Make a habit of leveraging your Public Relations with every mention you get in the media. It will make you a friendly target as the “expert”, and more sources will want to speak with when they need a quote or want to feature a product.
What is Public Relations in 2020?
Getting the word out doesn’t come as easy as it did in previous decades where you could count on a vast majority of the population tuning in for the evening news. Public Relations in today’s world is now a mix of reputation, authority and reach.
- Reputation is universal, in the PR world, how accessible your reputation is matters. Do you have strong reviews on the most relevant platforms? Are there plenty of testimonials that back your thoughts or work?
- Authority in Public Relations is about your positioning in your industry and how effective your perspective can be for the angle that the media outlet is creating. This is much different from the Authority in Google’s eyes (SEO).
- Reach how big is the audience that is following you or your brand and the audience of the media outlet. The similarities of your audience will increase the impact since your relevance will be higher, and the story will be more likable to the viewers/readers.
We now have an abundance of ways that content can be consumed and the type of content varies much more than before, the reach statistic is probably the most interesting. Can you have a very good insight into your audience demographics and understand where they are getting their news from, or what they are reading. Leveraging PR is different now; that could be a start to proactively build your guest blogging, or just giving a friendly heads up to a reporter if they need a quote or two.
Here’s the Bottom Line
Promoting your business in today’s digital space really means that individual channels mean less and an integrated marketing strategy means a lot more. Being able to control more of the path for potential customers who are interested and want to learn more about your company means the impression is only scratching the surface.
Even a few years ago, the barriers to entry were too high for most companies to have access to some amazing marketing tools. Now, with everything at our disposal, even the free tools, the expectation should be much higher of your advertising, public relations, and salespeople.
Public Relations is a massive industry that prides itself on being the first call for experts, products, and opinions for mass media content. Most small businesses aren’t aware of the full scope of PR since they rarely need the reach that it provides. The budget you have is paid to a PR firm who can make introductions and position your company as an expert who gets the promotion. PR works much differently than advertising campaigns in that you cannot directly purchase the space. This distinct difference makes PR more like content — its an investment.
Public Relations gives you a mention or 3rd party review or qualifier (whichever you like to call it) from the platform that you were featured on. Your customers see that you’ve “been featured” in a certain publication and that comes with trust. As you can imagine, if you could directly purchase trust with your potential customers, you would pay a pretty high price for it. PR doesn’t come cheap and most companies don’t take the time to make the most of it. The successful PR mentions are gold.
Here’s a quick guide to Active your Public Relations
1. Know when and where your story is going to run
Most of the opportunities will not be live. You will have a set time that you’ll engage (reviews, filming, interviews, etc) and then there will be a period of editing before publishing. This can be a long time depending on how much backlog a publisher has. Sometimes it’s helpful to check-in and sees when something is planning to run so you can properly do the next step.
2. Promote the heck out of your feature!
Content publishers no matter how small (community TV, blogs, youtube channels) or how big (national TV, podcasts, radio, major networks) all require audience loyalty and growth to survive. You can help them by pointing your audience to them, even if it’s just for your feature. Your dedication to this through social media mentions and newsletter blasts. The best part about this — the publisher usually notices. Your enthusiasm for them will have them wanting more. I’ll never forget hearing about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson talking about how much he promotes his movies. “He takes each movie’s promotion into his own hands, film insiders say that’s more valuable than any ad campaign.”
3. Capture the Footage or Article
If you can find out where the original content will be published and how you can access it. As an example, some TV stations will put all their segments on YouTube, where you can freely watch and share. While others will use a locked-down video player that isn’t share-friendly (or removes videos after a set period). Yes, that’s right. The people in the business of content, don’t really understand content archives. If they are of the “locked down” kind, see if you can get a copy or access so you can co-promote the PR mention.
4. Build an Archive
Co-promoting the mention is crucial for your brand. Having the PR is only part of it, but a news/press/media archive of your website will activate your PR for both your website (SEO Boost) and to qualify your company to customers who may not know much about you.
The easiest way to do this is by having a dedicated news/press/media archive build on your blog. Make sure you include the original piece of content (see how YouTube comes in handy) embedded in the blog post so the publisher still gets the stats from your audience. Include a brief introduction about what you did, how you liked the publisher, or a thank you. Always link back to the original source too.
5. Start Today
Here are a couple of examples for you, one in Real Estate and one in Fitness. As you’ll see with both of these, they go back years and years. This will also help solidify your company’s timeline and history. It’s actually a really fun exercise to read back through your PR and see how your company has evolved.
Make a habit of activating your Public Relations with every mention you get in the media. It will make you a friendly target as the “expert” more sources will want to speak with when they need a quote, or want to feature a product.
This post was written by a complete marketing nerd who may or may not stimulate people with random facts during parties… Maybe one of those random Chris Milton facts will be picked up and put on the newswire.
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