One of the biggest misconceptions about PR is that it’s expensive or requires you to have a lot of high-calibre connections. In this article, we break down 3 amazing tips that are affordable and easy to execute and don’t require you to hire an expensive PR agency or to have a personal relationship with the Queen of England.
Let’s dive in.
1. Master Cold Email Outreach
Most people think that PR is some lofty channel that you need to have a lot of connection for but it’s not true. Cold email outreach does wonders in PR as well as in other initiatives because it’s just a numbers game. The more people you reach out to and the more follow up emails you send the higher your chances of getting your product or service published on a high-authority site.
There are several fantastic tools for this. One is called PressHunt and it’s a huge database of journalists of all stripes and colors. It has their emails and allows you to export them easily to whatever email software you use.
For email software, we recommend Mailshake or Lemlist which are both really affordable and easy to use. So grab some relevant leads from a tool like PressHunt and import them into your email tool and get a campaign going. We recommend 5-6 follow up emails 3-5 days apart. Make them short and sweet and don’t go overboard with flowery compliments.
2. Work with Bloggers and Influencers
The whole reason that you are pursuing PR is because you want to make more sales right? A little known secret in the PR industry is that sometimes the smaller bloggers and micro-influencers will actually get you more sales than a large publication.
It’s easier for your article to get lost in the hustle and bustle of a site like Entrepreneur and Huffington Post if they don’t promote it. And promotion costs a lot of money on those sites.
On the other hand, the audiences of these bloggers and micro-influencers are often very engaged and loyal and are likely to buy a product that the blogger recommends.So reach out to the smaller bloggers and micro-influencers. You can use a tool like NinjaOutreach to get access to thousands of bloggers from all kinds of industries. This is something that a PR agency won’t be able to accomplish for you. They often don’t have relationships with the smaller guys.
3. Use Social Listening Tools
Our last tip is to use social listening to discover untapped PR opportunities. Social listening is the practice of scanning the web and social media for mention of your brand or product. This way you can find articles that have already been written about you and reach out to those journalists and ask them for another feature. Once they have already featured you they are more likely to do so again (since they obviously liked your product or service).
You can set this up really easily using Google Alerts which is a tool that sends you an alert every time a new piece of content is published with the keyword of your choice. In this case, your keyword should be the name of your business or product.
Recap
We covered three excellent tips that will help you boost your PR efforts dramatically. First, get really good at cold email outreach, it will do wonders for your business. Second, work with bloggers and micro-influencers. And third, use social listening tools to identify easy opportunities. If you do these three things you will see more mentions and more articles published about your and your business.
