You can’t go out and spend your marketing budget on ordering a box of credibility or a carton of trust. It would be great and incredibly easy if you could, but unfortunately both of those things have to be earned.
Equally, you can’t just tell people that you’re a great, trustworthy company, with an excellent product, and amazing customer service. Well, you can, but it’s far more effective when it comes from someone who has nothing to do with your company. And that’s where linkable content and earned media come in.
Earned media is content written about your business by other people and published on platforms that you don’t own. For example, a well-respected review site in your niche might write a great review of your new product or service. Or a site could quote your CEO in one of their articles and link back to a case study or some research you did.
This isn’t achieved by buying an ad or paying someone to post your guest blog on their site. It’s, as the name suggests, earned by being good enough to deserve a mention or a backlink.
While you could send a press release for something that’s genuinely newsworthy, you could get mentioned simply for having valuable content to share. If you have industry insights, in-depth research, or information on what’s trending, you have something that could appeal to a wide audience. And that means that a site may mention you organically as a source for an article.
Publications are always looking for good content that’s valuable to their members. If you want to appear in Forbes or the latest issue of your trade magazine, think about what you need to put on your website that will be something they want to link to and source.
Getting publications to mention you and link back to your site is no easy task. There are a couple of different ways to do it. You can spend hours doing personalized outreach to every online publication you can find. That’s thousands of emails to editors, contributors, or whatever other email you can grab from a site.
However, the other way to build your digital PR strategy and get those earned media placements is to have them come to you. And that’s through that linkable content.
Linkable content has been specifically crafted to attract attention and entice high domain authority sites and publications to link to it. Again, it has to be good enough; data-driven, and full of unique insights and quotes.
While you might wish that the top publication in your niche would link to your sales page, that’s highly unlikely. However, if you write an article that’s impactful and full of value, you will gain domain authority. Your content is also more likely to be used and shared.
Getting those earned media mentions is invaluable for your company. However, you can’t get that third-party validation without having the right type of content. As we mentioned above, linkable content can come in many forms:
The types of linkable content doesn’t end there. Make sure you’re exploring all the different ways you can provide great content that online publications will want to source to and link to in their own articles.
And creating linkable content isn’t a one-and-done situation. It should be an ongoing effort so your company is providing fresh, valuable insights on the regular.
Earned media can be an important part of your overall content strategy and your digital PR.
What makes it so important?
From Nielsen's Trust in Advertising study, “88% of global respondents trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel. What’s more, 50% more people trust recommendations than lesser-ranked channels like online banner ads, mobile ads, SMS messages, and SEO ads.”
Consumers are increasingly internet savvy. They know that what you say about yourself is designed to promote your products or services. Of course, you still need your own promotional content, but it does mean that consumers may take it with a pinch of salt.
When another site picks up your content, however, consumers know that they don’t have to do that. Other sites don’t have any reason to mention your content or your business unless they think what you have is valuable enough. Consumers will see this content as unbiased, third-party validation and take it more seriously than anything you post yourself.
When other sites and publications publish your content or link to it, of course, you get all-important backlinks to boost your rankings. You also get a whole host of other benefits, including brand credibility and awareness, and increased trust in your products and services. You can reach wider audiences with this strategy and build your authority and credibility.
And being mentioned in online publications is only one part of beginning to truly own your industry. If you want to eventually be the name that people think of when they think about your particular industry, you’ll need a strong mixture of digital PR, SEO, and onsite content.
All you can control is what you do and how much effort you put into it. Create high-quality, linkable content that’s targeted and full of value and it's more likely that your content will be shared.
With a consistent approach, you can build a strategy that brings you the earned media you deserve.
