Getting your brand featured in the media is a crucial step toward gaining credibility and exposure as an authority in your industry.
Bloggers, Start-up’s, SAAS Companies, Lawyers, Doctors, Financial Advisors, and any Small Business Professional can benefit from Media Exposure on big news sites like Fox, CBS, and NBC.
Let’s go through some available options for getting media coverage on newspapers and media sites. We’ll start with the easiest and quickest one first.
Publishing a Press Release
Publishing a Press Release is the easiest and quickest way to get media coverage for your brand.
There are many options out there for doing Press Releases.
You can publish directly with press release distribution sites like NewsWire, but the cost will range from $350 up to $2,000 dollars or more, depending on the options you get. For example, if you focus more on a Financial Press Release distribution, the cost is almost $900.
To add on NewWire’s Guaranteed Media Placement Program, it will easily make your entire campaign cost $2500 or more. But, they can get you on sites like Time, Life, Forbes, and the like.
When it comes to doing a press release, other distribution services are available that focus more on the $300 to $1,000 price range. This will be more friendly for a small business’s budget.
To get the best options and save yourself a lot of time, most brands should take the easy road and work with a Digital Marketing or PR agency that offers a “Get Featured” service.
It’s a huge advantage for you as well because each agency has its own connections, which will bring you much more value for how your press release gets distributed.
Plus, each agency negotiates different deals and discounts on volume pricing with service providers like NewsWire, Einpresswire, and PR Newswire, so your budget will be better spent and you won’t have to do any of the production work.
Another big plus is they can make sure your Press Release follows the strict editorial standards that the industry demands. This means you’ll get it right the first time with only a few revisions.
Creating Something NewsWorthy Will Create a Reason To Promote Your Brand
It can be hard to think about something you’ve done recently that might be newsworthy.
Whether you do something or create a solution to a problem, here are a few ideas you can leverage with.
- Do you have a popular YouTube channel?
- What about a blog?
- Did you recently finish writing a book?
- If you are a lawyer, did you win a big deal for your client?
- Did you finish building a product?
- Are you hosting an event of some kind?
- Highlight a news event that happened recently.
- Hosting a Charity or Industry Related Event
- Any exciting achievement or good news related to your brand.
These are all newsworthy sources to draw ideas from and leverage to promote your brand and attract attention from influencers in the media.
For example, a subject matter expert who writes a book will have a perfect reason to interview on a podcast, send out a press release, promote a sponsored post, or attract a news reporter to interview you. The same is true when hosting an event or building a new product that solves a problem for the masses.
Being In The Right Place At The Right Time
Sometimes being in the right place at the right time will provide you a big opportunity to get interviewed on the news. If you happen to be part of running a big event like a fair, for example, it might draw the interest of a local news reporter, and you will cross paths the day the event is running.
The same is true for rare life moments like witnessing a traffic accident, a new business opening up, or being in a restaurant when someone famous walks in and orders food.
You just never know what can happen in life.
If something spontaneously happens to you, it could attract the news, and you’ll meet a reporter who will interview you about that particular moment. Now because they have your information, they could contact you down the road for a different story that relates to your brand.
This, of course, is going to require a lot of luck, but it does happen.
Build Connections With Your Local News Outlets
One of our legal clients recently used their blog to publish local news events and provide expert commentary to summarize the up-and-coming problems relating to crime in the community.
When a big news story made a headline that related to the crime, the reporter was doing some research for the story on Google and found the local news articles on their blog.
The reporter reached out for a quote and linked back to the blog for reference. Their website was now essentially being featured on a local news site, and all they did was publish about an ongoing problem on their blog.
There are so many other ways to build connections with the local news; you just need to be good at networking and provide proof that you are an expert on a given subject matter. Blogging, Podcasting, Social Media, or a YouTube channel is a perfect way to start with this!
Use HARO and Qwoted To Build Relationships
Just like our previous section on making connections with local news outlets in your area, another way to build rapport with bloggers, reporters, and writers nationally is to utilize the services called Help a Reporter Out (HARO) or Qwoted.
These are news services that send out daily emails full of media requests that connect sources and journalists.
Mostly, these services let you sign up for free, but you may have to pay a fee to get early access to pitch on available stories.
If you are a blogger, I recommend HARO if you are just after something free because they have the most available leads each day and won’t hide any contact info.
If you’re a bit more serious with getting your quotes into various stories as the news breaks out, you’ll be better off paying for a subscription to HARO or Qwoted because you’ll have a chance to pitch early. Also, you won’t be restricted on when or how many requests you can reply to for commentary.
Make Sure You Are On Twitter
These days, lots of people don’t want to be on social media.
(And as of this writing, Elon Musk is looking to buy Twitter to fix its problems with fake bots.)
The thing about Twitter though, is that everybody in the media is on it.
You can follow people in the media and review your Twitter feed for any requests made for a source to contribute to an up-and-coming story.
Another advantage of Twitter is this: If you meet a reporter and get featured in a story you found through HARO, you could follow that reporter and see a request from them on a similar topic for a different publication. Since you have worked with them already, you’ll have an excellent chance of getting featured again. Typically, journalists write for many various publications.
This is the real power of being on Twitter; you get to set up media opportunities with others in your industry, whether they are Reporters, Journalists, Fellow Bloggers, or even YouTubers.
The one thing I would not expect from Twitter is a lot of referral traffic to a blog post you write. The engagement for that is pretty low for most. But, you should still show off things you create so that someone has something to scroll through when they view your Twitter Profile. If you want to build up a following just reply to trends and topics you are familiar with.
Make Relationships with Writers and Editors, So You Know Who You Are Pitching To
Making relationships with Writers and Editors is another great way to get your brand featured. Again, you can do this through social media, Twitter, going to conventions, or through the news reporter services I mentioned earlier, which are HARO and Qwoted.
After you are in the industry for a while, you will organically form relationships with people in the media from all sorts of random places.
The most important thing when trying to meet people in the media is to do it indirectly. It should be more about what you can do for them than what they can do for you. If a natural opportunity comes up for you to help them with a news article they are working on, it will happen naturally because of the authentic relationship you have with them. In other words, don’t over-promote yourself to anybody!
Be Patient, Follow Up, and Confirm
Whenever you contribute something to a news story, you need to understand something. You can’t control how long the story will take to get published sometimes.
If it’s breaking news, it will always be published right away!
If it’s a more evergreen type of story with lots of interviews, research, etc. it might take weeks to complete.
So be patient, take your time to follow up, and confirm if a week or more goes by and you don’t hear anything back yet.
There’s a funny thing about HARO, I’ve had clients pitch on a story and report back to us that sometimes it will take 4 – 6 weeks for them to even know the story they were featured in was published.
They only found out about it because they saw the backlink show up on their Google Search Console.
The writer took their contribution and published it, then forgot to tell them about it. Or they were just so busy it was not possible to get back to each and every source for the story.
This is not the norm with every reporter on HARO, but it does happen. That’s why if you have a better connection with the reporter, the follow-up and confirmation will be much better for you.
In the end, Press Releases still have a big advantage because it’s an instant follow-up when it goes live. You’ll get a report instantly after the publication is done.
Final Thoughts
These ideas for getting featured are not the end all be all. I’ll update this article from time to time as I think of more ideas for it.
The takeaway is to build your own connections through your content creation with blogging, videos, or podcasting. Create something that is Newsworthy, then promote yourself on places like Twitter, where people in the media hang out.
If you want the fastest results, a Press Release is your best option, but you’ll pay for it as a service. However, the good news is that it might be quicker and more profitable for you in the long run because of all the time you will save.
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