How to Leverage PR for Sales Conversion
After strategic messaging sessions and thoughtful conversations with the media, your PR team has landed you some impressive news coverage. Finally, your company’s story has been featured in the publication you wanted! Aside from giving your PR team kudos, what do you do next?
Two words: content amplification.
Content amplification helps you stack the deck that you can get as many people as possible to see and read your media placements. Regardless of whether you’re celebrating coverage in a target trade publication or The Wall Street Journal, the benefits of earned media should not end with that outlet’s audience alone.
Instead of thinking about secured placements as the end goal, we like to view them as the start of an ongoing process. By amplifying earned placements, you can expand your reach and create engagement with new and existing customers that will hopefully result in desired action.
This checklist will help you ensure that your media coverage provides ongoing value for the people you are most trying to reach and influence:
Share it with your leads. Whether it’s an expert quote, an op-ed or a podcast interview, the value of press is not just in the top of the funnel (lead generation) but in fact can play an important role in mid-funnel conversion. Going back to those you’ve already been in discussions with to showcase your point of view and credibility as an expert can go a long way in moving discussions forward.
Get social: Promoting and posting secured coverage across social media channels is a highly effective way of generating more reads and excitement around your news. Posting on your company’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages can help you connect with those who already share an affinity with your brand. In addition, encouraging your employees to share coverage with their individual networks can attract new attention for your brand. Just make sure that you provide employees with suggested language for posts and captions to make it as easy as possible for them to share.
Repurpose coverage: Finding ways to transform media placements into other forms of content can help you spread your company’s message to a wider audience. Consider ways in which the information within the coverage can be repurposed for use in channels like blog posts, infographics, case studies and white papers. The steadier the cadence of coverage, the more opportunities your organization can unlock to tell its story.
Spotlight it on your website: It’s important to leverage the power of your website to maximize publicity. Since your site is often the first place that existing and prospective customers visit to find out more about your company, making sure you have a dedicated space to feature articles prominently is key. Whether it’s within a news section or setting aside space on your home page, highlighting important placements can definitely drive more traffic to your messages.
Feature coverage in newsletters: Another way to amplify coverage is to highlight it in any internal or external newsletters. Adding clickable links can also be valuable in breaking up more lengthy newsletters and can allow you to add visuals that didn’t originate within your organization.
Extending the shelf life of earned media coverage is a “must-do” in building trust and credibility. Modern news consumers are more distracted than ever and competition for share of voice is only getting steeper. The more you amplify your news coverage, the better.
