Today, wherever you look marketing strategies are staring you down, direct marketing, content marketing, advertorials, teaser campaigns, contests, every little detail of the information you get is probably in some way or form a marketing gimmick. As audiences become more and more aware a brand needs to evolve and bring in a certain amount of credibility to their message.

Building relationships and engaging with the media is one effective way of actually bringing that credibility. A way of telling your story through a credible and verifiable source and focusing on the right elements of the story not the sales pitch. By engaging with journalists and media you can really add the strength of authenticity behind your message. Other than the fact that there is a built in following which media houses, news coverage agencies, publications and online news portals enjoy, they also have the ability to showcase stories with the right point of view, influence audiences and use multimedia to really emphasize the message. Good relationships with various media points are the key to really positioning your brand and what you do.

So why should you engage with Journalists and media houses?

LEVERAGE BUILT IN CREDIBILITY

Credibility of the news, the story and everything around it is hinged on who is reporting it. By getting coverage from an individual who has built up their credibility and already has an interested audience you create a much larger and deeper impact. A journalist in essence will fact check, validate and put the reader first in the coverage of any news story. Most audiences understand this and are more inclined to accept a message from a third party credible source rather than your website or blog. By making your brand readily visible and available to the media, you can build outstanding long term relationships and benefit from them

It is up to you to tell the story and structure your message in a manner which

• Is truly newsworthy
• Keeps the interests of the journalists and readers at its core.
• Puts the audience first

Ask yourself

• Why would they want to read your news?
• How does it add value to them?
• What is the feeling they take away by reading it?

Once you start focusing on the core elements of your message and start answering these questions, your ability to make strong relationships in media circles will improve drastically. These relationships will ultimately lead to your brands visibility to a much broader audience.

REFINED MESSAGING

By engaging with journalists and the media – your brand has the rare opportunity to actually evaluate your news and whether it is of value to the reader. Ongoing feedback and refinement of the quality of your news is something you can expect. A Journalist will always want information which is relevant and non salesy in nature to excite their audience and build a point of view on what they are reporting.

Your messaging will become:

• Sharper and audience focused
• Relevant and current
• Validated and unbiased in what it is trying to say

Building a relationship with a journalist or media house gives you’re the opportunity to really have your messaging evaluated and critically analyzed through an unbiased lens. The value of this feedback is immense. As your brand focuses on the right messaging you will see a much higher standard of loyalty, following and brand recognition.

LONG TERM BENEFITS AND THE “SNOWBALL EFFECT”

As you continue to build the right relationships, your brand starts to be viewed as relevant, trendsetting and newsworthy. This effect leads to many long term benefits; slowly you become the industry experts and are asked to add value to ongoing debates and current events. Other Journalists also start to pick up on the impact your brand has and include you in their coverages and want to talk about it.

You also have the option to now start reaching out to a much broader media landscape and have the credentials to have a conversation with them and showcase why your brand is newsworthy. This can trigger the “Snowball effect” for your brand. It is up to you to really capitalize on the visibility you receive and run with it to maximize the effect.

Many organisations make the mistake of not using existing coverage to leverage and get even more coverage and wait too long to get into the news again. This can lead to a genuine loss of momentum and to build back the momentum may take a long time.

Keeping your media outreach and relationship building strategy at the top of your marketing agenda is essential. It requires concerted effort to build a relationship and even identifying the right person to reach out to may be hard. Sometimes using a news distribution platform such as NewsVoir can give you great insights into who are the journalists who are in your industry space and are true influencers. By focusing on the journalist who care about the space your organization is in and targeting them will definitely give you a much higher response rate and a better opportunity to really cement the relationship that you start.