Marketing Communications Strategy

What It Is & How To Do It Right

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5. How to Get Press by Building Relationships
 The public relations field is a built on relationships.

 You might have seen the stereotype in movies – a busy PR person glued to the phone,
thumbing through a Rolodex (desktop card index) thicker than two packs of cards.

 The reality isn’t far from the truth, though emails have replaced phones and Customer
Relationship Management CRMs have replaced Rolodexes.
Getting the word out to journalists and influencers is still all about relationships in any
marketing communications strategy.

 A successful marketing communications specialist builds up these relationships over years.

 As an entrepreneur, you are an unknown quantity to any:

- journalist,
- influencer, or
- investor.

 You might have the best cold email pitches in the world, but since they don’t know you,
they’re unlikely to respond.

*Cold email is an unsolicited e-mail that is sent to a receiver without prior contact.
 You’ll also find that the top journalists almost never respond to unsolicited cold emails.

 It’s not that journalists and influencers aren’t nice people.

 They’re just too bombarded with emails:

- most journalists get more than 100 pitches per day.
- 70% of journalists also prefer collaborating on a story.
- only 30% of journalist prefer finished assets and be pitched something fully baked.

 Essentially, this means that you can’t simply send out cold pitches to top journalists.

 It’s far less effective than sending cold sales emails.

 Instead, you have to:

- stand out from the dozens of competing pitches, and
- collaborate with the journalist to develop a story idea

 To do both of these, you have to do one thing: build relationships.

6. How to Build Relationships
 The secret to building a relationship with an influencer is the same as building any other
relationship: Be valuable.

 This single rule should be the guiding force in your marketing communications strategy.

 All your interactions with:

- journalists,
- bloggers,
- influencers,
- investors,
- prospective customers, etc.
should follow it.

 In psychology, the “principle of reciprocity” – that you do unto others as they do to you – is
even considered one of the pillars of persuasion.
The more you give people something they want, the more they’re likely to do what you ask
of them (in our case, publish your story).

 Taking this into account is vital when you’re building your marketing communication process.
There are 2 principles you should adopt in your PR efforts:

1. Segment Your Prospect

 Would you use the same approach to reach out to Tim Ferriss* as you would for a no-name
blogger? Of course not.
 Your first step in marketing communications strategy is to segment your list into 3 categories:

 High-priority:
These are your ‘whales’ – high-value targets that have massive influence and reach.
Think of influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk* and journalists like Matt Burns*.

 Mid-priority:
These are prospects that would be known names to people within the industry, but don’t
have the name recognition of the ‘whales’ above.
Usually, they run websites with moderate authority but have a growing audience.
More importantly, they’re often followed by high-priority targets.

*Tim Ferriss: US author, podcast host, blogger, early-stage investor; has a net worth of $100 million.
*Gary Vaynerchuk: Russian-US author, speaker, Internet personality; has a net worth of $200 million.
*Matt Burns: one of the richest and listed on most popular TV Actor; has a net worth of $13 Million.
 Low-priority:
These are targets with newish websites and limited audiences.
They don’t have a lot of impact on getting you ‘viral’ but can act as a source of links and
social proof.

 Segmentation will help you align your efforts with the quality of the target.

 Create a marketing communication plan focused on maximizing the time and effort on high-
priority targets.

 Use scalable tactics for reaching out to low-priority targets.

2. Personalize Your Outreach

 Sending personalized emails is the number one thing you can do to build relationships.

 By the way, most journalists prefer not to be pitched on Twitter or over the phone.

 Medial relations professionals who stick to email and avoid other communication tools
achieve the highest response rates.

 The problem is that personalization isn’t scalable (=évolutive).

 One solution is to personalize according to the target’s priority.

