Use These Best Practices to Maximize Your Earned Media Coverage

Public Relations is a powerful component to your organization’s overall marketing efforts and can ultimately enhance brand awareness, improve credibility, increase trust, reach new audiences, generate excitement and more. 

Keep in mind, earned media coverage through public relations is only one piece to the overall marketing mix and shouldn’t be relied on to drive sales or achieve overall business results on its own. Combined with other marketing efforts, media coverage can create and build momentum for your brand. Here are a few marketing strategies to enhance the impact of your media placements: 

Use paid media efforts to support results. Media coverage can help drive visibility and visitors to your website that sometimes can lead to a purchase or sale. However, media coverage used in tandem with paid ad support through retargeting ads, SEO, display or other efforts can keep your brand top of mind with consumers and generate a larger ROI executed in tandem with each other.  

Repurpose and share content. Get excited about your great coverage and share earned media results through your brand’s social media channels and on your website, through email newsletters, etc. Media outlets and writers appreciate the support and sharing to raise visibility of their work also. 

Showcase media wins internally. Share key media wins with your internal stakeholders including employees, executives, investors, sales teams, partners and others to amplify the coverage and celebrate the third party validation from larger media outlets which ultimately can promote industry leadership, brand excellence and employee pride. 

Track effectiveness and adjust when needed. Use analytics to monitor the effectiveness of earned media wins and impact on website traffic or other marketing metrics. Track social media reach and engagement of the shared content, monitor paid ads to see what resonates most with potential customers or stakeholders. Use these tools and results to adjust and refine your overall brand messaging to reach your target demographic. 

Weaving earned media results into your existing marketing plan and content strategy can only amplify the return of your public relations efforts and will ultimately assist in driving your organization’s overall business goals.