by Felicity Cowie, The Media Relations Coach

In my earlier blogs for Lionesses of Africa, 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 how you can build your pipeline faster, with media coverage.

If you’re getting all your coverage from media outlets that are viewed and valued by your ideal customers, then you can build your pipeline much faster via these platforms, which will be far more established and far-reaching than your own nascent social media channels.

You can also save a lot of time. Rather than building your own channels as well as creating content you can cut down on this workload by creating content for pre-existing channels (such as the Lionesses of Africa platform!)

That’s not to say you don’t want to have your own channels because you do. But you can keep them low maintenance at first by using them to amplify the coverage you get on more established platforms.

For example, you may want to use Linkedin to make explicit your new venture to your network and can update your headline and About section accordingly. But rather than creating content for Linkedin you can create it for larger platforms used and valued by your potential clients. For example, sector or mainstream news sites.

Then when you get that media coverage you can then convert it into Linkedin content by taking screenshots of it and posting it with some information about how it came about and what you shared with a link to find out more. Sometimes the media outlets will then interact with your post, creating further amplification.

Getting media coverage is not just about reach it is also about building credibility and content which shows you’ve been covered by news outlets generally wins a lot of engagement. The double benefit of this approach is you are going out, via media to new potential customers, but in amplifying this coverage for your existing network (via your own channels) you are building further trust with them.

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