Happy Thursday, the clock is ticking down to the big day and here is my penultimate look at a business that’s made brilliant use of the media this year.

Day 4: Three Sisters Bake

First, this is a great business. A cafe and craft boutique in Quarriers Village near Bridge of Weir in Renfrewshire. It has a great team of staff, looks fantastic and sells delicious cakes, coffees, soups and pastries. But there are other businesses just like it suffering from a problem: how do we get ourselves noticed?

Three Sisters Bake is a great example of a small business using the media to make a big splash. First, they work hard on social media and have built up a following of well over 2,000 LIKES on their Facebook page. They think about what they post. Make great use of images, start conversations and give people content they are actually interested in.

They also truly ‘get’ the mainstream media. They have reached out to BBC Radio Scotland and made several live appearances on programmes getting themselves in front of an audience of tens of thousands. They recognise the stories the media wants and know how to give it to them. They are regularly featured in newspapers from the Paisley Daily Express to the Daily Record and The Herald magazine. They’ve found that once you achieve coverage in one media outlet it becomes easier to get coverage in another.

Truth is, they’ve been good at all this since they started. But this year they moved things up a gear organising their own event for children and involving a celebrity too. 

And none of it happens by accident. It takes work. It’s about making the right contacts, understanding what makes the business special and knowing what they can and can’t talk about. So they look for opportunities, they make images readily available to the media, provide quotes, they go the extra mile.

Every time I see Gillian, Nichola or Linsey being featured in a newspaper or on radio and television I raise a smile because I know there’s another business somewhere, just like them, who’ll be seething and wondering why it isn’t happening to them!