still or moving image of a product, usually including its packaging and labelling, such as Coffee beans
•Lifestyle shots- imagery that aims to capture portrait/people in situations, real-life events in an artistic way e.g. people picking up their food, ordering Coffee etc.
•Bio shots- you will most definitely need ‘Bio’ shots. These are for the biographies of key people who may be mentioned in stories such as the founder of the Café. Get a head and shoulders shot of the individual, as well as a lifestyle shot.

2) Have a newsworthy story
Start with any hooks you have such as impressive figures to reel the reader in. Keep the story non emotive, factual and relevant to the journalist you are sending it to. Do not send a story about hospitality to a journalist who writes about sport. You can use an eye-catching headline and elaborate with an interesting sub-header to generate interest.

A great, free tool Katy recommends to assist with this is: coschedule.com/headline-analyzer . Pop your headline into there and it will make recommendations on how to optimise it for SEO purposes.

3) Quotes & biographies
Quotes can be used to add emotion, an opinion and help the reader connect with individuals -whether this be the Café owner, loyal customers or the Café’s barista. Quotes must always include the name of the speaker and their contact details, should the journalist require any more information.

Packaging it all up
How you present everything to journalists makes a difference. They are incredibly busy and often short on time so making the information easy to read and assets easy to access increases your chance of them picking up your story.

Katy recommends:
•Storing the images on a Dropbox to make them easy for Journalists to access. High quality images take up a lot of space and this is perfect for that purpose.
•Getting your social media channels up to scratch prior to this. Journalists will look at this first.
•Allowing them to find more information by including your contact details and other sources of information. If you do not have a website, create an Instagram page- it is free and easy to create. You can even have it say ‘Website coming soon’. Ensure everything is up to date.

Media Outreach Checklist
-Story including quotes
-Few images in the body of the email
-Link to more images
-Attached biographies and biography shots

Keep a record of the details of who you reached out to and do not forget to follow up. If they do not respond to this story, they may do so for another.

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