Get Publicity in April Using Food-Related Days
April starts in two days, and with it comes a lot of food-related days that you can use to get some publicity.
Food Related Days in April 2010:April is:
• National Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato Sandwich Month• National Food Month
• National Pecan Month
• International Soyfoods Month
Select Days in April:
April 2: National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day
April 11: National Cheese Fondue Day
April 13: National Peach Cobbler Day (Yum!)
April 19: National Garlic Day
April 23: National Picnic Day (!)
April 28: National Blueberry Pie Day
April 29: National Shrimp Scampi Day
Submitting story ideas to the media based on food-related days can have good results. For example I got Lisa Reinhardt, a chocolatier, onto Channel 15 by using National Heart Health Month (because dark chocolate can be good for your heart). You can read how we did it here:
How to Get a TV Offer in 45 Minutes.
If we had just said “chocolate”, we might not have gotten any coverage. By tying it into Heart Health Month we got the attention of Channel 15.
And that's not the only example. Here's an article entitled "Wine suggestions for your Easter dinner" . Notice that the writer mentions specific wines by name? She had to get that information from *someone*. If you send story ideas like "best wines for a picnic" or "wines that go with blueberry pie", the wines listed in a future newspaper story could be YOUR wines.
So let’s put our thinking caps on again, and come up with some ideas for these special days. Then, submit a press release to your local TV stations and newspapers. You'll find that many of them will be interested in your story and your business.
From this month’s issue of Wine Business Monthly:Off-premise wine sales data for the second half of the holiday sales season saw a healthy boost with value increasing 6.3 percent and volume increasing 5.6 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to Nielsen Company-tracked data.Domestic wine sales increased 120% over imported wines during that period, and Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon showed the largest growth among the varietals.Below are the numbers (sorry about the layout. Blogger doesn't draw tables well)
Wine Source & Year-on-year Sales Growth:Domestic Wine Sales: 7.5%Imported Wine Sales: 3.4% Varietal & Case Volume Growth:Chardonnay: 2.6%Pinot Grigio: 3.8%Sauvignon Blanc: 6.7%Cabernet Sauvignon: 5.1%Also in an interesting note: Volume sales in the over-$20-per-bottle sales were up nearly 10% in that same time period.This is good news for everyone in the wine industry. Increases like this could be indicative of a rebound in wine sales, meaning, a better 2010!Here's Wine Business online.
AZ Wineries will be at the Tempe Festival of the Arts
The Tempe Festival of the Arts is next weekend (3/26 - 3/28), and the Arizona wineries have a pavili
on where happy visitors can go taste their great wines.
Naturally, the wineries want to sell as much wine as possible, so I’d like to give some suggestions for attracting more customers to your booth and selling more wine.
There’s a saying in marketing: “Give ‘em a reason to come see you, and then give ‘em a reason to come back”. Here are a few techniques to do that very thing.
Techniques to Get People to Your Wine Booth:
1. Send an email to your current list inviting them to stop by your booth. Even if you’ve done it earlier, do it again. People need to see any type of lead-generation communication at least three times before it registers. So send one last reminder.
2. In the email, give them a reason to come by. Offer a discount, or a special gift, or something inexpensive-yet-perceived-high-value that would entice them to come by your booth. It can be something as simple as a compilation of recipes for your wines.
3. Give them a reason to bring a friend. Offer yet another gift or discount if they bring one or more friends.
4. Get their email address. Have them drop their business card or a slip of paper with their name and email address on it into a fishbowl, with a drawing later to win one of 2-3 prizes. Hold a separate drawing every day of the festival.
5. Give them a reason to come back. After they’ve stopped by, give them a “preferred customer” card that they can use to get a gift or something the next time they visit you. Offer them something good enough that they’ll go out of their way to come by. For more tips, please refer to these previous posts:
Good luck to everyone at the festival! I’ll see you there!
What's New With You?A couple of months ago I was approached by a pizza parlor owner who wanted to get s
ome publicity for his store. So I asked some questions about his pizza to see if there was a story that we could use. The conversation went like this:
Me: "What's unique about your pizza?"
Him: "We use fresh ingredients every day."Me: "That's good, but so does everyone. No restaurant is going to tell their customers "Fresh? Heck no! This fish we're serving must be at least (sniff, sniff) one week old!". So what else is different about you?"
