When you first launch your product or service, being on featured on any news outlet would be great publicity for your start-up. However, to be published is not as easy as it seems.
Being a new business, you essentially start from the bottom. With zero reputation, brand awareness, and little to no budget to boost your company’s image, you’ll end up turning to ineffective but cheap marketing campaigns to improve your brand recognition.
Getting featured on the media would definitely do wonders to your start-up’s credibility and brand awareness. It will improve user acquisition by attracting more potential customers to your site, attract other businesses and vendors without having to reach out to them as well as attract more talent to your company because who wouldn’t want to work for successful and well-known business.
Here are five strategies your company can use to get your name on the papers!
Know your story
What any news outlet wants is a good story. You need to be able to give them a reason to feature your company on their paper or website. They’re not so interested in how you started up, but rather what unique product or service can you offer? Find a newsworthy point that could potentially interest these news agencies: write to them about your company launch, or recent award or funding your start-up received or even on the latest event your company is organizing.
Don’t send them basic and dry information about your company. Instead, give them the real stuff –what is your company doing for the people, for the customers? What separates your start-up from all the other competitors? Find the juiciest storyline and go with it! If you wanted to promote your company the old boring way, you might as well buy an ad.
If your pitches are well thought out and presented, the reporter might even give you another feature, and keep you in the loop for future interviews and connections.
Reach out
You first need to know whom your target audience is before knowing which news outlet to target. Ensure that these news agencies are in line with the industry you’re in and publish news that are relevant to your business. Social media is a good outlet for you to reach out to these news outlets. Let them know if you enjoyed a news article they have written and provide more insights and how your company can add value to them. You can go a step further by identifying journalists that report on news relating to your industry. Emails of reporters are normally easily attainable. With your story in mind, write to them or engage in a conversation while introducing your company. Start a discussion with these reporters and create relations with them in order increase your probability of being featured. It’s good to present them with some ideas in order to peak their interest.
Don’t push it
While sending out your emails, be sure to not oversell it, you want to sound genuine and interesting while talking about your business but not be overbearing and pushy. Your email might get lost in their inbox so send them another one to follow up and remind them of your story. Typically if a reporter finds your story interesting and news worthy, they would get back to you immediately. If you still don’t hear back, you might want to them, or switch up your story angle and send something more interesting in. Try not be overly demanding, you don’t want to get a bad reputation amongst news outlets and reporters for being difficult and high maintenance.
Be Relevant
You need to always be up to date with the current economical climate, or latest business news and events occurring around you. By being well informed, it not only improves your understanding of the business environment, but also ensures that you don’t miss out on possible opportunities to be featured. By attending networking events or forums, you can get in touch with the media sponsors or media representatives that are attending. Similarly, keep up with the latest business news and trends. If your business is affected by or involved in the latest headlines, you can hijack the news article and request for features.
Strong content marketing
If you want to be featured in a credible news publication, you also need to ensure that you have a strong content marketing foundation. Reporters these days use social media and content blogs to sieve out interesting material and inspiration for their next piece. If your company has an extensive and substantial blog with insightful content, you could draw these reporters to your company without having approach them. You should consistently be publishing useful content and share these articles on social media platform to create a greater awareness and visibility.
This list is definitely not exhaustive, and there are several unique ways for you to get your company on the news. But one thing remains, you should always strive to create brand awareness and retain customer loyalty by being genuine and promoting a service or product that would add value to your customers.
If you’re still unsure about how to run a PR or marketing campaign, seek a professional to do it for you.
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