Try some of these hacks to boost your results, traditional PR techniques seem not working anymore

These exciting times of social and digital adoption have ensured that businesses should embrace new tools, techniques or business strategies to remain relevant and ahead of the curve. Public Relations and Communications domain is no different. 

In fact, given that the last decade has seen a huge change in how small and mid-sized businesses are warming up to the idea of using corporate communications and PR as a strategic tool, the industry has seen some tremendous growth opportunities. And with this a new crop of digital and social friendly communication professionals have started to work towards a data driven and engagement-oriented communications approach. 

Today, let’s explore some of these new age strategies and look at some of the public relations hacks which can be helpful to get adequate results for your next PR project.

Before we discuss the actual PR tricks which can help you to get quicker results in getting media visibility for any business, we surely need to talk about some basic points. 

While good content has always been in great demand from the times immemorial, the trending catch phrase “Content is king”, has become the cornerstone of digital and social engagement strategy. There is no substitute for good quality content if you really want to make an impact with any kind of digital activity. Good content has the ability to attract users and the algorithm of the search engines. 

To measure the success of any digital campaign we see return on investment, conversion and engagement as the most important key performance indicators. You can achieve them all together with your content if created with the approach to target a specific set of audiences. Before jumping to any trick or hack we all need to focus on building quality content.

Another basic point that we must touch upon is the PR Pitches, something we need to remember while running a campaign for any business or brand. A monotonous PR pitch may backfire and make a negative impact on the journalist you are trying to reach. Most of your email will go directly into the trash folder if you cannot convince a journalist with your pitch. Doesn’t matter how good your content and ideas are. 

Therefore, it is better to work on modifying and customizing your PR pitches according to the beat and demands of journalists. You can stand ahead of your competitors by doing a little research on the journalist’s background to start with.

The Relationship between media publications and public relations professionals is always helpful for each other. A PR person needs a journalist to publish a client’s story in the publications and a journalist requires fresh information and daily press releases. 

In order to maintain this relationship, never hesitate to help out a journalist when he or she needs any story input, comments, pictures or other information. It is the right thing to do if you wish to build a long-term relationship with a journalist and it will always be rewarding.

If you are a beginner in PR and want to understand the basic things which should be clear before stepping further into this, you should scroll through the articles below.

Five Things Everyone Should Know About Public Relations

The Changing Face of Public Relations

Public Relations – DIY for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses

Now, having covered some basic points, here are 5 cool PR hacks which you can adopt and apply to boost your campaigns and get some excellent results.

1.Focus on multimedia content to reach broader

To understand the impact of multimedia content, first we need to understand that content is everywhere around social media and there is no way to escape it. Content is not only a written piece of text but it is everything that appears on social media and people can engage with it.

Images, videos, animations, graphics, infographics, icons, podcasts or explanatory videos, anything which can convey a message to audiences is called content.  Google also advises using multimedia content to get maximum benefits of SEO and search engine algorithms.

A content analysis platform, Buzzsumo, revealed in a study that articles with an image every 75-100 words received double the shares versus articles with fewer images.

Visual content is always in demand and it has 10x potential to engage viewers with a brand. Journalists are also in need of visual stories these days and digital platforms are all about using effective ways to disseminate messages to people. Hack the growth of your campaigns by delivering multimedia content to your audience and tools like Canva for graphics and InVideo for video editing will help you through this journey.

2.Get into productive collaborations

Getting into collaborations has immense benefits, and yes you don’t even have to spend money on it. The term barter collaboration has historical relevance, this was used to exchange goods and services at a time. But in today’s scenario media barter deals have become a business process, and it allows media buyers and media owners to make deals without having to pay the cash in exchange of what they are buying. 

There are many small publications, influencers and blogs which have a substantial number of followers and we can’t afford to lose them. Their audiences are highly targeted and share interest in a particular product or service, so it can be rewarding if we reach them.

Basic principle of barter deals is that you have to supply the product to the person who you want to promote your message through his/her channel. You don’t need to find these people, there are many platforms which can help you get such influencers/bloggers who are ready for barter deals in exchange of promoting your message to their audience.

 

3.Custom Lists of Journalists 

A good tool improves the way you work; And a customized list of journalists can be the best tool a PR professional ever had. Not only one but there are several ways you can prepare these lists. Categorize the journalists based on their beats, area of working, city and publication they work for.

Applying these filters can help you pick the right set of journalists for your every campaign. Sending emails to a random list of journalists is a purposeless task, and it wastes the time of both parties.

Keeping a tab on media movements, updating media lists from time to time, analyzing market and competitors, utilizing social media lists and reviewing media coverage are the regular tasks you need to perform to sharpen your media lists.

4.Catch the Influencers

It is not only about the journalists and PR professionals every time; it is about the value you add to the efforts of a publication. A publication has vast reach, loyal audiences and readers to which they are trying to impress and add value. So, the major task is to add value to the content of a publication and satisfy its readers.

In the social media world, there are not only big fishes but many small accounts which have followership of millions of people. These people are very important for their followers and they can influence the decisions of their followers. That’s why they are called social media influencers. 

Connect with these influencers to make your campaign a big hit on social media and reach to people who are hardly reachable through any news publication. The engagement rate of influencers is way higher than other mediums.  

You can start with micro influencers on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube to start with the influencers’ marketing campaigns. Surely this will give a boost to your results. Remember, you need to modify your brand messages accordingly before reaching out to the influencers. It is not a good idea to circulate the same message to everyone there.

 

5.Understand the competitor landscape

The best way to analyze your results is to compare it with your competitors. But how would you know what your competitors’ results are?

You need to spy on your competitors for that and spying digitally is not very difficult. Using the right set of tools and tactics will give you exactly what you are looking for. It’s legitimate and open to the public, only you need to compile it and analyze it.

Keep a track of every activity of your competitors and analyze your performance accordingly. Do-

• Follow their blogs and every social media platform
• Find their tools and technologies
• Check their popularity and reviews
• Check their SEO and keywords they are using
• Check their backlinks
• Analyse their coverage and reach

First, you need to identify who you should spy on? Because you will have multiple competitors and it is not cool to spy on everyone. Know who your real competitors are and how they are better than you.

Tools like Google search, SEM rush, Spyfu and social media can easily help you get all the details you want.

 

Are you looking for instant media visibility for your brand or clients?

These hacks can help you accomplish your goals for PR activities. But we need to remember that PR isn’t an overnight game changer. It takes a lot of time and patience to grow a brand’s presence in the media and without hacking the things it might be tough. 🙂

If you need instant media attention for your brand, reach NewsVoir. We have helped 6200+ brands and PR agencies to accomplish their media visibility goals. Our smart press release platform has a network of 3500+ publications, 9000+ journalists and covers 100+ industry categories.

Reach us here, we will talk about PR.