Him: "We make our dough fresh every morning."
Me: "That's great, but so does every other pizza parlor in town. What else?"
Him: "Well...."
Me: "I noticed the business name relates to a city in Italy. Do you have a secret Italian recipe for your sauce?"Him: "No. The previous owner gave it that name. It doesn't mean anything."
Me: "How about your pizzas? Do you have a specialty, like "All-Arizona Toppings" or "Super-Anti-Oxidant" or anything different and unusual?"Him: "No."
Me: "Well....is there anything unusual about your employees? For example, are they all left-handed tennis players?"Him: "Nope. Just local people."
...and on and on. Suffice it to say that we couldn't get any publicity. Why? Because he had nothing new or unusual about his food or his restaurant.How to Get a Reporters Attention:Reporters (and editors and producers) think like this:1. Get a good story.
2. Other stuff.
If you want to get publicity, make sure you have an interesting story. The most interesting story is something that is new and/or unusual. In the world of marketing, we call this the Unique Selling Point: USP. So we need to ask: What's our USP???Journalists spend four years in school learning how to locate and produce interesting stories, not how to read press releases. When you provide something new, they will be more interested than if you give them the same old stuff.USP Examples:New York Times: "99-cent Pizza Catches On": http://nyti.ms/9iZBiRChicago Tribune: "Guiness beer Pizza": http://bit.ly/ctUq7DSonoran Living, Ch 15: "Tea and Chocolate": http://bit.ly/9Kzk8STo figure out your USP, think of what you do (or make) that's different. "Hand-crafted", "Fresh daily", and "great service" are all old news. If we look at the three examples above, we have:1. Cheap pizza in an expensive city (NYC).2. Pizza made with beer. (BTW: the photo above is the Guiness beer pizza).3. TEA and chocolate, as opposed to wine and chocolate.So take a moment and really look hard at your offerings to find that USP. If you can't think of any you can:1. Review the newspaper food stories for examples of uniqueness.2. Watch some local TV talk shows that have chefs on and check out their menus.3. Or, ask someone creative (like a PR/marketing person) to give you some ideas.Take a moment and do this. Really. It makes a big difference. I've gotten a lot of publicity by looking for that USP and then talking about it exclusively to journalists. For a small investment of time, you can get a huge ROI of publicity.
Use the Calendar to Promote your FoodThe Oscar Awards came and went, but not before mixologists across the country created interesting Oscar-themed drinks to celebrate that special night. Drinks with names like "Avatar", "District 9", and "Julie and Julia" came into being and were enjoyed by movie-going fans
everywhere.
How do I know this? Because there was an article in the Arizona Republic newspaper that talked about the Oscar cocktails. This article came out *before* the Oscars, so it gave patrons plenty of time to go try the drinks.
How You Can Use This:
The AZ Republic had to get this information from someone. Why not you? The media is always looking for an unusual twist on food stories, and every month is filled with special days and events that you can use to tie into your food or your wine (or both!). By thinking up interesting ideas and submitting them to the media, you have a good chance of getting some coverage.
(I know I've talked about this before, but it bears repeating over and over again). Before you spend a lot of time trying to come up with some fancy message or spectacular event, take a look at the calendar and see what day or event is coming up that you can take advantage of.
Food Related Days in March 2010:
March is:
- National Nutrition Month
- National Sauce Month
- National Noodle Month
- International Hamburger and Pickle Month (!)
Select Days in March:
March 15: National Pears Helene Day
March 20: National Ravioli Day
March 21: National French Bread Day (good for artisan bread-makers)
March 24: National Chocolate Covered Raisins Day (my favorite!)
March 29: National Lemon Chiffon Cake Day
March 30: National Hot Dog Day
C'mon gang...you should be able to think up some interesting foods for those days. After all, this is International Hamburger and Pickle Month! As an example, there's a place in Surprise AZ that makes an excellent Cabernet Burger, and they used it to get front-cover billing in Phoenix magazine!
So put your thinking caps on, come up with some ideas for these special days, and submit a press release to your local TV stations and newspapers. You'll be pleasantly surprised to find out that many of them will be happy to find out more about what you have to offer.
