The ongoing pandemic and changing social values have redefined brand trust and public expectations of corporate brands. Further, a 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer survey found that 70% of consumers feel that trust in a company is more important today than ever before. But what exactly does it mean to today’s customers?
What is Brand Trust?
Brand trust is the degree of faith consumers have in your company to deliver on its promises. In addition to the quality of a company’s products or services, it can also refer to its financial performance or commitment to social causes. More recently, issues related to ESG and CSR have become more significant aspects of consumers’ trust in a brand. This aligns with the 74% of consumers who say that companies’ sizable impact on society and the planet is the main reason it has taken center stage.
Why is Brand Trust Important?
Brand trust is important because customers are more likely to purchase products and services from companies they feel they can rely on.
Trust significantly influences consumer behavior and purchase intent. Edelman’s 2020 survey – which included respondents from 11 countries – found that consumers rated trust as the second most important factor (behind price and affordability) when deciding to buy from a new brand or become a loyal customer.
Despite its importance, Havas’ 2021 Meaningful Brands Report indicates that only 39% of brands are trusted by consumers.
5 Ways to Build Brand Trust
So, what does this mean for PR teams?
Here are five ways your team can create a brand trust strategy that truly resonates with your target audience:
Know Your Audience
Consumers’ values when it comes to trust vary by audience demographics and interests. When studying trust across generations, Morning Consult found that not only are Millennials (1981 – 1995) and Gen Z (1996 – 2012) less trusting of the average brand, but they are also more likely to prioritize ethical concerns when choosing companies to trust. While the two younger generations are more likely to choose brands that align with their personal values, Gen X (1965 – 1980) consumers demonstrate greater long-term loyalty to their chosen brands.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to appealing to audiences, but it’s evident they all expect brands to meet certain standards. An in-depth understanding of your audience is crucial to building trust and maintaining consumer loyalty to your brand.
Define Your Values
Modern consumers favor brands that care about more than just profit. With your audience’s values in mind, consider where your company stands on each aspect of ESG and CSR. Over half of American consumers believe it’s important for companies to take a stand on social, environmental, and political issues. So, rather than steering clear of divisive topics, determine your company’s stance and publicize it. Millennials and Gen Z claim they are most receptive to brands sharing their stances on social media, in particular. Take advantage of your social channels to promote your values and highlight any work your company is doing to improve sustainability, ensure workplace safety, or promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), etc.
Show Authenticity
Research has shown that authenticity contributes to brands’ trustworthiness and perceived value. Use your social media channels to create authentic content and establish a connection with your audience.
According to Forbes, the key to being authentic is to “keep it real.” This means sharing the good and the bad with your audience, being honest and accountable when you fail, and maintaining a consistent, relatable voice across your channels. Your audience wants to feel as though they are hearing from a human being on the other end of your social accounts, not a disembodied corporation.
Ensure Transparency
A commitment to full transparency is fundamental to building and maintaining brand trust, even when your company makes mistakes. You can ensure transparency by being honest about your company’s operations and making information readily accessible to the public. Your consumers want to know that you are accountable to them and aren’t misleading with any of the information you share or withhold.
Two key steps towards transparency include admitting to your failures and outlining your plans to address them, and responding to online reviews in a way that demonstrates your openness to criticism.
Avoid Empty Promises
Audiences are wary of brands who are hopping on the social values bandwagon without making any operational changes towards an impact. You can show your consumers that your company has put action and money behind those values by measuring and reporting your CSR, ESG, and DEI efforts and impact.
Similarly, avoid claiming that your brand supports any values that align with your audience’s if you can’t back them up with evidence that your company is acting. Your audience will hold you accountable.
Measure Your Impact
In this era of uncertainty, it is more important than ever to build and strengthen consumers’ faith in your company. By taking steps to establish trust with your audience, you can improve consumer loyalty long-term.
But how do you know if your PR strategy is resonating with your audience and moving the needle on brand trust?
With the majority of brand work taking place across social platforms, understanding the conversations happening around broad social topics is essential to inform your strategy. You can then use social media listening to evaluate your social presence.
