Your PR questions answered: level up your business & focus your energy

In this month’s edition, we’re covering big business strategy and content topics with in-depth answers!

Quick question before we jump in- Last year we asked how we could support your business. Many of you answered bi-monthly group coaching. If you're still interested, respond to this email & let us know! (Details at the bottom of this email)

Q: How can I organize my website so it's clear and cohesive? My site includes multiple businesses/products—wholesale and retail fabrics, wallpapers, and ceramics.

A: Right now, it looks like you are organizing your work first by product type. Fabrics are here, wallpaper is over there, and ceramics are somewhere else. 

I see, though, that there are patterns and motifs that carry across your product types.

Instead of dividing your work up by product type first, maybe you're a pattern designer whose designs go on several mediums.

Lead with the story of being a pattern designer. It's a great way to unify what you do.

The good thing is you’re not the first pattern designer who sells different types of products. Peer research will help you see what works for businesses like yours. 

Look at how other businesses organize their homepage. Maybe it leads with big impactful banner images of collections that use the same pattern. So, multiple product types in each image. 

Once you’ve introduced your work as organized around collections, you can highlight specific product types. 

For example, you could include a simple “shop bowls” section. Here, all the photos would be silo white image of a bowl. The scale of the bowls would be the same, and because of this visual consistency you can show bowls from different collections.

When you're looking at peers’ homepages take notes and screenshots of how they are showing both collections and individual product types. 

In terms of wholesale/trade vs retail, we suggest including a main navigation  and page specifically for to your B2B clients. You may also want a small section on your homepage that also leads to your stand-alone wholesale/trade page. 

A good rule of thumb: B2B clients understand that businesses also sell directly to consumers. Consumers (your B2C folks), don’t always understand the difference. 

So, if B2C is a big portion of your business, message to those people and make sure a trade page is easy to find in your navigation for your B2B clients.  

Q: I'm feeling stretched. How can I focus my energy?

I'm an illustrator and pattern designer pitching companies to get my designs on products. I’m also reaching out to editors for press features.

I

always post to Instagram and was getting organic clients, but it's drying up. Now, very few followers see my stuff. I heard Pinterest is better, so I'm thinking about that...

A: When we help businesses with content strategy, we always start with pillar content. This is the longest-form piece of content for any given project, product, design, etc.

For you, this may be a blog post or product page about your newest pattern design. It could include process images, information about your inspiration, the final pattern, and how it looks on wrapping paper, cards, fabric, etc.

When you start with pillar content, you’re starting with all the pieces to tell the full story of one thing.

This is a bigger lift initially, but it’s much easier to slice and dice into smaller pieces of content for social media, newsletter, pitches, and more.

And lucky for us, there are a ton of easy-to-use AI tools to help with slicing and dicing for different formats. We use writer.com to help turn long-form content into smaller posts and captions. We use Mailchimp for our newsletter; their “Creative Assistant” takes your brand assets and images to create graphics in different formats.

AI may feel overwhelming, but it’s worth finding tool that help you automate.

That was a lot on systems and tools, on to PR and getting-the-word-out...

I’ve seen a creative tactic that works well for illustrators and photographers—doing a themed series, like thirty days of illustrating doors in NYC.

A themed series can be anything that you’re interested in that you draw for X amount of time. You can then pitch this story to the media. New York doors did well because editors want to write about NYC all the time. So, maybe there's a local publication that would be interested in your work and theme.

Another example is pets. Everyone loves pets. Kirsten and I follow an artist who paints cats. She asked all her followers to send pictures of their cats with their tongues out. She did this massive painting of cats, and obviously the Internet went crazy for it. This painting later became a puzzle and prints for sale.

Think about how you can satisfy an artistic pursuit and package it as a story for the media. Use your content system to share updates in your newsletter and on social. 

Useful tools to help you get started:

A personalized website, content, & PR review for your business compete with our photography guide and pitching mini course, free for a limited-time. If you found the answers above helpful, you’ll want to check this out.

How to Write Great Landing Page Copy

The Birth of a Service: Tweak & Edit PR Review