Tips On What Makes A Successful Media Outreach Strategy
A successful media outreach strategy can make all the difference between obscurity and brand recognition, and low sales volume versus high. In order to do business with you, your target audience first needs to know that you exist. Reaching out to media representatives, such as journalists, authority bloggers, and social media influencers could make all the difference.
What is media outreach?
Media outreach involves trying to connect with media representatives via a range of strategies. The most obvious is the press release. You can also pitch story ideas to journalists. You should soon start to collect a database of media representatives who cover your niche, their email addresses, and the types of content they are most interested in.
But media outreach can go beyond that, to connecting with important people in your niche via social media, engaging with them in online communities and groups, and trying to work with top bloggers and thought leaders to get them to engage with your content and company.
Developing a successful outreach strategy
Your first step is to start building relationships with everyone important in your niche. In terms of media representatives, do research on them and get to know them before you ever approach them with a pitch. Analyze their work and see what they do well, and also what they might be missing that you could help them with. Do the same for top bloggers.
In terms of social media, pick the top sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Linkedin. Follow the main people in your niche and comment and share as appropriate, without being a pushy promoter. Be helpful and polite.
Over time, you will be able to leverage these relationships. People will get to know, like and trust you. The content you create for the media and on the social networks should have real value, demonstrating your expertise. This is exactly the kind of content that is likely to be shared. Anything that sounds like a sales pitch should be avoided.
Now that you understand the various main forms of outreach, let’s plan your strategy.
Set a goal
For each outreach piece, decide if you want:
- brand recognition
- more subscribers
- more sales
Create a call to action that matches the goal
Examples might be, “Visit here to learn more”, “Visit URL, enter your email address, and download your free ebook”, or “Order now while X product is still at the low introductory price.”
Choose the content format
Will it be an article, video, and so on? Vary your content to appeal to a wider audience.
Choose the right media outlet for that format of content
Certain outlets have different preferences. Will it be best on a press release site, for example, or Facebook?
Keyword all your content
This will help search engines and everyone interested in your niche.
Plan a calendar
Create a calendar that ensures you cover all 3 goals. Pencil in all product launch dates.
Track and test your success
Follow up on your results, to see how many media pickups, and how much traffic, your media outreach activity has earned.
Do media outreach regularly and you should soon see results.
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