When flicking through a magazine, newspaper or when watching your favourite TV show, there are enormous opportunities for strategic product placement.

For By Caprice this is a crucial platform for promoting our products and driving traffic to our stockists, on both a regional and national basis.

The first steps are identifying your target audience and looking at what outlets these consumers and customers buy and interactive with.
Once you have done that, you then need to identify opportunities with these media outlets. For instance, the fashion pages of a celebrity and entertainment magazine are one of the important outlets for By Caprice.

However, before you approach, it is important to ensure your product is relevant to the pages you are targeting and that your product appeals to their reader. Don’t forget this is all about offering something to the end consumer and it has to be something an editor can buy into.

I would then recommend you have the editorial tools and the correct media databases in place to start the pitching process. A press release explaining your product or service is important, especially if your product, for instance, needs introducing at some length. Keep press materials relevant and informative and do not waffle otherwise your release won’t be absorbed by the reader. Include images highlighting your hero product!

Target key pages within a magazine or newspaper and inform the journalist of any unique selling points, special features and key stockists (etc) that might be of interest. Target your email and phone call to that specific journalist – so important!!!

For a wider feature you could always offer an exclusive reveal if a certain outlet is the market leader in the industry in which your business is operating.

Remember there may be multiple outlets and opportunities and a full and successful PR campaign takes strategic planning and expertise. Although, if you do not have the budget for this, there are still PR opportunities any business can pursue. For instance, look at your local regional press and enquire about promoting your product or service through their editorial pages. Whether you send the editor images of products you stock / sell, or inform them of a sale or invite them along to an in-store event, build relationships and they will become brand advocates….

And always remember, editorial is 3 times more effective that advertising!

Read more:
PR – My key recommendations & tips

It’s important that we provide quality, on trend pieces at an affordable price point. However, it’s also important to listen to trends and understand the macro environment in which your business operates.

Knowing what is going on around you is a vital ingredient to the success of any company and will help you sell more. To sell more, businesses need to understand their customer and what’s influencing them, otherwise your business will never reach its full potential.

So the question is, ‘how do you know what your customer’s need and want?

Customer requirements on the surface may seem like a simple concept, but it is difficult to master for a number of reasons. Having the correct research skills is the first step otherwise you will have inaccurate information to work from.

This however may seem more complex than originally thought because customers are not always sure of what they want until they have it – bear this in mind when undertaking the necessary research.

It is also important to keep your goals and vision realistic as you may not have the ability, such as, the management structure or technology in place to make the changes required to meet your customer’s growing needs.

Companies that can provide the correct research skills, establish what their customers want and have the ability to make it a reality, will undoubtedly gain sustainable competitive advantage over their peers.

My 5 tips:

1. Talk to your customers directly
2. Undertake a competitor analysis – are my direct competitors offering their customers something better?
3. Read the news and know what’s going on – this will help you forward plan
4. Put yourself in your customer’s position and see things from their perspective
5. Be realistic because you cannot achieve the impossible

Read more:
50 shades of sales boost: Listening to trends has created a huge boost in sales