PR at Work 3 of 4: Trade Press

If the term is foreign to you, a trade magazine is a periodical of some sort that publishes news and features particular to an industry. Say sporting goods. No one outside the sporting goods industry (except for maybe investment people) cares about this publication. It covers promotions, new hires, product launches, product trends, athlete licensing and such.

I recently stumbled on a summary of the top 100 trade magazines. Initially, I was a little surprised there were 100 total trade magazines in existence, let alone a top 100. But think, for every industry from promotional products to holistic vitamims to Hollywood to truckers, there is a community of professionals who need to be connected. And that connection can be made through a trade magazine.

So, who reads Trade magazines?
* Customers (hopefully)
* Competitors (guaranteed)
* Vendors (prospecting)
* Your Sales Team (they better)
* Ad Sales People (prospecting)
* Consumer Press (more on this later)

Really, trade magazines are almost like catalogs: page after page of reprinted product and personnel news releases, with a section of news snippets and one or two longer features. The best ones, in my humble opinion, read like hot sheets or gossip pages. Some look like Vogue, some look like the Wall Street Journal and others look like a college extracurricular newsletter.

If you’re not sending regular news releases to the applicable trade magazine, shame on you. Start today. Take the latest product or service you have, write three paragraphs on it and email it to the editor in chief. Chances are your release will appear in the next issue… for free… in almost the exact format you submitted it. And then that long lost sales rep from Albuquerque will call because he saw the article and you can ask him what he’s been up to for the last three months.

Seriously, the article will get noticed. Also, it’ll be on their website; you can link to it from your website and get some search engine play out of it. And here’s something cool, the consumer press reads these things, too. So if the stars are aligned, that trade magazine coverage could garner some consumer press. All from a three paragraph email you sent to the editor of your favorite trade magazine.

Just like every other journalist, trade magazine writers want new and interesting things to write about and publish. If you help them out, they will help you out with more coverage, and maybe one of those coveted feature/trend stories. They might even start calling you just to check in and see what you have going on. Take advantage of this and make a friend in the publishing industry. It’s not hard. It’s just work.

Those who do the work, get the coverage.