 For your high-priority targets
Always use a personalized conversation starter.
This should be a unique, handwritten email that initiates a conversation by giving something
of value without any ask.
The goal of this ‘conversation starter’ is to establish yourself on the prospect’s radar.
The ‘ask’ will come later.
 For mid-priority targets
Throwing in a single personalized line at the start of the pitch is often enough.
This helps you stand out from the army of PR agents sending out emails from templates.
The rest of the email can be from a template and should include an ask.
 For low-priority targets
Personalize the name and, if possible, their website name.
The rest of the email can just be a template.
It’s a good practice to work your way up from low/mid-priority targets to high-priority ones.
You can use your coverage in lower priority targets to build social proof and reel (=produire)
in bigger publications.
This “snowball” effect is a big part of any successful marketing communications strategy.
 How to start conversations and offer value to journalists? Below are 4 approaches.
7. How to Start Conversations with Journalists
 The best way to build relationships is to give your targets something they value.

 While this will obviously vary from target to target, there are a few things most influencers,
bloggers, and journalists want:
- exposure
- interesting stories and content
- feedback and compliments
- answers to their questions

 Below are some ways to use these approaches to build relationships :

1. Share useful content

 Journalists live and breathe content.

 Any writer who cares about his work likely scours (=parcourt) the internet for interesting
stories and useful content.

 If you can point the journalist to content that is relevant to their needs, they’ll appreciate it.

 To do this, you need to do some quick research on the journalist’s interests & recent stories.
 Most journalists will clearly identify their area of interest on their public profiles.

 Ex: Darrell Etherington notes his reporting areas in his Twitter bio:
This means that Darrell will likely be interested in stories related to transportation.

 You can also go through their most recent stories to see what kind of topics they’ve been
interested in lately.
In Darrell’s case, he’s written a lot about automotive tech companies like Tesla and Uber:

 If you send Darrell a story about Musk’s flamethrowers or a flying car, there’s a chance he’ll
find it useful, getting you one step closer to establishing a relationship.

 This approach was used to connect with Darrell earlier.

- A link to a story on a topic he’d shown interest in was sent to him .
- He responded by writing about the story later on TechCrunch:

 It’s important that you do this without any expectations.

 Do not have an ask; just share good content.

“Giving” should be the cornerstone of your marketing communications strategy.
 Do not try to sneak in a link to content you created either.

 There will be a time for self-promotion later.

 For now, just be generous by sharing quality content.

 If you’re going to share content with journalists, pick up something that is both substantial
and not easy to find.

 Don’t just send them the latest article you saw on NY Times.

 Chances are, they’ve seen it already.

 Keep a list of top websites that regularly feature content from your journalist’s industry.

 If you’re targeting business bloggers, for instance, you might share something from HBR.org.
*HBR = Harvard Business Review

 For best results, tie the content to what the journalist wrote about recently.

 A list of their most recently published pieces can help.

2. Promote them on Quora*
 A surefire way to hook in an influencer is to give them free exposure.

 However, most marketers mess this up by writing about the influencer on their own blog and
sending them a link to it.

 While they’ll likely be chuffed to see their name on your site, this approach has an element
of selfishness to it.

 There is an expectation that they’ll have to promote your website in exchange for the
mention.

 The trick is to be generous by giving them exposure on sites that:

- you don’t control, and
- have a large audience.

 And one of the best sites to do this is Quora.

Here’s how it works:
- Search for your target keyword on Quora.
- Look for a question that is fairly open-ended, yet specific enough to invite expert opinion.

*Quora is a US social question-and-answer website.

 Ex: If you’re writing about content marketing, this would be a good question:
What are some common beginner mistake in content marketing?

 Next, write a detailed answer to the question.

 Most importantly, include a quote or reference to the influencer you’re trying to target.
Ex: I wanted to reach out to a VentureBeat writer so I included a quote from her in my
answer.

 Now reach out to the influencer and tell them about your Quora answer or a tweet.

 This approach works better than simply dropping the influencer’s name in your own blog
post.

 It shows that you care enough about their work to not only read it, but to also promote it on
a platform you don’t even own.

 The result is a solid foundation for building a relationship as part of your marketing
communications strategy.

*VentureBeat is a US technology website, leader in covering transformative tech.

