We’ve written about content-led PR before and shared our tips for getting a reporter’s attention in your media outreach.
But what if you’re still in the phase where you don’t yet have the bandwidth for content and PR (but you know both could help you reach your growth goals)?
If that’s your situation, this post is for you. In it, I’ll highlight three ways you can use your blog to drive media coverage for your startup.
In our experience, publishing original data is one of the most effective ways to get the attention of a reporter or editor. Why? Because data you own is something that nobody else can offer.
Positioned right, it adds information, insight, or complexity to an existing conversation. But getting a story written about your data isn’t as simple as dumping it onto your blog. For best results, we recommend the following:
Senior living market intelligence company LivingPath recently had success getting media coverage by sharing data. Shortly after publishing the post “What Are the Most Expensive Senior Living Communities in the US?” a reporter from Senior Housing News (a leading industry publication) reached out to interview them about their data. That interview informed this article (paywalled) a few weeks later.
Figure 1: LivingPath’s blog post included several graphs and charts
If you’re not in the habit of publishing original data, look to the following for inspiration:
Data is a great way to get a reporter’s attention, but gathering, analyzing, and creating visuals for data takes a lot of time.
If you don’t have that kind of time, another way to use your blog to drive media coverage is to publish “hot takes” – that is, controversial opinions about topics that are important to people in your industry (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: How hot takes appear to blog readers (artist’s rendering)
To be clear, I’m not recommending stirring things up for the sake of it. But as Josh often points out, it’s hard to resist the IT consultant who says IT consultants are terrible or the lawyer who’s highly critical of lawyers.
Saying something that goes against what’s clearly in your best interest is more interesting than a message that’s all about how great it is to work with a company like yours. To make sure your hot take doesn’t go too far and backfire, we recommend the following:
Earlier this year, Apple device management software provider Addigy saw success with the “hot take” method by publishing the blog post “Apple Silicon Is on the Way: How to Support the New Line of High-Performance Machines,” which started with the quote about Apple’s M1 CPU above.
While that may sound like a pretty mild take, reporters who cover Apple took note because companies that work with Apple almost never say anything even remotely negative about the brand.
After seeing that post, reporters from CRN and Computer World decided to interview Addigy’s CEO for their own pieces on the future of Apple’s new processors.
Startup founders usually have plenty of strong opinions that would count as “hot takes.” The challenge of turning these into effective blog content is twofold:
The good news is that most startups have the alternative solution built in: your product or service. Line up these dominoes right, and they’ll clearly point to your organization as the way out of the problem you identified.
No data handy? Skittish about offending people? Never fear: you can still use your blog to drive media coverage of your startup.
The third method we’ve seen succeed is to publish deep, nuanced insights from industry experts. We’re talking really in-the-weeds commentary and / or analysis that requires years of experience and familiarity with complex concepts.
This tends to work for a few reasons:
For several clients, our media team has found success including links to relevant blog posts in pitches to reporters.
The general gist of these messages is “This thought leader has expertise that might help you. For a taste of what they know about, check out their past work: [link to post].”
I know, I know. This technically involves some proactive reporter outreach. But this step is not mandatory.
For best results without proactive outreach, be sure to optimize your blog for search and promote it on social (especially Twitter!) to maximize the odds that reporters researching the topic in question will find your thought leader.
Hitting “publish” on a blog post is the end of your writing journey – but the beginning of the blog’s life in the world. To maximize the odds that your target audience (reporters and editors at key publications) see it, be sure to promote it. At the very least:
For anyone reluctant to toot their own horn (or who questions the value of tweeting out a blog post when it’s SEO’d to the hilt): a writer and literary agent whose newsletter I subscribe to recently mentioned that many of the 18th- and 19th-century American authors we consider “classics” today were the ones who “took matters into their own hands.”
Newsletter excerpt: the best-known authors of yesteryear were ruthless self promoters
In some cases, that meant paying for their own printing and publicity rather than trusting a publisher to do it. The result: they sold more books. And we still talk about them.
While we’ve seen all three of these methods drive media coverage of our clients, none of them is guaranteed. Because of that, it’s important that your blog includes things that matter to your primary audience.
So don’t publish data that will only appeal to reporters if your blog is otherwise full of how-tos for customers. Don’t run a hot take likely to offend your most loyal readers. When in doubt (and this applies to more than just your blog, my friends), aim to do a single thing well rather than many things poorly.