The Birth of a Service: Tweak & Edit PR Review

You know that feeling…

You’re fairly sure that your website, photography, and social media are more or less on the right path. You’ve worked hard on your online presence, but you know it could still be stronger.

So many small businesses and independent entrepreneurs are looking for really specific, easy-to-implement advice to improve what they’ve already done. No one wants to be told they need to start from scratch or go back to the drawing board, they just want some advice and to next steps.

In a bit of a roundabout way, that’s where we come in.

I wrote this post to take you on a behind-the-small-business-scenes look at our newest service offering, the Tweak & Edit PR Review. We both wanted to share more about how and why we brought this service to life.

For every offering you see on our site, there are so many things we decided not to do and so many questions we asked ourselves. We thought you might want to learn more, not just about the service, but about how it came to be, small business to small business.

When we finally launch a new service, you know that we took a lot of time, engaged in hard decision making, and in-depth conversations to make sure whatever we’re sharing with you passed our high bar of standards.

**How the Tweak & Edit PR Review started**

Before we even started Wolf Craft, we knew we wanted to offer 1-1 PR consulting, and to build a course all about how to pitch holiday gift guides. Tweak & Edit was different, instead of imagining what folks might find useful, we were TOLD. By the exact audience we want to work with.

The idea for this new service grew organically out of collaborative workshops with organizations like the Female Design Council and the Craft Industry Alliance. This is basically the coolest way we’ve ever designed a Wolf Craft offering.

I’d been working 1-1 with creative businesses for a while and there were a few really common themes that I covered with just about everyone — how to take better media-quality pictures of your work, how to make small adjustments to your website format, images, and copy so it appeals to editors, and how to make sure your social media and content support the story of your business.

But I could only fit so many 1-1 clients into my schedule. We wanted to synthesize some of the key mistakes I saw creatives make all the time and show people how to fix this stuff themselves. And we wanted to do this in a way that was accessible to larger groups, which is why we did these larger workshops.

What we came up with was were live-critique-style workshops. Hellooo art school background!

Using a lottery system, we picked three to four victims…. ahem, I mean subjects for each workshop. We reviewed what was working and what wasn't serving them yet, shared notes about specific things they could tweak to make what they already had better, and collected examples of peer content — because nothing is better than visual examples of what works.

Our notes covered everything from tips to improve navigation and wayfinding on a website, how to optimize an Instagram bio, advice on which images to include in a pitch from a photoset and what to pay attention to in an upcoming photoshoot, and how to make a newsletter sign-up more compelling.

The goal was to give reviewees super specific actionable advice to improve their online presence so it would better serve their press, sales, and storytelling goals.

How did the live workshops with creatives go?

During each workshop we went through all of our notes and references, offering constructive criticism live digitally in front of the whole group. We figured the “lottery winners'' would gain a lot of specific insights, and the rest of the group would be able to extrapolate our advice and apply it to their work. Our hope was to create a collaborative learning experience.

For each tip we gave, each reviewee also got specific visuals, what we call ‘best-in-show’ examples of the element we were addressing. For example, we wouldn’t just say “you needed a better elevator pitch on your homepage” — we would show a really effective example of one.

If a reviewee’s photography was still substandard, we would surface several examples of what kinds of photos would serve them better, we shared examples of the literal images they could then bring to a photographer for their next shoot.

To say these presentations were well received was an understatement. And a bit to our surprise, many attendees reached out afterward asking if we would review their content individually. The whole experience resulted in the best feels in the world. We didn’t even have a service yet but people wanted our input on their assets. That’s when we knew we were on to something.

The making of a one-off service

The standard advice for launching a new product or service is to validate it before investing tons of time and money. We were able to do that an astounding twelve times in just three months by working with folks who attended our workshops and reached out to us looking for the same treatment our workshop subjects received. They wanted specific and concrete actionable advice for their work.

The Tweak and Edit PR Review follows a similar format to our previous workshops, but is designed for a one-off service. It has three main parts:

a questionnaire that you fill out so we better understand your media outreach goals, questions, and struggles.
a 30-ish minute loom recording where I talk through your assets, website, copy, and social media. What’s great about this pre-recorded video is that you’re able to share it with team members and assistants making the whole updating process much easier.
our detailed notes outlined in a google document with links to all the references we covered in the loom recording.

We used the first twelve individual Tweak & Edit PR Reviews to refine our process and confirm there was a validated interest in our expertise. We weren’t intro-ing a product we’d never tested, we were sure that the service we wanted to create provides value.

This was very exciting!

*Testimonials from two of the first reviewees from our one-off Tweak & Edit PR Review service.*

After validating and refining our process we’re very happy to say that the Tweak & Edit PR Review is now officially its own service!

You can send us your PR goals and struggles, a photo set, your website, and a social media platform and we’ll review everything you sent and create really easy, actionable advice that is specific to your unique assets, business, and goals.

We created something that is decidedly not one size fits all. And one that we think delivers an absurd amount of information. Much like we decided to be transparent in how we came up with and built out this business idea, we’re very committed to helping other businesses develop their own ideas. This is foundational not only to this service but in how we structure Wolf Craft as a whole.