Media Relations for Craft Chocolate Makers: Why You Need a Media Plan
•David Nilsen
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
8:33
Welcome to Bean to Barstool's Media Relations for Craft Chocolate Makers series!
As a full time freelance journalist in food and beverage, David Nilsen has communicated with thousands of breweries, distilleries, restaurants, chocolate makers, and other businesses, and he's seen ones who maximize their relationships with media members and outlets, and ones who are leaving opportunities on the table. Additionally, his wife and business partner, Melinda Guerra, is a freelance PR professional helping brands tell their stories and connect with media. Between the two of them, they’ll be sharing what we’ve learned over their careers to help craft chocolate companies of any size identify their stories, communicate them to media members and outlets, gain new customers, and keep the ones they have curious.
In part 1 today, David talks about why media relations are so important no matter the size of your chocolate business, and why you need to have a strategy for this.
In upcoming episodes, we’re going to explore how to build a media list, how to identify the stories you want to tell, how to create press releases and what to put in them, how to maintain media relationships, what to do when you get media coverage, and much more. The goal of all this is not to overwhelm you, but to walk you through how you Can do this, and why you should.
One note: while a lot of what we’ll talk about could apply to social media, and we will be hitting some specific aspects of social media, this series is focused on working with media members and outlets.
Media Relations for Craft Chocolate Makers series:
Welcome to part one of a summer series we're doing on Bean to Barstool called Media Relations for Craft Chocolate Makers. As a full-time freelance journalist in food and beverage, I have communicated with thousands of breweries, distilleries, restaurants, chocolate makers, and other food and beverage businesses. And I've seen ones who maximize their relationships with media members and outlets and ones who are leaving opportunities on the table. Additionally, my wife and business partner, Melinda Aguera, is a freelance PR professional helping brands tell their stories and connect with media. So between the two of us, we'll be sharing what we've learned over our careers to help craft chocolate companies of any size identify their stories, communicate them to media members and outlets, gain new customers, and keep the ones you have curious. In part one, we're just going to talk about why media relations is so important, no matter the size of your chocolate business, and why you need to have a strategy for this. In upcoming episodes, we're going to explore how to build a media list, how to identify the stories you want to tell, how to create press releases and what to put in them, how to maintain media relationships, what to do when you get media coverage, and much more. The goal of all this is not to overwhelm you, but to walk you through how you can do this and why you should. One note: while a lot of what we'll talk about in this series could apply to social media, and we will be hitting some specific aspects of social media, this series is focused on working with media members and outlets rather than social media specifically. If you run a craft chocolate company, you run a small business. Even the largest craft chocolate companies are still relatively small businesses, and the vast majority of companies under this umbrella are very small. You might be your only employee, or maybe you have one or two employees. And that means you're very busy. You probably struggle with work-life boundaries, and you wear a lot of hats during your work week. You got into craft chocolate because you love cacao and chocolate and flavor, not because you wanted to be a marketer or a social media manager. That said, you understand social media is a necessary evil, so you set aside time for it because you understand marketing is an essential part of getting your chocolate into the hands of your customers. The critical thing to understand is that media relations is also marketing. Being contacted by the media or getting a response from them when you reach out will take a little bit of your time, but it's not a favor you're doing. It's an essential and potentially very valuable part of your marketing. What I've seen from a lot of craft makers is that they have half of a media plan. They send out press releases or announcements for new products, events, or locations, but they miss a lot of opportunities with a more strategic and proactive media plan. A full media strategy enables you to identify and communicate your story and stories to media and consumers in a way that gets and holds their attention and is not limited to new products or events. Good chocolate on its own is not enough to make you stand out and guarantee the future of your business. The most valuable assets you have for connecting with potential customers and keeping your existing customers curious are not products but stories. Good chocolate is a necessity, but making good chocolate is kind of assumed at this point. That's not to say everybody's doing it, but it's a prerequisite for your success, not an option. What's going to get the attention of existing and potential customers is not just quality, but curiosity and connection. One thing I've noticed is that while companies know what they want to sell, they don't always identify the stories that will earn those sales. Sales might be the goal, but stories are the paths that will lead current and potential customers to that goal. And when the focus of your marketing is on products exclusively, it narrows the options for those points of connection. When we take a step back from that, the view broadens and we can better see the diverse paths that will guide curious consumers into becoming customers. Craft chocolate connects to so many other aspects of life, other topics, other industries, other subcultures, and all of them offer opportunities for storytelling. Chocolate intersects with agriculture, with ecology, with food and sensory science, with cooking and hospitality, with art and design, with local history and architecture, with finance and business, with manufacturing and economics, with labor and management, with nonprofits and community organizations and causes and the people who are the most important part of your craft chocolate business, they have their own stories. The founders, their stories are part of that company's stories. Staff, with their permission, their stories fit into this too. There are so many opportunities for storytelling. In working with craft chocolate companies, I've noticed that a lot of them seem to think that because they're small, that will limit both the stories they have available to tell and the outlets that will be interested in sharing those stories. And I want to tell you that there is no correlation between the size of your business and the significance of your stories. And I'm not just saying that inspirationally, but quite literally, it takes the exact same amount of time and space to tell a story, no matter the size of the company it's about. If I'm going to write a story about a craft chocolate company, it's going to take me the exact same amount of time to set up the interview and conduct that interview and write the article if you're the only employee versus a company that has 50 employees. And that story will take up the exact same amount of space on a website or the page of a magazine, regardless of the size of the company behind it. If a local TV reporter is going to interview you on camera, that's going to take the same number of minutes and seconds from that segment, whether you represent a company that is just you or a company with dozens of employees. The size of your business does not limit the media opportunities that you have. I tell stories for a living. Those stories need to connect with people, and that connection can happen and be compelling regardless of the size of the business represented. You need a media plan for your craft chocolate company, not just so that you know what to do when media members contact you. You need a media plan because without one, they most likely won't. At the end of almost every episode of Bean to Barstool, I asked my guest what story they're telling with their business. It's a reminder that we aren't just indulging our senses with craft chocolate or beer or other treats. We're stimulating our minds, our memories, our emotions, our imaginations. You don't have just one story to tell. You have many. They're worth telling. You just have to get them to the right people, and I hope this series helps you do that. Episodes in this series will come out every two weeks with accompanying blog posts on the following week, and unrelated episodes in between just to keep some variety. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening to Bean to Barstool.