With our human-augmented AI approach to media analytics, PublicRelay can accurately evaluate text for sentiment, context, and multidimensional concepts across social, traditional, and broadcast media.
Click here to learn how you can start measuring your media coverage today!
Brand credibility is crucial for a company to establish itself and is a key factor in sustained growth. For that reason, understanding brand credibility and how it can be influenced by earned media coverage is an important aspect of managing a company’s reputation. While it is most effectively built over time, PR teams can take several steps to help expedite the process.
What is Brand Credibility?
Brand credibility is the level of trust consumers have in a brand and their perceptions of its expertise. The Association for Consumer Research further explains it as “the believability of the product information contained in a brand, which requires that consumers perceive that the brand has the ability (i.e., expertise) and willingness (i.e., trustworthiness) to continuously deliver what has been promised.” It is an aspect of a company’s reputation that is most often cultivated over time as the quality of its products or services proves consistent and its brand awareness increases.
Why is Brand Credibility Important?
Brand credibility is important because the ability to garner consumers’ trust is essential to brand health. Trust in a company’s product and message, along with confidence in its ability to deliver a consistent and high-quality product, reflects positively on a company’s reputation and sets it apart from competitors. Customers must be able to rely on the quality of the product or service the brand is providing. A 2019 study of trust and risk perspectives of high-value brands noted that “customers adopt trust as a shortcut to avoid complex decision processes that carry risk.” If a company gives reason for skepticism, a consumer is more likely to forgo it for another brand. Overall, credible brands have more forgiving relationships and personal connections with their consumers.
Ways to Build Your Brand Credibility
Brand credibility can be difficult to build because of the time it takes to develop consistency and social proof. It can take years to prove to consumers that your products or services are reliable and for positive reviews to accumulate. However, a brand’s earned media coverage can increase its visibility and boost public perceptions of the validity of its claims.
Here are four ways you can build brand credibility:
Promote Spokesperson Coverage
Coverage of your company spokespeople and executives in reputable or industry-recognized third-party media outlets can establish the credibility and expertise of your brand. By securing bylines or offering quotes or interviews to relevant trade publications, consumers will see that your brand representatives are regarded as credible and experts in their fields. Even simply having a quote appear in a priority outlet can help build the integrity of your brand and perceived expertise. Further, contributing articles to industry publications or being cited for thought leadership can be an additional boost to your spokespeople’s reputations as experts.
Leverage Your Social Media Channels
Using social media allows for a direct connection between a brand and its consumers and paves the wave for establishing trust with your audience. According to a 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer special report, “four in 10 consumers say they are unlikely to become emotionally attached to a brand unless they are interacting via social media.” Being active and present on social media can show an attentiveness toward customers’ concerns, and allow a brand to boost its perceived authenticity which, in turn, fosters trust.
Build Social Proof
Social proof refers to the tendency of people to look to the opinions of others to guide their actions and beliefs. Social proof is vital to public relations because people’s judgments are shaped by others when they’re uncertain of how to feel about a new product or brand. There are several ways to build social proof that will resonate with your target audience.
For instance, positive reviews from past customers serve to confirm the quality and reliability of your products or services for prospective customers. Likewise, testimonials from existing clients or relevant influencers are useful for building trust among a shared target audience. Recent research has even found that celebrity trust in a company can significantly impact brand credibility.
Evaluate Your Strategy
Brand credibility takes time to develop, and some tactics may work better than others. Monitoring the impact of your spokesperson coverage, social proof, and influencer strategies on the portrayal of your company in earned media coverage can indicate whether your PR outputs are resonating with your target audience.
Build a media measurement program that tracks the metrics and industry topics that matter most to your reputation for data to guide your messaging and approach. By tracking your company’s earned media coverage, you can evaluate the impact of your campaigns on your brand credibility and learn from your competitors to inform your communications strategy.
