Would you like to receive more story requests from bloggers and journalists? Don’t you want to see more and more news stories mentioning your brand? Your first step to building more online coverage is to create an effective press page.
Why Create a Press Page?
I lost count of how many times I wanted to reach out to a brand (usually that’s a marketing tool I was curious to explore further) and struggled to find any clear instructions on how. I’ve also lost track of how many times I gave up when trying to mention a brand on Twitter and couldn’t find their Twitter handle anywhere.
Those brands missed a nice opportunity of being mentioned (which could even be a missed opportunity of onboarding a new brand advocate).
A well-built press page would have made that opportunity a reality.
Fundamentally, the major goals behind building a press page are:
- Attracting “linking leads” (i.e. bloggers and journalists) by making your brand look interesting to them.
- Delivering clear instructions on how they can get in touch (without leaving them wondering).
- Providing you with a little bit more control over the online sentiment surrounding your brand (by surfacing favorable mentions).
Should You Create a Press Page or a Press Site?
There are certain pros and cons to setting up a dedicated site to curate news and encourage press contacts.
The biggest benefit of having a separate site is an ability to take more than one position in Google for your branded queries. Google is trying to show diverse results per SERPs, aiming to show no more than two results from the same domain for a particular query in the top results. So having additional sites will help you control more of your branded search SERPs.
Bigger companies usually have several domains building additional online context around the brand (and controlling more branded SERPs):
Amazon hosts all brand-specific information on a separate domain aboutamazon.com
Radix offers a perfect domain name for your brand’s press room: .press:
Radix press domain ideas
On the other hand, building a separate site comes at a price: You need additional resources to build, design and maintain a separate entity.
I leave it up to you to decide, but I am personally leaning towards a separate entity option.
1. Past Mentions
There are a few important reasons why you want to curate your current press coverage:
- Linking to pages that mention you will boost rankings of those pages. This helps you surface your positive mentions and, hence, better control your company’s online sentiment.
- Featuring various stories around your brand gives journalists more ideas of possible angles for their own articles.
- Publicizing your mentions encourages more bloggers to feature you (in hopes you will link to them from that section as well).
- “As featured in” section offers you the power of social proof. Both your customers and journalists will trust your brand more once they see you are being covered in the news.
This section may contain all kinds of links that mention your brand in one way or another, including:
- Your mentions in the news outlets.
- Your management’s interviews.
- Articles quoting you or your management.
- Your CEO’s keynote coverage, etc.
It is also a good idea to curate your own press releases in this section.
Nextiva does a great job curating news coverage of their brand:
Great press page example from Nextiva. You can sort the list by year to find older / newer stories featuring the brand.
You can sort the list by year to find older / newer stories featuring the brand.
2. Contact Information
The best idea is to put a real person here, instead of a generic contact form. EPAM is a great example of doing that well:
Great example of highlighting your press contact on your press page.
Knowing who to contact and being able to choose from a variety of options is likely to encourage many of your company’s linking leads to start the conversation.
3. “Behind-the-Scenes” Company Information
Again, one of the major goals behind a good press page is to make your company more interesting to bloggers and journalists, encouraging them to think of it as part of a story.
What’s a better way to make your company more interesting to people than by humanizing it. Show your team, your pictures, your conference trips, your charity events. You have a lot of uniqueness in your brand. Just show it.
4. Style Guide/Assets
Offering bloggers and journalists additional assets to include in their articles may incentivize them to create a more eye-catching context.
Instagram is a good example of providing exhaustive instructions as to how bloggers may be using their logos and where to download a high-resolution file. They also offer high-resolution screenshots for download and use within articles:
Instagram’s asset collection is a great example of a style guide and assets for press to use
5. Your Social Media Channels
Finally, offering additional ways to get in touch is always a good idea. Plus, linking to your social media channels will allow bloggers and journalists to tag you in social media updates when your feature goes live.
Besides, encouraging your linking leads to follow you around would tie them closer to your brand and potentially keep them engaged.
Optimize Your Page for Organic Visibility
Finally, getting your press page (or site) rank for a variety of branded (and possibly even generic / non-branded) queries is key to generating more press coverage.
Text Optimizer will help you create an effective copy for your Press Coverage, which will help it rank higher in Google. Text Optimizer will check your current brand-name ranking and use semantic analysis to extract related concepts for you to include them in your copy:
It is also a good idea to come up with a user-engaging strategy making sure people who have found themselves on our press page will continue browsing the site.
Alter offers a few great user engaging options, including exit-intent popup that shows up exactly when your site users are ready to leave. You can control the pages that will show up and the content they will include:
Conclusion
So many companies are getting proactive with link acquisition and press coverage tactics, yet they forget the inbound aspect of them. Before investing in your journalistic email outreach, make sure you have a convincing landing page set up. That way, linking leads will know why and how to mention you when providing the coverage.
Setting up a press page (or a press site) is a one-time task, but it must be done in order to see your brand generating more and more organic mentions around the web.