Earned media through publicity is one of the most valued resources for a business to have. Without it, no one would ever know about the company and therefore it would never be able to get any clients. But just knowing you need publicity gets a company nowhere since there are so many different types of it.
A popular option among many businesses is paid media coverage because it helps to guarantee that other sites will be talking about yours in a specific way. However, earned media is much more powerful for your company. Earned media is the ultimate form of publicity. This form of publicity is when your site or content gets promoted without the company having to pay for it. If you are interested in improving the amount and quality of the earned media coverage that your company gets, then here are a few ways to make it happen.
Keep an Up-to-Date Press Page for Media
While journalists are typically more than happy to write up a little news piece about your company and the unique or special thing that you have accomplished, they do not want to have to dig through dozens of pages of information to be able to do it. If they have to dig through too much to find the info, you might not end up with any earned media. That is why it greatly benefits a company to have all of their relevant information written up in entertaining and organized press releases.
Just having these press releases is not enough though. A company also needs to know what to do with them once they are ready to go. One of the best things that they can do is to upload them onto the company website. Not just under the normal posts or blog pages though because then it can easily become lost among a sea of other posts.
Instead, host it on a page that is entirely dedicated to press releases and previous media coverage. Then make this page really easy to find so that journalists can go onto the page at any time and easily find the information that they are looking for.
Increase SEO Efforts through Earned Media
Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for companies to take part in for numerous reasons, one of which is to increase their earned media coverage. If news outlets and consumers do not even know that your company exists, then they are obviously not going to provide you with earned media coverage.
The best way to get your company in front of their eyes is to improve its SEO so that it pops up in the search engine results page for all of the relevant searches. A company could always resort to buying paid Google ads, but those are of course paid media and can end up costing a lot of money.
A better way to go about this is to sprinkle relevant keywords, layouts, and media throughout each of your website’s posts and pages. This will help your company rise in the ranks and become an SEO powerhouse, which is sure to get you more earned media coverage.
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash