Pratico Media: the content producer giving brands a leg up
You’ve no doubt heard of Pratico-Pratiques and its acclaimed multiplatform brands, such as 5 Ingrédients – 15 Minutes, Je Cuisine, Les plaisirs minceur de Caty and Je décore, as well as its best-selling books Eat Fat to Lose Weight with the Keto and Low-Carb Diet, and Végane mais pas plate, not to mention Cassandra Loignon’s belovedcookbook.
One of Quebec’s favourite content producers for over 15 years, Pratico‑Pratiques is finely attuned to its readers’ interests and has flourished within the Quebec media industry, putting out inspiring content focused on food (cooking and nutrition), health, decorating, gardening and renovation.
These days, Pratico-Pratiques is also a content marketing agency, providing these services under the name of Pratico Media. How did this come to be? Émilie Gagnon, Director of Sales and Marketing, tells us the whole story!
An epiphany!
Early on, Pratico-Pratiques offered a fairly limited advertising sales program (ad pages, cover pages, and some online services). However, it didn’t take long for advertisers to want something more. Social media was becoming a daily presence in people’s lives, and businesses wanted to use these platforms to engage in conversation with potential clients. We thus saw a need to adjust to this new reality and revisit our service offering.
We came to the conclusion that we had all the expertise we needed under a single roof to meet our advertiser’s needs. As both a media and a production company, our strengths were the ability of our multidisciplinary teams (the same ones who put together our books and magazines) to produce brand content, and the potential of our communication channels as a way to distribute this content and directly reach and engage our readers.
“Content marketing” had yet to become a buzzword when we made the decision to combine the forces of our editorial and production teams (copywriters, researchers, photographers, stylists, chefs) with the strategic vision of our sales team to create advertising opportunities that would let our clients be a part of our content.
Seizing opportunities
When it finally arrives, the big chance may very well give you a moment’s pause.This is what happened in 2015, when we decided to offer our content production and distribution services to a major hardware chain in Quebec.
Although we felt like we could deliver the goods, we can’t say the whole experience was completely stress-free. Thankfully, we had faith in ourselves and were well rewarded for our boldness, landing the hardware chain as the first client to hire us to build them a digital strategy for content marketing and social media. That’s how our first “agency” job came to pass. From that point on, we officially started producing content for companies in the fields of food, decorating and renovation.
We then started seizing other opportunities and began spreading the word about our new service offering to some of our partners. However, we still weren’t labelling ourselves as a marketing agency, as we first wanted to take the time to get a handle on our service offering, build up a record of real results with our long-lasting partners and really narrow in on where we could make the biggest difference for our clients.
“A company needs to be able to change and adapt to the world it lives in, and a big part of that is seizing every opportunity that makes sense. You also have to take some time to get feedback and take a look in the mirror so that you can readjust. A term that’s on everyone’s lips these days is ‘agile’, and that’s something that I think describes us to the letter.”
Émilie Gagnon, Director of Sales and Marketing
An agency is born
Almost five years later, we decided to take the plungeand officially call ourselves an agency. Today, more than 20 major Quebec businesses (mainly specializing in food, health and decorating) entrust us to manage their social media strategy, and over 50 others call on us every year to create brand content. Pratico Media comprises ten inspired and inspiring marketing project managers and a full production team. We are working on some very stimulating projects and challenges at the moment. We can’t wait to see what’s next, and we consider ourselves extremely lucky that our partners place such trust in us!
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