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You and your staff use public relations to sell your pub every single moment of the day.

 

Every hour of attention you lavish on your customers, every minute you spend creating great menus and every moment you spend in your cellar is a form of PR.

 

So, because you have this natural ability, all we aim to do with this guide is channel those talents with a simple step-by-step process to generating positive media coverage for your pub.

 

In addition, it also contains some templates for press releases, photo calls, some advice on crisis management and, as this is a Pub Aid guide after all, how to promote your charitable works.

 

We’ve aimed to keep this as brief as possible, whilst still giving you vital information that you need – but if you have any feedback at all please email info@pubaid.com with any suggestions.

 

Before you start making more work for yourself, it’s important to check what resources you have at your disposal.

 

So, here’s a quick set of questions that will help you focus your efforts in the right direction.

 

1. Are you part of a wider pub group? Then ask your area manager about centralised PR support for your pub, they may have an in-house PR department or retain an agency for this purpose – they should offer most of the assistance you need, but to make sure you’re getting the most out of them, do read the rest of this guide.

 

2. Are you a freeholder or untied lessee? In which case have you got a regular who’s in PR? Is one of your locals a journalist? Or can you identify a copywriter at the bar?

 

3. Do you have a member of staff with good writing skills? This doesn’t mean the in-house lyricist, someone who writes strong business letters or emails, with correct grammar and spelling, is far more useful than your Poet Laureate staffer.

 

4. Are you taking this on yourself? If so, have you budgeted for the time it takes to write a release, organise photography & contact the media? It takes longer than you might think!

Once you have your support network or plan in place, you can move onto the business of identifying opportunities to PR your establishment and how best to do so.

 

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1. What’s Your USP?
Identifying your unique selling point, i.e. what makes you different from every other pub in the area, is the very first step you should take when considering your PR plan.

Do you offer the best food/beer/welcome/garden/games/family environment?

Or is it that you’ve won the most awards or are the most charitably active pub in the area?

Whatever it is, you need to focus attention on this in order to build your media profile.

 

2. What’s Your Target Audience?
Realistically, your target audience is your local population – so the local media is your most important conduit to reaching them.

 

So the first thing to do is find out who the right person is to talk to at your local paper/papers and ask them if they can spend a couple of minutes just talking you through how they like to receive information and what sort of story they would genuinely be interested in.

It’s always worth asking them to pop in for a drink or a bite to eat to talk this through, there’s nothing journalists like more than a free lunch!

 

3. Do you have a story?
There’s nothing more guaranteed to get a journalist’s back up than to insist you have a story when there isn’t one.

 

For example: presenting a cheque for £42.98 to a local charity, no matter how hard you worked to raise those funds, isn’t going to interest even the local newspaper on the slowest day, sorry but it’s true.

 

However, if this is the 21st cheque you’ve presented to the charity over the last five years, raising in total over £700 for them, then that’s a story – it may only be a picture caption in the paper (for which you’ll probably have to provide the picture) but at least it’s coverage for your pub.

 

4. Managing Story Expectations
Chances are that you’ll be running interesting and exciting events throughout the year – whether it’s running family fun days, beer festivals, St George’s Day celebrations, Christmas in Summer or even covering your whole floor in turf to celebrate the rugby world cup or the Ashes!

All these things are worth notifying the press about both in advance in the form of a press release and releasing photographs afterwards.

 

However, do be careful how you bill these things when you are first involving the press; if it’s an annual event that you know attracts a whole host of people then be confident in your announcements, billing it as one of the hottest tickets in town etc.

 

If it’s a new event that you’ve got high hopes for but no real idea of how it’s going to go, be much more circumspect in your approach and perhaps avoid media invites for the first year/occasion.

 

5. Executing Effective Communications
Deadlines are the most important things to a journalist and helping them hit these deadlines is one of the most important things you can do to get your story into the papers.

When you speak to your local press make sure you identify when those deadlines are and how you can provide information in the correct format to the journalist to meet them.

Budgets are also something to take into consideration – although you might not incur any direct costs by writing and emailing out the release or taking photographs yourself, your time is still valuable.

 

After three months of engaging in your PR campaign, take a minute to assess whether this is a cost-effective exercise for you or whether you are willing to continue absorbing any expenses incurred.

 

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Below we are providing a guide to the basics of writing a press release, we promise it’s not complicated to learn.

 

However, if you’re not confident in your use of the English language we recommend buying Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss – it’s an entertaining guide to better grammar – and of course make sure your spell check and grammar check are switched on in Word!

 

The Basics
1. Who, What, Where, When, Why & How - if you haven’t got these six things then you haven’t got a story.

 

2. Make One Main Point Per Story - don’t confuse your messages by trying to cram everything into one place; your strategy should be one topic per story to keep people’s interest.

 

3. Boring Data Must Come Later – whatever you are writing about, you have to seize the reader’s interest in the first paragraph. Complex numbers and boring data won’t do that, salient and headline-grabbing statistics will.

