Would you like to take your local business to a new level? Launching a solid, well-planned local link building and PR outreach strategy is an effective way to generate traffic, grow your brand, and build local backlinks! What is PR Outreach?PR outreach is a marketing process in which a company contacts various publications in order to build coverage. It’s commonly conducted by email, although additional methods like social media messages and phone calls may also be used from time to time. More often than not, the purpose of outreach is to gain press coverage. With that in mind, I’ll be referring to outreach targets (i.e. people you are contacting) as “press prospects”. Define Your GoalsDepending on your goals, outreach tactics will vary. Public relations and outreach can mainly be used to:
You may have both of these goals in mind, but if you’re at an early stage of reaching out to press prospects then I suggest starting with location-based outreach:
With that in mind, let’s agree that email outreach should start within your location. But before we delve into that, let’s take care of some important basics: Do the Basic Work FirstSet-up and establish your email addressOne of the first questions you’re going to face is, “Where should I email from? Should I use my own domain? Should I use a free email service like Yahoo or Gmail?” These are all valid questions, and I’ve been going from method to method to come up with a winning strategy:
Instead, set up a new email address on a new domain. There are tons of cheap top-level domains that will look like something coming from your brand but will help you keep this part of your marketing separate. Namify is a cool service that will help you find a great cheap domain for those purposes: Make sure you register your email address, set up a mailing server, and start using it a few months prior to starting your outreach strategy. Most spam filters will flag emails coming from brand new domains. Also consider using a tool called Mail Tester on a regular basis. The tool will alert you if your email might be flagged as spam and include a reason why, so you can fix it and improve deliverability. Create your email outreach guidelines and policiesChances are your outreach emails are going to be sent by interns, freelancers or a separate marketing team, and that’s where problems can occur. When a task is moved from person to person, some of those people may not clearly understand the responsibility of communicating on your business’s behalf. Outreach is part of external business communication and hence should be handled very carefully. You cannot allow your brand to be misrepresented, or to have your relationships with journalists ruined. So before you launch your outreach strategy, create a clear business communication policy and make sure everyone involved is familiar with it. Note what can or cannot be included in emails, what to do if a recipient is irritated by being contacted, and which situations should be escalated to you.
Create or beef up your “Press” pageNot many bloggers or reporters will write an article about you or your business right away. The best you can hope for is that those bloggers or journalists will click a link in your email and give you the benefit of the doubt: “Is there really a story here?” This is where creating an effective “Press” (and possibly also “About”) page is so important. You need to spark curiosity and trigger an action on that page. With that in mind:
Find Local Journalists and BloggersThere are lots of ways to find niche and/or local reporters, and at some point you’ll have exhausted all of them and will need to find more. Here are some main sources to get you started: Google is obviously the first source I turn to. Play with all kinds of combinations of your locations (your city, cities and counties nearby, your state, etc.) and anything from [blog] to [magazine]. Then start a spreadsheet and list all the sites that seem active: Twitter is a great way to discover active bloggers and reporters, and the best thing is that you can start building relationships with them right away! Start by following those people, retweeting their tweets and commenting on what they have to say. These activities will help on many levels, mainly:
To find local bloggers and reporters on Twitter, try Twitter’s native search feature: simply switch to the “People” tab when searching Twitter: BuzzsumoBuzzsumo offers several tools to find local bloggers and reporters. Their content search feature allows you to find journalists covering your location. Keep the “Journalists” filter active, and search for multiple locations including neighboring cities, counties and your state: Buzzsumo also has a powerful Twitter search feature allowing you to find tweeting journalists: LinkedIn is one of the most misunderstood social media networks: some people ignore it completely, while some overuse it. I use LinkedIn as a connection discovery tool. You can open your chosen publication profile page and find reporters you are connected to: Take note of your common contacts to get introduced and start building those relationships! Coming Up with Outreach IdeasConnecting to those bloggers and reporters earlier will help you better understand them and what would make them curious enough to cover your business and/or link to your site. So spend some time listening to them, interacting with their updates, and monitoring their content. This will give you ideas on how to approach them in a more effective way. Here are a few examples of community PR opportunities to use in your outreach: Local charities you’re supportingIs your company partnering with or supporting a charity? If you time your outreach to match something trending, you may find quite a few reporters willing to cover your story. Here’s one example I got last year which piqued my interest because of its timeliness: Local success storiesWas your CEO or business awarded for something locally? Is there another success story to tell? Here’s an email I got which definitely stood out: Local events your business is hosting or participating inThese could include local conferences and summits, festivals, or taster events. If you’re organizing or sponsoring an event, use email outreach to get some coverage. One of the most effective ways to use events as a PR opportunity is to give away free passes to press and media representatives. Here’s a good example of event-based outreach that got me participating! Going Outside of Your LocationUse lessons from your local PR to expand to national publications and popular blogs. It’s easier to do when you have some local coverage to mention in your outreach. Nationwide (or even global) outreach takes lots of time because you are dealing with a much wider pool of press contacts. But it can also be really rewarding in the long run. Once your business manages to get featured in a large publication, you’ll see press requests coming through without you having to reach out to anyone. Make the Most of Each EmailWhile not specific to local outreach, this final step is always worth mentioning: make the most of each of those emails. Don’t give up too early and lose a contact! Follow up!There are lots of case studies proving the effectiveness of following-up. One of them states that follow-ups result in 22% more replies. In other words, without following up, you’re losing about one-fifth of your press prospects. If you’re using an outreach platform like Link Hunter or Pitchbox, follow-ups will be automatically included. Just don’t forget to edit the copy! Also, several studies suggest that a magic number of follow-ups is 3 (definitely not more!) Admittedly, I usually use a single follow-up but I think every business needs to find the magic number that yields results and feels comfortable to them. Create additional assetsOffer your press prospects diverse materials for them to cover you! This could be anything from including “insider” photos and media kits to creating entertaining videos. There are lots of tools and easy-to-use video editors to help you out. It’s a good idea to include these on your press page as well as mention them in your follow-up email. Create and track additional CTAs and engagement tactics for your PR leadsIn the ideal world you’d want each and every person you contact to take some sort of action:
Not all people will want to schedule a call with you or request more information right away. You want these people to still hang around and hopefully get interested in your brand in the future. This is where all of those alternative calls-to-action (CTAs) help. Obviously, don’t include all of them in a single email. Instead, spread them out, for example:
Of course, you need to monitor all those CTAs to identify best-working ones:
Finteza makes it incredibly easy to identify best working CTAs and the most effective landing pages. Track your mentions and linksFinally, keeping an eye on your inbound links and brand mentions is important, as not all bloggers and journalists featuring you will reply to your email.
Finally, to organize those links and keep track of them, Link Checker can help you monitor your links as well as visualizes your progress: ConclusionPR outreach is a great way to get your local business known, and to discover new exciting growth opportunities. It takes time and effort to create an effective outreach and local link building strategy, but I do recommend keeping it in-house (at least partially) because all those contacts you build are priceless. Good luck! The post How to Do PR Outreach for Local Businesses appeared first on BrightLocal. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/2UsqG2S Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/
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