Measuring Brand Credibility
Brand credibility is an essential facet of brand health. It cements a company and its representatives as reputable, allowing it greater longevity. Being mindful of the factors that contribute to perceptions of trust and expertise is crucial for PR teams looking to build or improve credibility.
With our unique human-AI hybrid approach to media measurement, PublicRelay can help your team benchmark your brand against competitors and gauge your impact in obtaining high brand credibility. Start measuring your earned media coverage now!
Communications teams have the incredible responsibility of managing their company reputation across all forms of media. What may appear to be a simple task spans a seemingly infinite number of online outlets, print publications, and social sites with constantly changing discussions. Not only that, but conversations around your brand can quickly become cacophonous and make it difficult to decipher how your brand is represented.
What is Reputation Management?
Reputation management is the act of influencing or controlling public perceptions of a company. With the increasing shift towards digital media, the practice requires consideration of traditional, online, broadcast, and social media.
Managing your reputation is both active and reactive and is shaped by three types of coverage: earned, paid, and owned media. Paid media relates to advertising, earned media encompasses traditional media coverage and social discussions, and owned media refers to content published by your organization, like your company website, blog, and social media.
Why is Reputation Management Important?
Reputation management is important because it can help your company build trust and brand loyalty in an era when consumers are more informed, demanding, and skeptical than ever. As younger generations amass more buying power, monitoring your brand can also help ensure your company stays relevant in a highly competitive market. For instance, Gen Z favors authenticity, fun, and tech when they consider brands – do you know how your company is performing in those areas?
The factors influencing how a brand is perceived expand far beyond the scope of typical business operations: they now encompass social and environmental responsibility, corporate governance, and community relations. PR teams are even developing practices around CEO activism to maintain a reputation that connects with today’s consumers. Investing in reputation management can help your company make sure it is represented favorably by the media and that its portrayal stays relevant.
Steps to Build a Reputation Management Strategy
Building a reputation management strategy begins with identifying your reputational drivers: the key aspects that construct your brand’s identity. After determining the topics that drive your brand’s coverage, implement a data-based media strategy to track your key messages and develop strategies to correct divergences from your desired brand. Monitoring competitor coverage can also help your team to predict trends and develop internal strategies for crisis response.
Identify Your Reputational Drivers
Start by identifying the key factors that drive your company’s reputation, also known as reputational drivers. At PublicRelay, we have developed a framework of seven essential reputation drivers that can be applied or adapted to any company: products and services, business strategy, workplace, leadership, corporate social responsibility, financial performance, and government relations.
Reputational drivers work together to help paint a cohesive picture of the public perception of your brand and should be tailored to represent your company and industry. Maybe your company has reworked its communications themes for 2021, and emphasis on diversity is crucial. After all, a growing number of consumers are changing their consumption habits to frequent more diverse businesses. Using the reputational drivers “workplace” and “corporate social responsibility” you can track sub-categories such as “diversity” and “DEI initiatives” to accurately assess your performance on specific facets of your reputational goals.
Your team may not yet know the full breadth of the drivers that comprise your corporate reputation. Tracking key industry competitors or launching a whitespace program to monitor PR strategies and discussions in your sector are excellent, in-depth starting points to understand the reputational drivers of both close competitors and larger organizations.
Monitor Your Coverage Using Real-Time Data Analytics
One of the most effective methods for ensuring that your messaging and earned media are consistent with your reputational goals is using real-time analytics. Tracking the volume, tone, and sharing of media output that mentions your company can help you determine how often your key messages are discussed, the sentiment surrounding them, and how readers engage with your coverage.
Using real-time analytics also allows you to pivot and adapt your brand messaging in response to public interests, political activity, and global events. For example, environmental, social, and governance topics have exploded over the last 12 months, with global standard-setters announcing new ways to comprehensively measure and track businesses’ ESG initiatives.
However, be wary of fully automated real-time data analysis solutions – AI and Machine Learning can only accomplish so much when analyzing articles for sentiment, significance, and social context. Alternatively, if humans analyze your data, you can access a richness of reputation analysis that allows for a more useful data set. For example, how can AI determine how ethical your brand appears in earned media? According to McKinsey, ethics are a key aspect influencing decision-making for Gen Z, and human analysis will ensure your coverage is accurately evaluated for such nuanced social issues.
