It’s always a thrill to see your business’s name in the press, whether it’s a story about your new product, a thought leadership article, or as part of a news roundup. It likely took a huge effort to land that piece of coverage, and now it’s out in the world. Congratulations!
But now what? Chalk the story up as a win and move on?
In actuality, that coveted bit of earned media — that is, press coverage you did not pay for — is a valuable marketing asset. If you really want to make an impact, your work has just begun. The next critical step: promote any press hits, often and widely! Third-party media coverage is one of the best ways to build credibility and exposure for your brand. It’s perceived as an objective validation of your company’s offerings and is a powerful competitive advantage in a sea of competitors.
When a good article is published, your job is to amplify it, repurpose it, reuse it – squeeze every bit of opportunity from that hard-won news piece. In particular, thought leadership articles are a great way to showcase and build up your executive leadership’s reputation and in doing that, improve and elevate your company’s public standing with target audiences.
These media hits position your company and its executives as industry experts. Editorial coverage gives you third-party validation and shows that knowledgeable people deem your company worth paying attention to. These articles offer a whole world of opportunities for further amplification; for one, they can be a powerful tool for your sales team.
Arm Your Sales Team and Employees with the Power of Media Coverage
Sales executives can leverage coverage (articles) to break the ice with new leads or reconnect with past customers by including them in their outreach either via email or social and including links to the news stories. Media article links and excerpts can add weight to sales collateral, case studies, and email marketing campaigns, as they provide third-party validations by an established and trusted voice in the industry. This proves how your company stands out among its competitors.
Beyond external use, media coverage is a great internal tool that can drive morale, motivation, passion amongst employees. Utilizing the published content can be great for alignment not only providing insight from top leaders within an organization but providing another well of information that can succinctly place everyone on the same page in terms of goals, objectives, and vision of where a company is headed towards. The reality is most employees aren’t actively monitoring Google for mention of their organizations and that lift has to come from those that are leading the efforts with the business. Share it on Teams, Slack, Email or even mention it in an all teams meeting.
Another effective way of sharing media stories is printing articles onto handouts for distribution at trade shows, conferences, or job fairs. Be sure to get reprint permission from the publisher, as most articles become the property of the original distributor. But they’re just as eager for expanded exposure too; as long as you credit them and link to the original content.
Boost Social Content and Website SEO
Don’t forget social platforms! Every article can be shared across company social sites with some added material about why the story is important and how it shows your company’s value to its target customers. This is where you can delve into related important aspects of the topic. Tagging the original publisher is appreciated by them and helps to build rapport for further coverage down the road. It also encourages them to share on their social profiles, which increases exposure for your own social platform.
A designated Media Coverage page on your website’s press page can include media logos with links to digital content or PDFs of printed material. Over time, this chronological record will be an impressive archive of your company’s media history. It also helps build your SEO. Updating your site often will enhance your Google rankings, so regularly adding coverage is an easy way to keep the web crawlers busy and interested. Backlinks from these third-party publications drive website traffic, while increasing SEO rank. People researching your business or for solutions that you offer, whether prospective customers or journalists, will have a trove of factual material to learn from as you are likely to appear higher than others because of media coverage.
Any article, good or not-so-great, can serve as a prompt to go deeper into a subject, add more detail, or highlight other angles that weren’t originally discussed. You still get the benefit of demonstrating your company is one that the press is interested in and is covering. You can’t buy that kind of editorial weight, so when you get third-party media, it’s important to wring out every bit of value from it.
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