In the restaurant business it’s important to have good food, good service, and a good plan to ensure good ROI. But if you want your restaurant to become the go-to place for your customers and their friends, it’s critical that you provide a memorable experience that moves your customers from telling their friends “You wanna go get some BBQ?” to “Wow! We’ve got to go to this place! You’ll love it!”Cooperstown in PhoenixI went to Alice Cooper'stown restaurant yesterday with a friend.
This is a BBQ-and-other-foods place that rock star Alice Cooper
created in his home town of Phoenix, AZ. The food is good, and there’s a good amount of it. But what’s best is the atmosphere.Alice Cooper is an entertainer and Cooperstown is entertaining. From the guitars and gold records hanging on the walls, to the wall-mounted TVs showing all kinds of sports, to the waitresses
made up to look like Alice, the place says “Let’s have a good time!”.
It’s fun to eat at Cooperstown. You go there when you want to relax and have fun with your friends. You wouldn’t take business people there for an important meeting, but you *would* take them there if they wanted to have a burger, watch some baseball, and shoot the breeze. When I have friends in from out of town who love that sort of thing, I take them to Cooperstown. http://www.alicecooperstown.com/
The Palace Restaurant in Prescott:
Another restaurant that does it well is the Palace Restaurant in Prescott, AZ. The Palace is the oldest frontier bar in Arizona and the most well-known and historic restaurant and saloon in the state. Everything about The Palace says “Old West”, from the ornately carved 1880's Brunswick bar in the saloon to the black-leather-and-boots-and-hat-wearing, handlebar-mustache-bearing cowboy banging out rinky-tink tunes on the honky tonk piano. Even the food has classic old west names.
When you’re there, you’d swear you were in the 1800’s. You expect Wyatt and Virgil Earp to come stridin’ through the swinging doors at any moment. Whenever I go to Prescott, I go to the Palace. Oh sure, I could go somewhere else, but the Palace is so much fun that I keep going back and taking my friends. http://www.historicpalace.com/
So remember that when you plan the ambiance of your restaurant: What do you want your customers to experience in terms of a place to interact? Fun? Families? Professionalism? High-end? Relaxed? And then ask: How can I deliver it to them?
Don’t be afraid to talk to your customers and get their input, and also to visit some competitors to see what they’re doing. Because a restaurant is more than food. It’s an experience. Build your atmosphere and ambiance around that and your customers will come back and bring their friends.
Here’s the move: select the right media to pitch your story to. Sounds obvious, yes? Yes, but it’s rarely followed.Let’s look at a typical scenario: A boutique restaurant in Phoenix develops a wine-country type menu and pairs specific wines with each menu item. The owners write a press release and then blast it out on all the PR newswires. They get no coverage.Why didn’t they get any coverage?There’s a variety of reasons, but one of them is doing a major blast out to the hundreds of media outlets who subscribe to a PR newswire service. One of the problems with this is that the media outlets who get their releases also get another 500 – 800 press releases every day from the same service, and most aren’t interested in what the restaurant does.The 80/20 Rule in PR:If you want to get more coverage, you must keep the 80/20 rule in mind: 80% of your coverage will come from 20% of the media. To put this into workable terms, create a “top ten” list of media outlets that specifically cover your type of wine and/or food, and then focus on them.Back to the restaurant example. They provide high-end wine-country type of food, paired specifically with select wines. Who would the owners want as customers? Families with hundreds of children screaming for cheeseburgers? No. Adults with refined palates and a certain income level would be better customers. Target your Audience:Now let’s look at two different publications in Phoenix: Phoenix Magazine, and New Times, a weekly periodical.- Phoenix Magazine focuses on the medium-to-high-end market: Men and women, married, average age is 54, only 32% have children in the home, and the average household income is $179,000.
- New Times’ audience is different. Their audience is 59% male, single, age range 18 – 34, and the average income is $55,000/year.
The Better Choice:If you run a high-end wine-country-type restaurant, which would be a better choice? Phoenix Magazine, because Phoenix magazine targets the people you want in your restaurant. An article about your restaurant, along with their usual glossy photos, would draw customers to your door by the hundreds. Especially since 82% of their readers hang onto the Dining Guide for reference all year long.So remember: target your PR efforts rather than doing a mass email-blast. Create a “top ten” list of targeted media outlets that reach your audience and focus on them. It’ll save you a lot of work and will provide a lot more coverage.
