In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by founder, CEO and PR expert, Gaby Howard. Gaby runs Flaunter, a marketplace for public relations which allows brands such as Allbirds, CottonOn and Asos to immediately connect with publications such as Marie Claire, Popsugar and Vogue. In this conversation we cover how to turn your products into stories that the media will care about. We also have a chat around how gifts for PR are on the way out and how we can foster a greater community of women entrepreneurs in Australia.
“I think the brands that get cut through are the brands who have really great storytelling“
Gaby Howard
Questions answered in this episode include…
- Which tools would you recommend to help with targeting PR to resonate with specific audiences
- What’s important for brands in terms of content and asset creation?
- Which is better, agency or in-house PR?
Let me tell you a story…
I think some of the things that people are doing really well is doubling down on the storytelling and really leveraging those PR skills to actually become amazing content producers, and actually starting to share the stories of the brand, the mission behind the brand, the founders behind the brand, the products, and actually leveraging those great stories to create content and then to create bigger audiences around those stories.
And I think that there’s definitely always room to move, in terms of the data piece and actually monitoring, we know who your engaged audience is and how to effectively communicate with the right people who want to talk about your brand, and not get so caught up in trying to have reach across the board and trying to have that mass appeal.
So I think people who are doing things well are really personalizing their outreach to media. They’re looking at what their existing kind of database is talking about and how they fit into that. They’re creating amazing content. I think that’s probably one of the most critical aspects of how to do PR well, is you have to have amazing resources to be able to share out, and you’ve got really good storytelling and you’re telling really good stories that have meaning.
Founder stories resonate really well. The history behind the brand resonates really well. The history behind a particular product or collection resonates really well. I think you can no longer go out into the world and say, “Hey, I’ve created five new pink jumpers, isn’t that amazing? And here are some photos of my five new pink jumpers.” It has to be why pink jumpers, why these particular types of jumpers, why should consumers care about your pink jumpers versus someone else’s.
Assets, content and quality
With PR, the more different types of assets that you can have at hand, the better. One person will be looking for flat lay and other will be looking only for look book or campaign, and someone might be just looking for some sort of pre-packaged content, which includes a blog post, as well as those images and video. So, the more that, that you can create, the better, the more different types. But having said that, you have to be really careful with the quality that you’re producing, because that is also just as important. There is no point in producing 100 images of low quality, you’re better off producing five high quality images at the end of the day.
In terms of the technical aspects of it, a high quality. In terms of size, so you want high resolution assets that can sit across all different formats. Also, we’re looking at displays now and even on your mobile where you can’t have low res 72 DPI images. Everything that we need to produce has to be super high quality and look like it’s going to jump off the screen. But also in terms of high quality, the more creative that you can be, but within your brand, obviously your brand look and feel, obviously the better. And the more differentiated you can be, the better.
On Flaunter, we say that the images have to be a minimum of 300 DPI. Even if it’s going to go on a website or just for social, we have a minimum 300 DPI on the platform.
If you’ve got it, Flaunter it!
Flaunter is software for PR and marketing teams, and we help those teams to streamline their daily flow of media relations, content sharing, sample tracking, and reporting. So we basically provide digital showrooms and branded media centres that help PR marketing teams to more easily leverage and distribute, and also track and build data around their PR content.
We also have a marketplace component, and so all of that content that teams are managing internally within Flaunter and sharing out their existing networks. Is also actually available on demand to the media network that we have built within Flaunter. So media can create their own profiles within Flaunter and access branded content on demand.