 

Understanding the difference is vital, if you’ve donated a £1,000 to charity or will have more beers on at the beer festival than anyone else in the area has ever done then that’s of interest, but it has to be engaging!

 

4. One Thought Per Sentence - keep it short and sweet and you’ll have the reader’s attention.

 

5. Strong Logical Development - don’t waffle, be succinct and make sure there is a natural progression to your story.

 

6. Headlines - headlines need to be punchy and exciting, long-winded headlines bore and turn readers off.

 

7. Room to Breathe - space your text out, well spaced paragraphs allow note making on the releases and make for easy reading.

 

8. Keep Your Fonts Clean - flowery, complex fonts are difficult and unpleasant to read; comic sans is not an option!

 

9. Keep It Short & Sweet - think about how much information really needs to be in each paragraph, can you break it up into two or more chunks?

 

10. Notes to Editors – the person you normally deal with could leave, or be off sick the day you send your release in, so never imagine for a minute that basic information isn’t a valuable commodity. On the bottom of every press release there should be a brief statement about your pub’s offering, its website address, physical address, telephone number and your contact details.

 

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Everyone these days seems to think that you can do anything with a digital image on a computer to make it printable – but I’m afraid that US crime dramas have a lot to answer for!

Basically, if the image you start off with isn’t of sufficient quality then newspapers and magazines won’t be able to use it – and even if they do the pictures will appear grainy and unprofessional, which will directly affect people’s perception of your premises.

 

You will hear the phrase ‘dpi’ from the press when talking about photography, all this means dots per square inch, and here’s a really simple way of thinking about this.

 

Think about an image of a postage stamp that’s made with grains of sand, that’s a very small picture with enough grains of sand per square inch to make it a coherent picture but if you tried to make those grains of sand stretch to make a picture the size of an A4 piece of paper you wouldn’t be able to tell what it was, because there wouldn’t be enough grains, or dots, per square inch to form a coherent image.

 

Exactly the same principle applies to digital images.

 

If you don’t set your digital camera to not only take high-quality pictures, but download them as such as well, then you won’t have enough dots per square inch to produce a high-quality image and you could miss out on a valuable PR opportunity.

 

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These days a bad web presence is almost worse than no web presence at all and an out-of-date web presence is a very bad advert for your business indeed.

Below is a quick guide to the tools available to you for online marketing and a brief synopsis of how to make them effective.

 

If you can’t afford to set up a proper website then there are a lot of free alternatives that, if kept updated regularly, can help you promote your site.

 

The first thing you need to do with all of these web tools, however, is to ensure that people know about them! So, when you launch your website/blog/Facebook page/MySpace presence or personalised social network don’t forget to put the web address on posters around the pub, and at the bottom of your menus and press releases.

 

Websites
The first step to take when you are thinking about website design is to trawl the internet for how you would best like to portray your pub, check out what the opposition is offering and then settle on your three favourite pub websites and get three separate quotes from three different companies.

 

Remember, as with any other tradesman’s quote, the cheapest isn’t always the best – make sure you ask to see examples of their previous work and testimonials from satisfied clients.

When you are writing the brief for your website, in the main it’s best to keep it simple. Simple design, navigation and information are all key to a strong web presence.

Another to make sure of when you are setting out your requirements for your website is that you are able to keep it regularly updated through the use of a simple private area of the site, that only you can log into.

 

What this will allow you to do is keep your food, beer or wine menus to date or make sure people know the details of special events or regular quiz/music nights.

 

Facebook
A ubiquitous word in today’s society and the way that many people now choose to communicate with each other to organise drinks, birthday parties and pretty much life in general!

Having a www.Facebook.com page as your web presence, or in addition to it, is not a bad place to start. The added bonus is that you can create a ‘group’ that you can constantly communicate with.

 

It’s very simple to do, but if you’re finding it difficult, ask anyone under the age of 30 and they’ll be almost guaranteed to be able to help you.

 

Blogs
For those of you who don’t know what a blog is, the word is short for web log and it is designed as an online diary.

 

We think the most user-friendly version of this free service is www.blogspot.com but there’s also www.wordpress.org as well, which is a little more advanced.

 

These are very simple to set up and are good to create a nice interaction with your clientele as many of them will start to follow the blog on a regular basis.

 

Personalised Social Networking Sites
Hosted by such entities as www.ning.com you can actually create your own Facebook-style social network.

 

For example, the Boxing Donkey in Roseville, California has nearly 200 members of its social networking site, which it uses to send out what are called broadcast messages (group emails effectively) to all its patrons and followers – thus always being able to reach them when it is holding special events, or to engender further loyalty by creating special offers solely for the site.

 

MySpace
The forerunner of Facebook, www.MySpace.com is now primarily used by music-driven venues, so if you offer live music then it’s probably a really good place for you to start or add a web presence.

 

The other key to using MySpace is to ensure that you enquire of every musical act that comes through your doors whether they have a MySpace page too – and by linking to theirs you will not only be encouraging their fans to follow them through your doors but you’ll probably get quite a bit of return business once they know you offer their kind of music.

 

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