Develop Data-Based Strategies for Crises That Threaten Reputation
Tracking your company messages and those of your peers can also help shape your approach to crisis communications. When negative publicity threatens your brand’s reputation, you can use data from the experiences of competitors faced with similar crises in the past to inform your response. Whether the move is to remain quiet as coverage passes or issue a carefully worded statement, competitive tracking can give you the foresight to deftly maneuver potential challenges.
Identify the Threats Worth Addressing
Negative articles about your brand will inevitably be published from time to time, but not all bad press is worth addressing. Coverage that threatens your desired brand may be worthy of a response if published by a high-reach outlet or if it garners significant social sharing, as both factors could snowball into additional negative coverage or even result in a communications crisis. Social engagement is especially important, as sharing spreads articles across websites, amplifying their reach exponentially.
Predictive analytics can help your team to see around the corner when it comes to topics with high potential virality, allowing you to know before an article goes viral if it constitutes a potential threat to your brand reputation. This mechanism can also help you anticipate positive coverage, enabling your team to capitalize on sharing trends.
Start Managing Your Reputation Today
Reputation management is one of the greatest responsibilities of PR and communications teams. While paid and owned media are internally controlled, earned media relies on both a proactive and reactive management strategy best implemented with reputational driver analysis as they appear in the media. With real-time data analysis, your communications team can track how your brand messages are portrayed across earned media, how social users engage your campaigns, and how peer messages appear in the press. A comparative analysis can also allow your company a representative insight into the market, identifying how your reputation stands against peers and what you can learn from their mistakes.
PublicRelay can help your team reactively and proactively track topics that might throw a wrench in your brand management plans. Our new predictive momentum score allows our clients to see the likelihood of an article will going viral on social media. To know if a topic is trending enough to warrant a crisis management-level response, we also offer predictive alerts to notify your team hours in advance of an article that might go viral so you can begin strategizing. To learn more about how PublicRelay can help to manage your brand, click here.
Media monitoring is the process by which a company keeps track of its media coverage. This practice benefits PR and communications teams in many ways. Most notably, a good monitoring program allows a company to more effectively manage its reputation, one of the greatest assets of any business.
Tracking media coverage has become an increasingly essential part of companies’ PR strategies. With the introduction of social and digital media, coupled with media content that is readily available to people on smart devices, a successful monitoring program is crucial to staying on top of your company’s public image.
Why is Media Monitoring Important?
Media monitoring is important because it helps you stay up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry and provides your PR team with the opportunity to proactively manage your brand. Having a strong monitoring system in place allows your team to listen to and take note of what is going on in your industry and how your business is perceived on a day-to-day basis.
If you want to increase your brand awareness and demonstrate your team’s impact, media monitoring will support your PR team with these goals.
The Best Metrics for Media Monitoring
Many metrics can be used when monitoring media. Selecting the correct metrics when establishing your monitoring program will provide your team with the data necessary to inform your strategy and reach your communications objectives.
Several essential metrics that can provide your PR team with an overarching view of your company’s and your competitors’ media coverage are:
- Volume and tone of company mentions
- Key message penetration
- Top authors and outlets
- Competitor and industry coverage
- Social media coverage and engagement
- Sentiment of coverage
- Potential impressions
Why Media Monitoring Should Be a Part of Your PR Strategy
Here are a few of the ways media monitoring can support your PR team:
Manage Corporate Reputation
By following the topic and tone of and engagement with your company’s media coverage, you are better prepared to build or adjust your communications strategy accordingly.
With the ability to track what is said about your business, your PR team can quickly react to negative coverage and respond to such stories or mentions constructively, therefore mitigating potential PR crises. It also allows your PR team to identify opportunities to capitalize on positive coverage or trending topics in your industry.
