5 Steps PR strategy to drive results
How to maximize your Public relations
Public relations are your secret weapon for increasing your website search engine optimization.
Yet, leveraging a PR strategy is the most undervalued tactics by marketing professionals.
There are 2 main reasons why:
1. Many people struggle to write a public relations pitch that stand out in a reporter’s inbox or piques an editor’s interest enough to even reply.
2. And then, most people do not know what to do with the ensuing covering to make it worth their efforts.
But those 2 obstacles can be easily overcome by putting in place a plan to seed and nurture a public relations campaign, and by then maximizing the results.
In helping out many clients, we have come to a formula that works incredibly well to increase SEO results from any public relations campaign.
5 steps PR strategy for success
1. Begin with your priority keywords.
2. Identify media outlets that rank well for your keywords.
3. Create top quality owned content relating to your keywords.
4. Craft your own pitch, to show your thought leadership.
5. Optimize your articles with anchor text.
Begin with Your Precedence Key Words
Use the keywords that you are focusing on for your company as a starting point to turn them in a statement which can be used as a headline to get a high-level bit of content. Use the Google Keyword Planneror another keyword research tool to make sure your headline reflects a phrase for which people are searching, and will work for the rest of this process.
Once you’ve refined 10 keyword phrases you want to focus your content around, you’re ready to move on to the second step.
Identify Top Media Outlets Covering Your Subject
Using a Google search, look-up your keyword phrases and find which high-traffic websites and media sites your crowd visits.
Those websites are where you need to earn links from to raise your domain name power and to drive qualified visitors to your website.
To prioritize your media outlets, use tools like Moz toolbar to obtain each sites domain authority.
You will want to focus on obtaining links back to your website from domains with higher authority than yours.
Plan a Content Strategy
Here, the goal is to make sure your earned media ties into your owned content
In order to do so, your content needs to live on your company blog. In our experience, it is best to write two to three blog posts on your primary keyword phrase (like for example: How to build a Media Contact list.)
For each of the blog posts, identify three contributed content ideas to pitch to publications, and three to pitch to blogs.
For each of the identified blogs or media outlets, you will pitch an idea related to one of the topics you included in your content for publication on your company blog.
These are broad topics that correspond to the media contact’s keyword phrase.
Once you’ve completed your media relations outreach, you will have six higher domain websites pointing back to content on your blog.
Craft a Private Pitch
To craft a personal pitch you’ll need to have spent some time building relationships with the reporters or bloggers you want to reach.
You can use any social listening tool to identify the influencers. You’ll want to interact with them on social media and amplify their content.
That way, when you are ready to pitch, your name will be familiar to them.
You’ll also have a much better idea of their beat and preferences.
If you haven’t done this yet, or don’t have time to do this, there are other tools like datablitz that alleviate some of the more tedious aspects of the work. You subscribe to the service and you can find the relevant reporters and bloggers according to your query. An excellent time saver for your PR strategy.
Tip: In crafting your pitch, briefly outline who you are and cite your owned content as examples of your expertise and prior take on the topic. Note that you’ve seen a specific piece of content on a related topic, and would like to pitch them on your topic.
Every day, journalists receive an inbox full of pitches from people they don’t know, on topics they don’t cover. Spending the time to individually craft each pitch‚ instead of writing a generic pitch and spamming it out to your entire media list will stand out.
Optimize Your Content
Once you receive coverage for your pitch or publication of your contributed content, you’ll want to include a link back to your website from a relevant anchor text.
By including this link to your site, not only will you begin to see an improvement in your domain authority over time, you now have something concrete to measure.