When it comes to marketing online, content is everything. But we all know it's hard to consistently post relevant content. However, it's necessary as strong content will set your company apart from competitors and increase your digital PR outreach.
Most publications are interested in citing educational, helpful information that adds to a conversation. If you’re only focused on putting out promotional content about your brand, it’s highly unlikely a publication will want to source that content.
Instead, try creating content that is educational, informative, and provides true value to relevant conversations. When you have a variety of content on your site that does just that, that’s when you’ll see success with digital pr outreach efforts. That’s when a publication will want to use your blog post full of useful data points in their article.
To get to that point, you need to be thinking through different types of source content that you can put on your site to help aid your digital PR outreach efforts. Here are some types of content to get you started:
Original research is difficult for everybody. But with some hard work, it's possible, and if you do it well it can lead to incredible results. Utilizing your own data ensures that your content is unique and stands out among others.
Creating content focused on your own data shows resourcefulness and elevates your authority since your audience can’t find it anywhere else. Think through what information you can gather from your own customers, employees, or audience that would provide value to your industry as a whole. Use that as a starting point to creating data-focused content for your site.
Detailed, relevant content can drive organic traffic to your website, while also informing consumers about your products, brand, and expertise in the field. Blogs are great opportunities for keyword optimization and gaining inbound links, which help with SEO and traffic growth.
More than that though, blogs are the windows to your company’s soul. They explain what you do, who you are, and why you do what you do. When you write strategically and educationally about your company, this encourages publications to utilize that information.
Make sure you sprinkle in helpful stats and quotes when applicable to make your digital PR outreach as strong as possible. Incorporating quotes around industry trends and high-level ideas for the industry within your blogs makes for the great source content. Quoting industry experts will boost the credibility of your content and overall brand. These quotes add weight to your content and what you’ve said seems more valid. That also means you're ready if publications want to use you as a source.
Unique insights are distinctive aspects of your company that make you stand out from your competitors. It can also be a unique way of thinking you have about your industry as a whole. Using this as content inspiration is great because publications can utilize you as examples in their content.
In a world of competition, personalization has become a necessity for brands. Targeted and personalized insights help communicate a clearer message and attract customers. Unique insights can help businesses determine why people buy certain products over others and what’s driving those preferences.
The ease of use and accessibility of these digital mediums over the past several years has made them must-use forms of content. Podcasts and videos have become increasingly popular because they can be consumed somewhat passively.
Videos are more likely to hold the audience’s attention as opposed to something they have to read. Podcasts are also an engaging, personable method to reach users and allow them to easily access the content.
Both of these are great sources of content for publications to use and link to. As with all other content, make sure your videos or podcasts are moving the conversation forward and are answering questions about your industry.
Infographics are great because they’re easily shareable and consumable. Creating interesting visual representations of information and statistics makes it easier to read than a list of numbers and facts.
Because these tend to have a lot of stats and numbers associated with them, they make great pieces of content to source in external articles. Think through stats that are relevant not only to your business but your industry as a whole to capture the attention of online publications. This will help make your digital PR outreach more successful.
Every business should be utilizing social media in some capacity. However, using social media platforms as content distribution isn’t enough anymore. You should also be creating content that’s specific to your various channels and promotes your business’s personal growth.
Social media can also be a great tool for distributing key stats, facts, and quotes about your business and industry. Many online publications will look to social for helpful snippets, so think about keeping your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook up to date. Posting to social media could help provide a publication with the information they need to include you in an article.
Case studies take time and energy to create, but they also hold a substantial amount of weight with consumers. These studies are essentially success stories that show the power of your business and its services.
By researching and taking an in-depth look at specific subjects, your business can quickly increase its trustworthiness and expertise in the eyes of consumers. The more specific results you can showcase and the deeper you can dive, the more potential people will believe your company has.
These case studies can be another source of information for publications to pull if you’re sure to fill them with helpful information. When doing digital PR outreach, they can be a great tool to prove why your company should be mentioned.
Strong content has and always will be the foundation of a successful marketing strategy.
But it can do more than just help to encourage readers to become customers. It can be the key to excelling in digital PR outreach. With strong source content, publications won’t have a choice but to include you in the articles they are writing about your industry.
