Here’s hoping your year is off to a great and prosperous start! As you think about how to allocate your marketing budget this year, consider the immense ROI (return-on-investment) of a piece earned media coverage.
I have been helping companies, including major global corporations, businesses headquartered abroad and countless U.S.-based companies of all sizes, earn great media coverage for more than 25 years. The ROI is tough to beat.
A company can extract value out of a positive piece of media coverage for at least 2-3 years and I am hard-pressed to think of any other marketing piece with that kind of longevity. The various ways to maximize the value of a positive piece of media coverage are listed below.
Immediate Steps (within 1 to 8 hours)
- Email it to your employees with an upbeat “rah, rah” message. And remember to thank all the people involved in making the positive coverage happen.
- Post a link to the piece in the News page of your company website.
- Point to it from the Home page of your company website. Consider extracting an especially strong sentence or two from the piece to highlight there.
- Point to it on all of your social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Remember photos and all related hashtags, etc. to draw people in.
- Use your social media channels to openly thank the editor for the well-written news piece. They are human and will appreciate the public thank you.
- Email the editor/s to thank them and tell them how nice it was to work with them. This is usually true, most editors are pretty cool, and it also helps build the relationship for the future.
- Email it to your Board of Directors and make sure to tell them how it was negotiated, all the work that went into it and how you are optimizing its value.
- Send it to any funding prospects as “third-party validation” with a reminder of the good work your company is doing.
- Email it to partners to emphasize that your company is a wonderful partner.
- Send it with a thank you note to any third parties who helped with the piece (e.g. customers or partners who were quoted).
Within 2-3 Business Days
- Send it to your sales prospects with carefully drafted personalized messages.
- Add the logo, and possibly a quote, to all sales presentations.
- Create a slide in your sales presentations with logos of all the media outlets that have covered your company.
- Post the media outlet’s logo on the Home page along with the logos of other media outlets that have covered your firm in an “As featured in…” banner on the Home page.
- If an executive was quoted, add that to his or her bio (e.g. …has been quoted in X,Y, Z media outlets).
Longer-Term
- Use a quote from the coverage to add emphasis on a speaker presentation.
- Write a short blog post about it to drive additional traffic to the piece.
- Add a quote or two from the coverage and the logo to videos you are creating about your company.
- Mention it in a webinar that your company hosts.
- Use the media coverage to invigorate trade show and conference exhibits and materials. (Remember to work with the media outlet if you want to use printed copies of the entire piece. They will likely charge you for it, but it might be worth it.)
- Mention the coverage in any interactions discussing the company. “We recently talked to The New York Times about X and they wrote a piece that focuses on how well we are…”
- Name-drop it when talking with other media. “We just worked with X on a piece about Y. What really needs to be written is…” Media have more of herd mentality than they would like to admit and many media outlets are intertwined now.
- Consider a framed version of the coverage in your lobby. This is very old school, but I still see it all the time. Or maybe a framed version of a great quote from it. Or have someone paint the great quote directly on the wall.
- Put a binder in your lobby of the all the great media coverage your company has generated. This is also old school, but it gives all your visitors something to read while they are waiting.
I hope I have convinced you of the high ROI of a strong piece of media coverage. If you want to learn how your company can put strategic media relations to use, please contact me at By the Sea Communications. I look forward to hearing from you!
(Copyright By the Sea Communications, LLC 2015-2019. Please do not reproduce any or all of this content without permission and attribution. This post is an updated version of a post I wrote in 2015.)
