With today's pace of news, an earned media hit often lands in a publication and is pushed below the (digital) fold within a few hours. That's an unreasonably short shelf-life for a potentially amazing piece of coverage.That's why a core PR competency today is in extending the life of coverage, considering other ways (beyond the hit) to get eyeballs on the article itself.
Extending the life of coverage through owned channels
We can start with the most obvious way: promote it. You’re proud of that feature in the New York Times; share it! The good news iswe have many vehicles to do this:
- Social Media: This should be the most basic part of your promotion plan. Sharing the story across your social channels increases the chance that your audiences will see the article. Consider using hashtags to extend your reach to people outside of your usual audience who may be searching for a particular topic that happens to be covered by your piece.
- Blog: It's likely your media hit was tied to a hot topic in the relevant industry. Why not take that article and draft a blog post of your thoughts from a different perspective altogether? Not only does this give some more exposure to the article, but it provides further insight into how you’re thinking about a particular subject.
- Newsletter: If you’re on top of your marketing game, you may have a weekly or monthly newsletter that you distribute on a regular basis. Plan to include any relevant hits inside your newsletter for further exposure. In SHIFT's weekly newsletter, we include some of the latest and greatest pieces of coverage our clients saw over the past week. This is a way to not only show off the great work of our teams – but also to inform people what’s hot in our client’s industries.
- Online Newsroom: If you or your client do not have an online newsroom, it may be time to think about creating one on your website. A newsroom is a great resource for customers (both current and potential), reporters, and employees to see where your name has been popping up and what type of press your company is receiving. Not to mention your salespeople can point to these articles as proof that you’re a leader in the space. Here is how we formatted our newsroom.
Extending the life of coverage through paid media
Outside of your owned media channels, you can also consider and plan to use syndication as a tactic. Syndication helps to further promote your content – or in this case an article – across relevant websites. For example, if you recently scored a hit in The Verge about your newest gadget, syndicating the piece can help it be visible on similar websites that support syndication programs,like Mashable.Using third party services, such as Google AdWords,TaboolaandinPoweredcan helpfacilitate this for you. One thing to note is that syndication is essentially paid promotion, so you will have to put some money behind it. The payoff can be great though – added exposure, and often times a grateful reporter who is happy to see his or her piece catching more eyeballs.There are several ways to help extend the lifeline of a great media hit. In a busy world where headlines come and go, it’s worthwhile to brainstorm other ways to show off your work. Try a few of these tactics and see what works for your media program.And if you have other ideas – share them in the comments!
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