3. Share data & insight
 Journalists love data, especially if it can be used to support something they’ve written about
earlier.

 If your organization has some unique data or insights, sharing it with a journalist or influencer
is a great way to get an “in”.

 The trick to make this work is to tie the data to something they covered recently.
If they wrote about poor conversion rates of outreach campaigns, and you have your own
data showing otherwise, share it with them!

 Ex: Reference a journalist’s recent posts on loneliness to share data about dating preferences.

 But what if you don’t have data of your own?

In that case, you can create unique content specifically for the influencer.

 Use this tactic extensively and a software like Polar can help you achieve this.
Created unique polls bloggers could plug into their recent posts to spur (inciter) engagement.

 Closed the email with a question?

That’s a great way to get a response.
4. Answer their questions

 What if instead of pitching journalists, you could get them to pitch you instead?

 Sounds impossible, but an online service for journalists like HARO (Help A Reporter Out)
makes the marketing communication process easier by connecting journalists with sources.

 Every day, it sends out an email with a list of requirements from different journalists.

 Sources who fit their requirements can jump in and leave a response.

 Ex: Here’s a recent requirement for blockchain experts posted on HARO:

- If you had a blockchain product, this would be some of the easiest press you could
ever get.

 The problem with HARO is that it queries can be hard to find.

 It is not searchable:
You have to ask your marketing communications manager to keep an eye out for the
newsletters they send twice a day.
 To solve this problem:
A HARO search engine was incorporated in JustReachOut.

 Instead of digging through newsletters:

Just enter your target keyword and find relevant opportunities.

 This makes the entire marketing communications process drastically easy and gets your
organization into some high-profile media publications.

 So do try to include HARO as one of your marketing communication tools.

 “Be where your customers already are” is business for starters and it applies equally to PR.

 Be where journalists are already asking questions and in our case, it’s HARO.

*JustReachOut is a PR platform that allows to find relevant journalists, publications, press

opportunities, content, and podcasts to pitch with confidence.
8. Using Relationships to Get Press
 If you’ve put in the hard work and built relationships with journalists as part of your
marketing communications strategy, you’re already far ahead of the competition.

 You’ll find that it’s significantly easier to get people to respond to you if you’ve
communicated with them before.

 For one, instead of sending a fresh email, you can simply reply to your older conversation
thread.

 When they see that you’ve spoken to them earlier, it’s guaranteed that they’ll at least look.

 Two, there is the principle of reciprocity at play.

 If you’ve been nice to them in the past, there is an implicit obligation on them to return the
favor.

 After you’ve had a couple of touches:

The more important the influencer, the more touches you’ll need.
Send them an email referencing your earlier conversation.
But this time, include a clear ask (see example below).
 Use example like this:
Hi Steven,
You might remember me from the graphic I shared with you from ----------- video.
I just wanted to get your thoughts about letting me do a guess post on -------------.
Here is the topic I had in mind:

 If your pitch is good and of interest to them, most will happily respond.

 The best part about this approach is that your pitch doesn’t have to be perfect.

 Marketers spend hours following cold email pitch tips, but if your targets have already
warmed up, you don’t have to use any clever “hacks”.

 Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can send a lazy pitch.

 You should still be succinct, offer value, and use a strong subject line.

 Carefully follow the tips in this presentation to learn how to create a compelling pitch to
journalists and influencers.

 Out of all marketing and communications approaches, there’s nothing as valuable as these
press relationships!
 Over time, these relationships will get you valuable media coverage that will far outweigh
what you can achieve even with a huge advertising budget.

 After all, a story in a top outlet brings far more credibility than any self-promotional
advertising campaign – whether it’s a TV ad or a direct mail campaign.

 It’s the best marketing investment you will ever make! Over to You

 Getting press, backlinks, and guest blogging opportunities should be the cornerstone of any
startup’s marketing communications strategy.

 It’s way more cost-effective than advertising, scalable, and helps you build the long-term
relationships necessary for promoting your business.