Getting PR for your e-commerce business helps you build credibility and trust in your market. It can also be a game-changing leadgen opportunity for your brand or small business. Read on to learn about how to get PR for your ecommerce product.
Get Your Story Straight
If you want to gain PR for your ecommerce business, you need to make sure that you have a good grip on your branding and the story behind your business. While the product you’re selling obviously needs to be valuable to your target audience in some way, a large part of selling that business owners ignore is that story behind that product. Consumers are more inclined to buy a product that they connect with!
Let Consumers Connect With Your Story
You know you need a story behind your product if you want to get PR for your e-commerce business. If you’re not sure how to create one, here are some tips to help you create a story that consumers connect with:
- Think about how your e-commerce business or product is different from its competitors. What sets you apart from the crowd?
- Think less about your particular product and more about how to make it newsworthy. What kinds of headlines attract your attention? How can you get your e-commerce business to generate an interesting headline?
- Do something innovative. Even if what you’re doing is not directly related to your business, as long as it’s different and never been done before, people will pay attention to it.
Stay Relevant
To make sure you gain PR for your e-commerce business or product it needs to be relevant to anything that’s current. For example, here at Otter PR, one of our clients, Christie Smith, was able to sell out her entire art gallery because she was doing zoom tours. This was during the beginning of the pandemic when Zoom was at peak popularity. Because she was using this innovative way to sell her paintings that was relevant to a topic of interest to most (if not all) of the world at the time, she was able to capitalize on that and make a huge profit from her art!
Another example of using relevancy to gain PR can be found in cybersecurity companies. They tend to push their story and services when email breaches happen because their services are relevant at that time. While a large tech company like Apple doesn’t need to promote their cybersecurity because most tech consumers know about Apple’s capabilities and reputation, small tech companies will typically compare themselves to Apple. They use Apple’s name and relevancy to help their own reputation.
Pitch Your E-Commerce Business To Relevant Sites
When pitching your business to different websites you may be asking yourself: who do I pitch to? Where would my e-commerce business or product do best? The answer is simple: smaller, relevant websites. For example, if you had an EDM business, you would only pitch to EDM websites instead of big news sources.Yes, those websites might not get millions of views, but they do get the type of traffic you want for your business: targeted, organic traffic. Even if you’re not get 100,000 views a day, those 1,000 views you do get will all count. Once you find a couple of smaller websites that are in your market, find their contact information and start creating a list!
If there’s a website you know you really want your e-commerce business featured on, the best way to reach out to them is through a personalized email. Don’t make it generic! Let them know their importance to you by telling them exactly why your business is a great fit to be featured on their website. Then, reach out to them on their social media channels. By liking their posts and tagging them in your own, you are showing genuine interest which will catch their attention!
When To Pay
A last resort offer that definitely still works is to pay for a promotional post on a website. If you have tried contacting them via email and engaged with them on social media and they still haven’t responded to your inquiries, paying for a promotional post works as well. Since you are targeting smaller (but still relevant!) websites, they shouldn’t charge you an extravagant amount. You might pay around 100 dollars for the opportunity to publish your business or product on their website. The return on investment for that 100 dollars is definitely worth it: you’ll gain backlinks to your website and increase your SEO. This will add long term relevance to your e-commerce business and will give you a credibility boost, as well. You might not make a single sale through being published on a website, however, being reviewed on a trusted website is worth the investment.
In Conclusion
Getting PR for your e-commerce business is valuable in that it adds credibility to your business. It’s also a great lead generation opportunity for your business. Just make sure your business has a story that people can connect with and is relevant in some way in the media.
Tags: how to get pr for your e-commerce business
