Five Things a PR Campaign Needs to Generate Media Coverage and Links

Creating a newsworthy and relevant PR campaign involves putting together a strategy considering multiple client outcomes. Whether that’s securing links, driving brand awareness and securing placements in relevant publications.

Each goal needs to be outlined clearly in a PR campaign strategy document, as this will help piece together what your story should look like and how it will appeal to your desired target audience. As each news outlet has a different age demographic, it’s important to ensure that you’re aware of how each publication tailors their content to their readership.

From expert-led to real-life stories, each journalist you pitch to has a way of absorbing data and commentary from PRs. So, it’s important to think about how they produce their stories online and what will make this easier for the reporter to absorb as they’re on tight deadlines.

We’ve shared previously on our Embryo blog how to write a well-detailed pitch and plan a Digital PR campaign. However, before you book that meeting room for a brainstorming session and start jotting down those PR ideas, there are other things to consider. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen as a digital marketing agency the importance of staying on trending topics and how often big data-led and creative PR campaigns are not always the campaigns that will generate a lot of media coverage or high authoritative backlinks.

We’ve learnt as PR experts that you’ve got to think outside of the box and be willing to think about the bigger picture of that ‘brand’ and their ‘target audience’. It’s about piecing together stories and trending topics together tie into your brand. You can start by reviewing your previous campaign results and analysing what did and didn’t perform well.

Looking back at your previous success can sometimes help you restructure your approach and put together a plan of action that will help you deliver the KPIs you desire. It can also show how people in your sector are achieving their results and make you aware of how you need to improve.

But if you find yourself back at the drawing board, don’t panic. We’ve summarised below five things that will help improve your Digital PR strategy, campaign planning and outreach results.

1. Include Keyword Research – As you know, Digital PR and SEO go hand, and we’ve learnt that PR experts need to think more about building links. If you’ve read up on E-A-T, you’ll know that Google values content that’s relevant to the reader, which is also something that online publications have clocked onto as well. So no more than ever, people working in Digital PR need to think about using tools like Ask my Audience, SEMrush and Ahrefs as this will help you create content that ticks all the boxes that Google is looking at as it is focusing on relevance.
2. Find Unique Data to Help Build Your Story – Journalists depend on PRs and other sources to provide them with unique data for their articles. This can come in various forms; however, the most popular data used in print and online are surveys or data provided by the Office for Natitional Statistics (ONS) or YouGov. Depending on the campaign you’re building, it’s important to add stats to your press releases, as this will help build your brand image and give the journalist the incentive to link back to a blog post or a page that you’re looking to target as part of your link building strategy.
3. Source Expert Commentary – After sourcing the data you need for your PR campaign. You will need to consider including relevant voices and profiles in your press release to help back your research. Depending on the industry you’re targeting as part of your media strategy, it’s important to source people with the right experience and knowledge, as journalists will ask to see the expert credentials. Using experts can help highlight key points in your story and drive further brand awareness as people will engage with the person’s thoughts and expert opinion.
4. Use Case Studies – Along with sourcing experts, you must consider including case studies as part of your PR campaign. Including these extra profiles as part of your outreach strategy will help you secure quick wins in the national press and develop relationships with lifestyle magazines, as they often look out for real life stories. Using these people’s experiences and thoughts can help your brand stand out of the crowd as you’re using genuine thoughts and reactions to a product or service.
5. Keep an Eye on What’s Trending – We’ve seen how powerful social media is when generating news stories. Journalists use TikTok, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram as sources for beauty, fashion and lifestyle stories. So keeping ahead of the curve by monitoring trends across these platforms can help boost media coverage for clients within the retail and beauty industry as you can highlight for example why they’re so popular among consumers.

As things are always changing within the digital media landscape, we’ve got a team of experts at Embryo who can help you and guide you towards how you can get into those media publications. Our Digital PR team comes from a media background and gives you insights into how the industry works and, most importantly, how you can get in front of the right people by following a strategy tailored to your brand.

To find out more about all our services about how we work, you can get in touch with our Digital PR team here, and one of Embryo’s media experts will be on hand to help you build your brand image, share your story and get you in front of the right people online.