Track Your Key Messages
Key message penetration is an excellent indicator of your brand awareness and the effectiveness of your messaging campaigns. With a media monitoring program that can detect keywords, concepts, and topics related to your campaigns, you can assess the extent to which your key messages have been picked up by the media. You can also determine the sentiment of that coverage, how many people were potentially exposed to it, and the level of social engagement it has received. This level of depth and insight will allow you to evaluate your existing strategy and inform future campaigns.
Know Your Industry and Competition
Beyond your company’s coverage, the coverage of your competitors and industry holds many insights.
Competitive intelligence is a simple way to stay on top of the latest industry developments and trends and to determine your company’s share of voice within your industry. Share of voice gives your team the chance to see how your company is faring directly against your competition. Monitoring your competitors also allows you to identify the topics driving their positive and negative coverage, and that which generates the most social engagement.
Measure the Effectiveness of Your Communications
Media monitoring is a great tool that allows your team to measure and improve the effectiveness of your communications. The insights gained can help you to determine whether you understand your target audience, you are reaching your target audience, and if you’re getting the type of engagement that you are striving for.
With a monitoring tool or service in place, the data is collected automatically, allowing you to perform an ongoing evaluation of your approach. Quality data from monitoring your media can reliably inform decision-making and accurately measure the impact of your communications.
How Does Media Monitoring Work?
Planning and correctly implementing a monitoring program is vital to ensuring the tool’s success for your PR team. If your team doesn’t do the appropriate planning, it’s likely your monitoring program won’t deliver the full extent of its value. A successful planning process will ensure that the program your team develops provides advantages from the beginning.
There are three core steps necessary to make the most of your program:
Set Objectives
The first stage of planning your monitoring strategy is setting your objectives. What do you want to learn from your media coverage? Knowing this will help you to figure out the type of metrics you need to measure. As a starting point, monitor your company coverage fully, as this will provide a base-level knowledge of your brand. It will also allow your team to measure the impact of your communications over time and compare coverage to previous periods.
Establish Reputational Drivers
Perhaps the most important step is determining the drivers of your corporate reputation. Reputational drivers are the factors that contribute to the overall public perception of a company. Defining and capturing these brand elements will help your team to understand and manage your corporate reputation.
At PublicRelay, we use a framework of essential drivers to guide the planning of your monitoring program. Several core drivers that can apply to most businesses include workplace, leadership, financial performance, and government relations. These drivers, which are mutually exclusive and capture every facet of your company, offer a clearer picture of what is shaping public perceptions of your company.
Gather and Interpret the Data
After collecting initial media data, you can gather and interpret your metrics. The interpretation of the data is what aids you in understanding your business, your competitors, and your industry. As your team interprets the collected data, you can now make changes to your campaigns as needed. With this information, your team can see what works, where you can improve, and which of your key messages are captured by the media.
With sufficient planning and accurate data collection, your team can draw actionable insights and improve your PR and communications strategies.
Elevate Your Media Monitoring Program
Media monitoring is essential to helping your PR team understand how well your current strategies are working and how your team can continue to plot a path towards future success. To take your strategy to the next level, consider incorporating media analytics into your communications process.
At PublicRelay, we offer clients accurate and in-depth analyses of their media coverage. With our media monitoring solution, we can help you to build a foundation of nuanced, high-quality data to assess the effectiveness of your messaging campaigns. Demonstrate the success of your communications strategy and start tracking your earned media now!
While PR teams used to rely on press releases and media outlets to connect with their target audiences, social media’s integration into people’s daily lives has made the public more accessible than ever before.
Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact Communication notes that “as both PR and social media are used to build and maintain trust in the company and their products, it is only natural that the two must be in sync.” Unsurprisingly, social platforms have become valuable tools that are essential to communications teams’ ability to increase brand awareness and perceived authenticity with their target audience.
Why is Social Media Important for Public Relations?
Social media is an important tool for PR because it allows you to reach audiences that previously may have been difficult to interact with. With social media, the world is quite literally at your fingertips. Among this population, industry influencers are an indispensable resource that can help your team communicate key messages and lend weight to them, whether via reach or credibility. In addition, social measurement tools can help you assess the impact of your campaigns and fine-tune your strategy.
