I am often asked how to make public relations produce leads for the sales funnel. It’s an important question yet it is based on a flawed premise; Public relations is not – by definition – a lead-generation effort. Rather, PR is tasked with creating brand awareness, generating goodwill, and establishing credibility. The primary function of marketing is to generate leads. Public relations can’t because there is no* mechanism to capture leads from a news article or byline that PR efforts have landed. BTW, this is a really BIG asterisk.
Perhaps in a separate article, I’ll address that asterisk and delve into the new marketing-style PR efforts, but the purpose of this article is to explain how PR wins like news articles, bylines, and winning awards can generate marketing-like outcomes or leads. Before I proceed though, hold this thought in mind: this piece is positioning PR placements as marketing assets. What follows are ways to leverage those assets to generate leads or at least suggest ways to better use and extend the mileage of PR wins.
Deep-linking content and lead capture on the website are essential.
These two elements are the foundation to your marketing house. I need not explain that robust, properly tagged, and structured content on websites improves search ranking. Even the smallest companies can get these basics locked in. What is all too common though is that the website has no long and robust content that can support or add to news articles and bylines. That is missing a huge opportunity. And I didn’t even mention not having lead capture yet.
Robust content is not simply a longer exposition of the marketing brochure. Instead it is research, thought leadership and thought-provoking blog posts, surveys, how-to’s, white papers, and case studies. 1,000 words of unconnected customer quotes and testimonials is not good enough. 1,000 (or better yet 2,000 words) in a case study will work. Better yet, build a page of 2,000 words describing implementation strategies of a new language arts curriculum complete with several teachers’ advice of how they adapted assessments in the age of ChatGPT. The goal is that these are single pages with the corresponding slug and header tags unmuddied by marketing speak and clutter. The page has to stand on its own as a resource. That’s why using the blog function of your WordPress site is so valuable. Use it!
Think of it this way. Editors are not going to share a page you’ve included in a byline submission just because. However, if you include a link to a very strong page in your byline, they might. Likewise, if the said publication editor wrote a story and was looking for an outside source with tips about how to – just to throw out an idea here – adapt assessments in the age of ChatGPT, your company might get lucky and be included in that story. And, if you submitted a byline expressing an opinion about that and had this deep-linking and strong content, you’ve got a very strong and usable piece of content.
Once the article has landed, pass it along in ways that can generate leads.
The idea here is that your “win” can’t include a lead-capture vehicle but that doesn’t stop you from using the piece in lead-capturing kinds of way. Read on…
Email to customers and prospects
Bylines (thought leadership) and articles in publications are like third-party endorsements so email them to customer and prospect lists. Always give proper credit to the publisher and link to the original source. Do not reprint the entire piece. Instead use snippets. Sales folks know how to leverage these articles so set those sales people up so they can use them properly: supply the link to the original source, pull quotes, and key segments of text.
Add to Marketing Collateral
Don’t simply relegate articles to living only on the “In the News” page. Add snippets to product marketing materials and throughout the company website like banners, carousels, and blog posts. Always link back to the source.
Make your social shares more effective by thinking bigger.
It is easy to hit “SHARE” and pass along an article, but don’t overlook these ways to boost value.
- Don’t use the default post. Put it in your own words and add key terms and hashtags.
- Grab a quote from the article or better yet, add a new quote and additional information in your social posts.
- Tag the reporter AND the publication organically so it feels sincere. Reporters covet pass along and if you don’t tag them, they might miss the article, especially if you didn’t use the exact title.
- Include a new photo or product image. Add another resource like a case study on your site or third-party research.
- Place quotes or a line from the article into a graphic that also includes the publication logo and your company logo.
- Share on LinkedIn INTO your professional groups. On other social properties, tag the groups that might appreciate the piece. BTW, I just learned today that LI doesn’t allow sharing of posts submitted to closed groups. Not sure how I missed that since it makes perfect sense. To get around that, I just copied what I sent to the closed group (my own stuff, not somebody else’s because that’s stealing) to a new post and reposted it to “everyone.”
- Write a more detailed post about the story behind the story. Where was the interview? What inspired you to write the byline? Share hindsight or envision what might be ahead. Get creative.
- Tag targets (but do it judiciously). Make sure you are giving them additional value.
- Don’t be afraid to suggest extensions of the story. Just be careful that it doesn’t imply the reporter didn’t do an adequate job.
There is a lot more that can be done with a PR win.
Maximize Multimedia
PR wins in broadcast and podcast are golden. Pull audio clips and do all of the above, just with the multimedia. Just be sure to link back to the original source. Also take a moment to know the publication’s copyright and then respect their ownership. Many trades allow republishing of your own contributed content (like thought leadership). However, think through the benefit of simply republishing a piece pretending that it is original. I think that is leaving something on the table because acknowledging the original publisher and using those links has so many benefits.
Build On It
As with using placements for social media, build on the content. Write more. Write the back story. Write follow ups. All of this is grounds for completely new takes and allows using the article over and over.
Engage More With the Journalist
If your company has a mailing list of 25,000 and you sent the article to them, tell the journalist who wrote it (or the editor who published your byline). They keep track of these things. If you have 50,000 X followers, tell the journalist. Don’t send a dozen emails but it is perfectly reasonable to email them a few weeks or a month later to say Thanks for the interview. I enjoyed meeting you and by the way, our company shared your article here, here and here.
Tack on an extra update or tell the reporter you expect more data out in 6 months and you’ll send it along. Build your relationship by conveying that you understand their beat, and that you can increase visibility of their piece. Mention something else they’ve been writing. Consider bringing them on as a panelist in a webinar or onto your podcast. Most journalists are keen to be on podcasts and prove their ability to be multimodal.
Awards, Conferences, RFPs
Make it easy for colleagues to use these wins in awards submissions, on conference proposals, in investor decks, and in RFPs for contracts. Each one is a tick in the validity column, especially in awards. I have seen too many awards entries that were mild variations of the marketing language. If time is too short to write these well, explaining the end user benefits or describing a problem solved with verifiable data, use portions of the article instead. I’ll be writing a column on awards soon and will add that link here.
Republished from PR in EdTech (our LinkedIn Newsletter) published on December 12, 2024. See another helpful article – How Substack Newsletters Fit Into EdTech Public Relations.
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