Content Promotion: Four PR Tips

Once your content is complete and live, promoting it will help to increase exposure, earn more links, and also drive traffic to your website. Outreaching to influencers and journalists is one way to strengthen your campaigns and help with your content promotion. So if you’re going to be engaging in PR and outreaching to these key contacts, here are four tips to help you get started.

First of all, call journalists and influencers. By picking up the phone and speaking to people, this gives you the chance to develop a more personal relationship with them on a one-to-one basis. Sending an email is okay if they’ve specifically requested that in their own media requests when they’re looking for particular opportunities. But if not, don’t be afraid to pick up the phone, speak to the contact, and build relationships from there.

Remember, PR and outreach is all about building relationships and planning effectively to make those relationships last for the future as well. So don’t be afraid to pick up the phone. It’s also likely that you’ll get a much better response rate if you’re speaking to a journalist or an influencer whilst their on the phone, because you’ve got their attention, rather than waiting for an email to come back to you in, say, a couple of days time.

Point number two, research the publication. This is quite important. Just as you would when you call and make your pitch, it’s also important to know exactly who you’re contacting and why. So research the journalist, the publication, the deadlines they operate on. If you’re contacting a local newspaper, then find out where they write for, the circumference of the area they cover. Good planning, effective planning will help you with your pitch when you go to pick up the phone and make your initial calls. So always do your research. It’s very important.

Point number three, use stats, data, and offer statements. Obviously, if you’re doing outreach or you’re working on a PR campaign, the whole point of it is that you want to add value to either existing stories or stories that they’re going to be publishing in the future. Now, one way to do this is if you’ve done some customer research in the past and you’ve done some really good stats and data that you’ve garnered from that research, you can use this as the buy-in or the hook to go to the journalist and say, “Look, you’ve written this story on XYZ. We’ve got this data to back up that particular point. Would you like to feature it in your article?” So that’s one way of achieving it.

Second of all, statements is another good one to think about. Again, if you’re offering value in a sense that a particular news story has broken that day, then you can contact them within sort of one or two days and basically offer them a statement on the story. Or if they don’t decide to take you up on the offer, then at least they’ve got your details, and they know that if you’re a key and authoritative figure in your own industry, they can go back to you in the future to then ask you for a statement on something that’s related to that specific story.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be the case that you have to react exactly when the news story breaks, because it might be something that’s ongoing that can last a couple of days, as long as you make those initial contacts with the influencer or journalist. And, again, that comes back to point number one, what we said about building those relationships with key people in those industries.

Number four on the list and the final point, have extra information to hand. It’s likely that when you speak to a journalist, they’re basically going to probably tell you to email them over some extra information. So always have this ready to go. This could be things like press release, quotes, photos, images, videos of anything that you’re launching, that kind of thing. The more information that you’ve got to hand in the form of a press pack to send them after you’ve put the phone down and you send them an email, the better. That means they don’t have to keep chasing you, and it makes their life easy as well, because you’ve got to remember, at the end of the day, journalists are very busy people. So always have that information ready to hand.

Best of luck with your own PR and outreach efforts. If you don’t have the time to do PR and promotion on this level, then speak to us at Koozai, because we can help and we can offer content marketing services as well. So please do get in touch if you need further assistance.

Thanks for watching. For more information, please visit Koozai.com or visit any of the social profiles at the end of this video.