How to Leverage Your Good Publicity for Added Marketing Value

Did you recently parlay a press release into a full feature story?

Was your company favorably showcased in an important trade journal or business publication?

Improve the marketing impact of this strong public relations by extending the reach to your prospective customers by using a variety of marketing tools.

Email: If you have an email list of individuals who have purchased your products and services in the past, consider sending an enews announcement about the recent article to your e news mailing list with a link to the recent article. You may want to pull a quote that specifically addresses your product or service’s unique benefit and highlight that information.

Reprints/Clippings: Julie Wassom, marketing expert for child care centers and alpaca farms suggests ways to use reprints and clippings:

• Send a copy of your article in a special mailing to prospects, customers, and referral sources, as follow up to your Guess Who’s In The News? notification.
• Include it in wave mailings in your direct mail marketing program.
• Mail it to local affiliate members who can kite-tail on the good industry promotion it provides.
• Insert in a rack in your show booth with an accompanying sign that says “Take One!”

Read her entire article about how to Extend Your Audience After Good Publicity.

Blog about it: If your company has a blog, this is the perfect place to write an article about the article. Don’t pull the published piece into your blog in its entirety. Instead, pull sections and briefly quote the article with links back to the publication’s website. You don’t want to miss the implied endorsement of the publication that wrote about your business, or it will just be another blog post written by you instead of by a knowledgeable staffer at the industry or consumer publication. Remember to optimize your blog post for Local SEO. This helps potential customers discover your business. A lot of local searches originate from non-locals who are searching for a business like yours, and with local SEO done right, your business can capture that audience. This is important for all businesses who are looking to appeal to locals. For example, it is a key aspect of dental marketing. Your URL, title, headers, meta description and the article itself should include your city or region and the target keyword of the page they describe. This tells Google what geographical location the page is relevant to and helps them index your page accordingly. Need more help optimizing your online content for search engines? Head to oadesignservices.co.uk.

Link on Social Media: Use your company Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account to post links to the article. Make sure you select the proper thumbnail before you hit submit. I find that it is better to log into them separately rather than trying to save time and posting once for all three mediums. It’s just that what LinkedIn can show, versus Facebook — or the 140 characters of Twitter — is vastly different. Also the make up of the audiences on the three mediums also varies. While the subject and message is the same, you’ll want to modify the actual comment before you link to match the medium.

If your business markets to consumers in your local area, don’t forget Yelp, Google Local, Yahoo and other sites like Zagat, and CitySearch. Find out which type of links can make a big difference.

Website links: Your website could add a new page under the about us tab that features Customer comments and pull testimonials out of a favorable article with a link back to the actual publication.

How will you use favorable publicity to improve your marketing efforts and speed up the sales process? Leave a comment below with a note about what has worked for you. Include a link and I’ll moderate the comments to make sure it’s a “real” example.

Author: Chris Brown

Business owner operating a marketing consulting firm. Online Publisher. Keynote Speaker. View all posts by Chris Brown