How to Use Social Media to Support Your PR Strategy
To effectively use social media to support your PR strategy, you must define your goals. Start broad by first determining your overarching objective. Then develop questions such as:
- What niche do you occupy in your industry?
- How can you distinguish yourself from your peers and competitors?
- Who is your target audience?
- Which platforms does your target audience engage with most?
- What kinds of content does your target audience interact with most?
Delving into these questions and defining clear answers will help you to build a solid foundation to work from. The answers to these questions provide a guideline that you can use to ensure you are working towards your overarching goals as you explore the minutiae of how to do so.
Understand Your Target Audience
While having a large target audience may seem beneficial, it’s more effective to have a narrow and specific description of your target audience. Creating a buyer persona – a detailed profile of your ideal consumer – is one way to do this. Referring to a buyer persona helps to map out the platforms and content that will be most effective in attracting your desired audience. The best way to collect this information is with reliable data and social media analytics. As Business News Daily suggests, “use data to learn about and target your customers based on characteristics such as location, language, and interests.”
Having a focused understanding of your target audience prevents the potential pitfall of spreading your resources too thin or having juxtaposed messaging intending to appeal to various groups of people. The latter of which can appear inconsistent to audiences and confuse your brand messages.
Engage with Influencers
Before the rise of social media, communications teams would have to call media outlets to pitch a story. Now, social media influencers have become a driving force in transmitting messages to target audiences, with research showing that 63% of consumers trust influencers over a brand’s in-house advertisers. In addition to the benefit of effectively reaching audiences that would otherwise be difficult to reach, they also lend authority to messages. Third-party influencers add to message credibility because they are often deemed as subject matter experts by the media.
Engage with Journalists
Regularly engaging with influencers, especially journalists, can help create genuine relationships that will continue to aid you over time. As Michelle Mekky of Mekky Media Relations explains, Twitter is an excellent tool to use for reaching out to journalists because they “are online for the sole purpose of interacting with the public.”
When identifying journalists, dig into specifics that will help you increase your chances of a beneficial partnership. Decide which outlets fit best with your brand and the journalists from those outlets who regularly write about topics relevant to your industry. You can also scan their Twitter feeds for an indication of the types of stories they engage with to gauge whether you are on the right path.
With this information, you can cater to their interests when reaching out. If your goals and interests appear to align, write a concise message to grab their attention. As Twitter consists of short, fast-paced Tweets, it’s best to comply with those expectations even when messaging someone.
Create a Brand Guideline
Consistency when building brand awareness is the key to establishing familiarity with your audience. Posting social content on a regular schedule and communicating in ways that encapsulate your brand are crucial steps for increasing that brand awareness. Create a brand guideline to help define your brand and establish a point of reference to ensure you have a consistent tone of voice across your social media activity, the nuances of which may differ depending on which platform you are posting. Remember that consistency is what ultimately reinforces your brand.
Fine-Tuning Your Strategy
Social media is an ever-changing landscape, and you can expect trial-and-error as you find your footing. Knowing what doesn’t work can be just as helpful as knowing what does, and so it’s important to be objectively aware of every failure and success. Using reliable data is essential to assess the impact of your strategy and can help you achieve objectivity.
At PublicRelay, we can help PR teams assess the impact of their strategy for improving brand sentiment and awareness. With our unique human-AI hybrid approach, we analyze your social, traditional, and broadcast media coverage and provide you with actionable insights to inform your PR strategy. In addition to pinpointing key industry influencers and highlighting the discussions circling your brand, PublicRelay can provide you with both a bird’s-eye-view and an up-close examination of the details. Click here to learn more.
Earned media is an essential tool for PR teams to build consumer trust. This type of media has provided PR professionals with new and innovative ways to interact with and engage their audiences, making it an asset to any public relations skillset.
In today’s market, PR teams must understand how this form of coverage can be used to boost a company’s brand and be willing to invest in a communications strategy that has earned media coverage at its core.
