Hi! I’m paulina and for my senior project, I created a PR campaign for Sophie Wallace. She is a Chicago artist who freelances her work, sells her art at art festivals, creates art murals for local businesses and much more. The main goal of this campaign is to help her gain more exposure on social media, find more art shows to attend, thus pushing her to find more clients to buy her art or create art for clients.
One of the biggest tasks I had to do was to do a lot of research. I created a SWOT analysis, and strategies and tactics chart to get a visual of where Sophie W. Art was in terms of business success, and what direction I should guide this PR campaign to. Through my research, I helped Sophie find amazing journalists and editors that she can reach out to for potential features on their articles. I even created a media pitch template for her to use as an example on how to reach out to journalists. I helped her narrow down her target audience, as that was something that she was struggling with. With that, I had the opportunity to take over her Instagram stories and talk with her followers about what kind of content they wanted to see more of. I created polls for them to answer, I even did a Q&A on stories to get a feel of who was following her. I managed to list out three major audiences that she can focus on.
One of the greatest successes from this PR campaign was getting Sophie signed up for 5 art festivals, from May to September. It took networking with the right people to be able to sign up that far in advance. I knew it was very important to Sophie that she gets these opportunities. I wrote out a Press Release about Sophie’s rebrand in the hopes that she can get the word out about who she is and how she can make an impact in the Chicago art scene.
To finalize her PR campaign, I made a social media content calendar for the months of May and June. I even made mock posts for her stories and her Instagram posts for her to use as her art show features.
Throughout this PR plan, I had been steadily recording how the PR campaign has helped her gain more followers, clients, website traffic, and so on. I gathered information from her social media, her website, and her freelance success and I created two charts. The first chart is the overall metrics of social media, her website, and her freelance business. I even added some future projections of what we hope to see when she attends her art festivals this summer. The second chart is her social media metrics which include her social media reach, shares, followers, and overall engagement.
The biggest skill I gained from this project was learning how to network with journalists. It took a lot of work to figure out how to be noticed by editors and writers of all types, but with thorough research, I gained traction with various writers of different media outlets.
I hope that I can continue to work with Sophie throughout the summer to help her seek the success that she desires with her art business.
Below is a link to the PR booklet I created for Sophie Wallace. I hope you enjoy and learn a little bit about Sophie W. Art.