by Felicity Cowie, author of Exposure

In my earlier blog for LoA, What Exactly is Media Relations, I said there are at least eight mega benefits of media relations for any business to consider:

Gain exposure with zero to low financial investment
Build credibility
Build pipeline faster
Get highly valuable shareable content
Find product-market fit
Become a thought leader and ‘category queen’
Get funding and more funding
Gain external validation

In this series of blogs, I give you more detail and tools to gain each of these benefits.

Let’s look now at the fourth one - how you can get highly valuable shareable content from media coverage. You can leverage media coverage to grow your own channels faster. Media coverage generates buzz because people find ‘being in the news’ or knowing somebody in the news exciting.

You can put backlinks to it on your website, ‘As featured in...’, or post it on social media with words such as ‘delighted to be joining the global conversation about [the subject of the coverage] in this news story’ and attach a screenshot or link to it. The coverage will drive up ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing and engagement on your own channels and boost search engine optimization.

Investors rely on recommendations from people in their trusted networks, so by sharing your media coverage (especially on channels such as LinkedIn) you’re maximizing opportunities for this coverage to be flagged to them within their online communities and newsletters.

This content also increases your chances of winning further engagement from journalists. Journalists can have a ‘pack mentality’ and an initial piece of coverage in a trade or sector outlet can go all the way up the ‘ladder’ to mainstream media.

Journalists can be very risk averse because they are under pressure to deliver content fast, so they can feel more confident about approaching a new source or story (to them and their outlet) if they can see that the source or a version of the story has already been used by another journalist.

You can read more about all of this and gain tools to do it all in my book Exposure: Insider Secrets to Make Your Business a Go-To Authority for Journalists Get Exposure

Felicity Cowie has worked as a media relations trouble-shooter for some of the world’s leading organisations and is a former BBC News and Panorama journalist. She’s worked on 100,000 story pitches from both sides. She now makes her insights and tactics available to the founders and leaders of today’s early-stage businesses, helping them gain exposure and competitive advantage. She is the author of Exposure: Insider Secrets to Make Your Business a Go-To Authority for Journalists. More information www.themediarelationscoach.com