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Restaurant PR Press Releases
| For Immediate Release: 9/1/2006 |
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| September 2006 – PR Power |
| What’s a proven way to increase business at your restaurant? |
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Sante Magazine column -
What’s a proven way to increase business at your restaurant?
Via media communications. How? By successfully communicating with the media, you place stories in the press that expose your business to [ital]all the people who see it[ital]. Magazine, newspaper, TV show, or blog, you reach a multiple of potential customers that you could not reach any other way. A certain percentage of this group will become customers; how many depends upon the quality and frequency of the exposure.
One thing is true: If you [ital]do not[ital] communicate with the media, you guarantee that no one will read, see, or talk about you and your restaurant. Begin your media communications program today and give your business a chance. Where should you start? By writing a press release.
Key Document
Why do you need to know how to write a press release? The press release is the single most used document in public relations work. It is often the first line of communications between you and the media and one you will use frequently when communicating about your enterprise. A press release is used to announce an event or news related to your operation, and by delivering it to the media, you bring your event or news to their attention. They might file it away until it becomes useful to them (to be included in a story or when it relates to a timely event), or they might act upon it immediately by contacting you to find out more.
Whether you use a press release to alert the media to an event or simply to inform (e.g., you have a new menu, a new product, a new customer base or you’ve developed a new technique that will impact business) or to elicit some sort of response (perhaps because you have breaking news of an urgent nature), there is a right way to approach the job.
Send? Don’t send?
Before getting into the task of gathering and organizing information to write your release, always ask yourself if what you want to say is of interest to the media---and their audience. If you decide that it’s not, don’t write it. Be brutally honest because, all too often, press releases are written and distributed to (1) keep PR people busy or (2) keep your name constantly in front of the media. In either case, all you receive for your hard work and effort is annoyed people on the receiving end, and you can’t risk that. An irritated audience is an unresponsive audience.
If you tie your idea to a current news peg, you stand a better chance of succeeding and getting your story some coverage. And if you can’t relate the subject of your press release to the life or work of your target media’s audience, then there’s no reason to send it.
Media Data Base
You will send your release to any number of different audiences, chief among them the media (other audiences include your customers, your own industry, community, government, and so forth). You can build your own list of media or buy one from companies such as Bacon’s or BurrellesLuce, which provide you with basic contact information and, when possible, reporter or editor/producer interest. You can also purchase a list of media contacts from my company, Restaurant PR, which will provide a custom list of restaurant, lifestyle media, and freelance food and restaurant writers, complete with contact information, areas of interest, and, where available, lead times for each media and how that journalist prefers to receive information (e-mail, snail mail, or phone).
Whether you purchase your list or develop it yourself, I highly recommend handing it to a list-management company to maintain. List-maintenance outfits are low cost, and they don’t drain your company’s resources.
In my next column, we’ll actually get down to writing your press release.
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