Within a strategy of inbound marketingPR (public relations) can play a fundamental role in attracting our buyer persona.
As you already know, public relations is based on cultivate our brand’s relationship with the media and get them to talk about us organically, without having to pay for sponsored content.
The media is a speaker, and therefore it is a very powerful tool to disseminate our content. If we are in the press, it means that we are talked about and that we are part of the debate, and this brings multiple benefits for companies.
Advantages of PR for your inbound marketing strategy
It is difficult to quantify the economic impact of press appearances, but this does not mean that we should leave aside PR actions. Appearing in the media provides multiple advantages, such as:
- Elderly visibility, both among those who already know us and among new audiences. This translates into more possibilities of reaching our ideal buyer persona or client.
- Elderly engagement with users, since they are more exposed to our brand.
- Positioning as an expert source in the sector, with the consequent increase in reputation, prestige and credibility. The objective must be to become a reference company within our sector.
- Elderly lead capture. If we can track the users who visit us after having seen one of our news and the actions they take within our website, including conversions to leads and clients, we can begin to attribute economic value to advertising activities. relationships.
How to attract media attention?
We are going to see 5 keys or steps that we can carry out to establish contact with journalists and create a relationship with them that ends up generating regular appearances in the media and enriches our inbound marketing.
1) Create a good database
Creating a database is the most tedious task of the strategy, but also the most important. Where can we start?
- Detect and classify media. We must look for media that could publish news about our company, taking into account their scope of coverage, the potential target or buyer they are targeting, the sections and topics they talk about. Once detected, we will have to organize them based on our interests and in a way that is useful and accessible to us when consulting them.
- Collect the contact details. We can search for them on the media’s website, on social networks such as LinkedIn or Twitter, in directories or even hire online database services. The ideal is that we get a phone number and email address for the editor.
- Update the database frequently. This should be an almost daily task, every time we receive an email or an article or find interesting content.
2) Contact the media
Nowadays we are very used to connecting and relating in a digital environment, so few people take the phone to call. But I recommend continuing to do it from time to time, because then there is a greater chance that they will remember us. If you call the editor at a good time and tell him a story, you will have more points to end up being published.
Some tips To contact the media:
- When you start a new job, take the opportunity to call and introduce yourself and your company.
- Follow the media’s content and use their posts as a hook to make the call, e.g. e.g. if they publish a new study.
- Once contact is established, continue calling to report important news. If you don’t communicate, you don’t exist!
3) Send press releases
A Press release It is a piece of writing in news format that includes the most important news about a company, which is why it is the most common means of communication between companies and journalists.
In order for the press release to be published, it is necessary that tell a story. But the work begins even before sitting down to write, since we need to know how we want position ourselves: who we are, what we do and why. This positioning must be aligned with our buyer persona.
A very interesting PR practice to generate press releases is the newsjacking, that is, taking advantage of daily news to link it with something relevant to our company. The media lives on current affairs, so their aim is to use it to generate news about our brand.
4) Post interesting content
If you manage to find relevant, innovative content that fits with what the media and your buyer persona are looking for, you will have a good part of the work done.
My recommendation is that you always try to generate content from first hand sourcestaking advantage of the knowledge of the people in your company.
It is also highly recommended take advantage of all existing channels to spread this content and make it reach as far as possible. For example, at we publish an ebook on digital marketing trends every year, we generate a press release and a video and we use all the channels we have to publicize it.
5) Establish an ongoing relationship with journalists
The ultimate goal of a PR strategy is for journalists to think of us as a expert source and contact us to prepare the news. To do this, we can rely on many techniques:
- Follow the editors that interest us on social networks and interact with them.
- Go to media events and present ourselves.
- Maintain contact by phone, especially when important news occurs.
- If we organize an event or publish new content, we can organize a breakfast or a small meeting to tell first-hand the conclusions and data.
In short, it is about establishing a relationship based on trust and that is mutually beneficial. And to be a good public relations person, you have to be able to think like a journalist.