For a small business or a new startup, marketing can be a real challenge. It’s not just the financial aspect; it’s also finding the right channels to get your brand in front of the potential customers you’re after. While some businesses have found success in outlandish publicity stunts, we don’t recommend such a dramatic approach.
We’re big into content marketing these days—as many organizations are. We’ve found good success for ourselves, and our clients, by strategically created and disseminating copy to engage audiences and drive some desired actions.
Here are a few tips we and our clients have had steady success with:
Go Where the Journalists are Looking
If you’re looking for media exposure that is not necessarily local, use tools like ProfNet and HARO to learn about reporter, editor and producer needs at a wide range of publications and media outlets.
When responding make sure that you think carefully about the value you can provide the media outlet’s audience, and craft your response based on their needs. Be very detailed in your response; journalists will often pull information directly from your response.
Contributed Content
Consider offering contributed content — content that you write, which will appear with your byline — to media outlets. There is not only no cost associated with this, aside from the time to write the piece or what you might pay a freelancer to do it for you, but also an added benefit is that this type of exposure can help boost your thought leadership — and drive traffic to your website.
Thought Leadership
Develop a reputation as a trusted go-to source by providing high-quality, relevant, non-promotional materials; be timely in your responses and follow through. Don’t badger the journalists with constant emails seeking information, asking for links to the published material (you find it yourself online if they don’t automatically send you the link) or asking to see the piece prior to publication. When reporters learn they can trust you to deliver quality input, and that you won’t be a drain on their time, they’ll reach out to you when they’re working on pieces that fall into your areas of expertise.
Hoping for a high-profile, smash-hit publicity stunt is like hoping to strike it rich playing the lottery. The big difference is you can irreparably damage your brand with a failed publicity stunt, meaning the potential risks and rewards of such stunts aren’t as asymmetrical as playing the lotto.
When it comes to effective brand building through content marketing, we recommend the slow and steady approach to developing your brand with consistency and regularity.
Recommended Reading:
The Everything Guide to Customer Engagement
Best Practices in Influencer Marketing