With more people using social media to receive daily content and read the news, the nature of reaching audiences and generating media exposure is changing. So, what is earned media and how can you increase this valuable form of content?
What is Earned Media Coverage?
Earned media coverage is any material written about your company that you haven’t paid for or created yourself. In other words, it is any publicity or press coverage that is gained organically. This can include social shares of your paid media, customer reviews, and social posts, blogs, or news articles that mention your company.
Paid Media vs. Earned Media vs. Owned Media
There are three common forms of media coverage companies can invest in: paid, earned, and owned.
According to Smart Insights, paid media is content that is solely generated by the company, while owned media is content generated by the company in channels that it controls. Each type is an effective way for PR teams to engage their audience.
What sets earned media apart is the fact that it is not directly generated or paid for by the company.
Why is Earned Media Coverage Important?
Earned media coverage is important because it plays a pivotal role in engaging your audience, and it has the potential to reach a much wider audience previously unknown to the brand.
Building an earned media strategy is valuable because of its perceived trustworthiness relative to other forms of media coverage, as people are more likely to purchase or use services based on the advice of sources that are not directly connected to a company. Because it comes from an objective external source, it is more likely to be listened to and trusted by potential customers.
It is also more cost-effective than paid media as it is created by third parties unassociated with the company’s press or communications teams.
An organic earned media strategy is also an effective way for companies to build relationships with journalists, media outlets, social media creators, and influencers.
Not to mention, tracking earned coverage – in combination with other metrics such as social sharing and potential impressions – can be used to evaluate and provide insights into key message campaigns.
Ways to Maximize Earned Media Coverage
In this interconnected and online world, there are many ways for communications and PR teams to gain earned media coverage. While the nature of media has evolved with the rise of online outlets and social media influencers, there are a few trusted methods that can be used to increase your earned media.
Do Something Newsworthy
One of the best ways to attract organic coverage is to do something noteworthy or of interest to the public. This can range from philanthropic donations – which has proven to be a successful PR strategy for many organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic – to advocating for a worthy cause, like diversity and inclusion in the workplace. If your company can do something notable, it will likely attract positive news coverage and social engagement.
Create Content Worth Sharing
Creating ‘shareable’ content will increase the likelihood that you’ll gain social engagement with and positive coverage of your owned media. To create content worth sharing, it is important to understand the topics and formats that will resonate with your audience. The most shareable content is often in the form of video clips, infographics, or commentary on trending industry topics.
Partner with Industry Influencers
Partnering with industry influencers to promote your messaging is a key tactic for gaining positive earned media coverage. Take the time to build relationships with industry professionals and journalists that commonly cover your sector. In addition to gaining insight into the topics that resonate with your audience, you will increase the reach of your messages by taking advantage of influencers’ followings.
Utilize Social Media
Both large and small brands rely on customer reviews and word-of-mouth to build their media exposure. Not only has social media become a primary platform for customer reviews and word-of-mouth coverage, but it also allows you to engage directly with your audience. By building a social media team to promote shareable content and interact with your audience, you can boost your shared coverage and shape conversations about your brand.
Understand Your Target Audience
Understanding your audience requires that your PR team be aware of topics and trends that can be used to engage your audience. PR teams can use sentiment analysis to understand how their audience currently views their company and various industry topics. Once you understand how to reach your audience and how they engage with content, you can create content and campaigns that will generate higher rates of social sharing.
Using Earned Media Coverage as a Part of Your PR Strategy
Earned media coverage is an essential part of a successful public relations strategy. By refining your message, engaging your audience with creative content, and collaborating with industry influencers, you can increase your earned media coverage. Doing so will provide your company with valuable insight into your audience’s perceptions of your company and allow your organization to expand its reach to new realms.
At PublicRelay, we offer clients an accurate in-depth analysis of their media coverage. With media monitoring, we can help you to track all forms of your media coverage and assess the effectiveness of your messaging campaigns. Demonstrate the success of your communications strategy and start tracking your earned media now!