Open one month!!

deleted

Hi I started a take & Bake back in Sept of 06 and I didn’t have a ad budget of any kind. What I did was to print cards with 1/2 off and give them out to local stores in your area. Also with those cards start a reward program by giving say 20 of them each to your loyal customers (say 50 customers) with the incentive of who ever get the most back within say 30 days recieves $100.00 in cash. Just have the customer write there name on the front of the 1/2 off card and when the new customer redeams the coupon he puts his/her name on the back, building customer data. That way you got your good customers talking to there friends, co-workers spreading great word of mouth advertising for your store. Just a thought that might help it did great for me. $100.00 is really cheap for 50 people pushing your pizza with what works best. WORD OF MOUTH ADVERTISING

Hi. I haven’t had much time to look at the TT lately, but I saw your post and had to reply. Congratulations on your first month. Newspaper advertising rarely pays off for pizza – but newspaper articles do! And since you’re the first take-and-bake shop in your area, you’re news. Put together a package to make it really easy for the local papers to cover you: an well-written press release about the hot, new trend of take-and-bake pizza and how a local woman is bringing it to [your town]. A newspaper article is a great way to introduce yourself – and to educate people about what take-and-bake pizza is all about (and what makes yours so great). Include a quote from a customer about how fresh and great and convenient it is, and a couple of good photos.

Since you’ve opened quietly so far, this would be a great way to get some publicity for a grand opening too. Include the date and times in your release, with your address, phone—and think about promoting free samples and/or a contest of some kind.

Send it to the local papers and radio/TV stations, and then either call and invite them to the grand opening, or stop in with a sample and an personal invitation.

Then get going on those doorhangers or direct mail flyers…

Good luck with Month 2!

Thanx sooo much Jennifer and Tony!
Jennifer, do u know where I may be able to see a press release that would work that I could gleen from? I just dont even know where to start.
Tony, so glad to see another t-n-b person on here! I will look into your suggestions. I dont know if I can go the 50% route, but im sure even 10% -20% would be an attraction dont you? I am doing AWESOME in the realm of word of mouth, im astounded by how much business I have received from people just talking about our pizza!
Thanx so much for the encouragement! Ill be looking into both your suggestions right away! Wish me luck!
Naida

Naida

I've produced quite a few press releases for my store. You are trying to do a few things here:

  1. The first and singularly most important is to make the journalists job really easy. We all want an easy life and if you can make a simple piece of text that is easy to read and means they don't have to edit too much then they are way more likely to include it in their paper.
  2. Read a similar piece of text in your local paper - this is what you are wanting to achieve. A piece about you written in the 3rd person tense.
  3. Include images - again saves them time.
  4. make sure you structure your piece well (beginning, middle and end) and get the point across quickly and will no jargon.

Have a look at the news section on the front page of PMQ you'll see some pizza articles - thats what you want to aim at but much more local.

Other than that ring the paper - speak to the business reporter - invite them over to try and pizza and hope they do you a good article (although they will always get something slightly wrong - bless!)

hope this helps.

Wizzle

Hi Naida,

Take a look at this one as an example. Your story will be different, of course, but this will give you an idea of the format and some things you might want to include.

http://www.nancyspizza.com/html/press_release.html

Jennifer

http://www.uniquepizza.com/PressRelease.aspx