Digital PR is an excellent strategy to pair with content marketing, especially if your goals include increasing your brand awareness and improving your backlink portfolio.
When you create excellent content and pitch it to writers, you not only get great media coverage, but you get the link back to your project and the authority that comes with being mentioned in a trusted publication.
This earned media tactic is very effective — but it isn’t easy.
If you get any part of it wrong, your chances of success decrease dramatically. If you’ve run into roadblocks, make sure you’re not making any of these mistakes with your content or your pitching.
1. It’s not newsworthy
Sure, it’s easy to say the news only wants to cover material that is, well, news worthy.
But what does that actually mean?
For content marketers, it usually refers to three criteria: timeliness, relevance and significance.
But there’s a catch: Most content marketing programs don’t have journalists devoted to breaking news like actual media outlets do. So how can you create content that is truly newsworthy without the resources of a newsroom?
By creating and analyzing your own data.
If your brand provides a fresh data set or a new analysis of existing data, then you’re the sole owner of information, and you can offer it exclusively to publications. This makes your pitch much more interesting.
This tactic is a combination of original content marketing and digital PR.
But the content can’t just be timely. It also has to be relevant to the writer you’re pitching and that writer’s audience. I’ll explain more on that in #4.
Finally, significance, which refers to the impact it has on the audience. When you think of local news, this is why they report on things like traffic jams and school closures: It directly affects the daily lives of the people watching and listening.
Alternatively, your data can be significant to writers covering specific beats. For example, for our client Porch.com, we aimed for national coverage but also more relevant coverage on industry sites like Realtor.com.
Knowing we wanted to target niche publications like that one, we asked people about their opinions on HOAs. The project earned coverage on Realtor.com, REALTOR Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, and more.
Image Credits: Fractl
Significance is tough criteria from a brand perspective, but if you’re able to offer brand-new insights, it’s certainly not impossible.
2. The significance isn’t clear
Imagine a stranger handing you a book with a blank cover and saying, “Here, you’ll find this interesting.” Would you read the whole book?