Building your brand through local media coverage and news sites can bring huge benefits to your business—both online and offline.
Google and other search engines place a high value on external brand mentions and links from sources they deem trustworthy.
This PR exposure from news and media agencies active in the local community provides the opportunity to reach new audiences and stimulate your sales growth potential.
Knowing how to get stories on local news sites relevant to your business can give you a competitive edge over your local competition.
Using these four proven tips, packed with actionable strategies, you’ll use them to connect with and get featured in local media, building valuable links, visibility, and new business in the process.
1. Lay the groundwork
The biggest mistake companies make when posting stories to local news sites is thinking it’s a tactic you can turn on or off at will.
Ultimately, like most trust, authority, and backlink/PR building, it requires constant focus and prioritization in your marketing mix in order to generate repeat targeting and relevant metric-based wins for the business.
There are many ways to solve this problem. Here’s a useful framework that you can tweak and improve as you progress:
- Identify the major local news sites and related outlets specific to your target area.
- Connect with them on social media channels (follow them and build rapport).
- Create automatic social listening triggers to alert you when these outside news sites are looking for stories (one of the biggest challenges for local news sites is often getting enough regular, fresh content to satisfy their readers).
- Increase your visibility in your local community (specific strategies shared later in this article can help here).
- Find relevant personal contacts for content creation, new stories and wider newspaper editing.
- Create unique content that has independent value and a purpose relevant to your publication’s audience.
- Reach out to your acquired contacts in a professional, friendly, spam-free or templated way.
- Set up recurring actions to follow up on emails (not just using email to contact people).
- Set up recurring actions to expand your distribution list.
- Add relevant tools to your arsenal to access a wider range of media sites (there are many database/CRM/media publishing tools and software to consider).
- Check the published articles for success and promote them on social media and other business channels (direct sales, newsletters, company websites, etc.).
- Remember to maintain relationships through consistent check-ins and relevant shares of newsworthy content.
2. Build your brand in the local community
There are many ways to increase brand exposure in your local niche in a credible and value-based way.
When you have physical offices/outlets/premises in different locations, you already have a solid foundation and an advantage over competitors that don’t exist in that particular location.
There are some basic local community strategies to explore, such as:
- Support local charities through company events.
- Run and promote contests in your business channels.
- Answer location-driven questions and answers on social media, niche forums, and our website.
- Showcase your experts by appearing regularly on industry and location forums.
- Be part of local business forums, chambers of commerce and related networking areas.
- Build Your Site Location/Value Community Hub – Leverage your data and unique understanding of your audience to deliver ongoing value.
- Promote credible PR to all relevant fields.
- Positive reviews of local news sites.
- Host a client day or other event where your local audience can experience your expertise first-hand.
- Partner with local influencers, connect audiences and reach new friends.
The above will get you moving, and over time you may find many other useful strategies to apply.
3. Say something useful
For local news sites, this is imperative.
You have many unique perspectives and interesting stories to share within the company.
The following method is an example of what I’ve used directly to combine personal success with company branding in local news.
In this case, newsworthy stories began with a desire to help local businesses succeed and boost their online sales, and targeted Portsmouth News, one of the largest local news sites in our region.
you can see a snippet of post the following:
Next, I continued my relationship with the publication and released a series of news stories.
In this case, the approach taken continues story Between helping small businesses online and publishing a new book:
Image via Portsmouth News, December 2018You can then leverage your staff/expert profiles and branding along with your organization to target regional and national branding and PR.
This is best achieved by developing the corporate brand and experts in key subject areas and maintaining and increasing the variation and number of relationships built over time.
In this case, I offer commentary on digital personalization on a national news site reciter of the times.
The preceding example demonstrates how to start with a meaningful story, continue the story into a series of placement opportunities, and over time, use previous successes to win bigger news site wins.
Explore other mediums
Content digestion preferences in the online world are less and less text-based.
Among mobile and digestible content, forms continue to grow in terms of user preference and digital influence online.
When your local community and local news sites do something different and have something interesting and engaging to say, they love promoting business updates and PR.
You can take a stand to simplify complex business topics with a video series, and Other content types Such as infographics and promote the company’s mission and ongoing content created for local news sites for brand repeat growth.
Creating a “Visit Our Experts” monthly podcast can be a great way to share monthly stories with local news sites and keep visiting the business and community pages they often wish to fill.
In summary
There are many ways to become active and active in your local community and have your company story recur in local news outlets.
Make local news entities part of you The “always-on” approach to marketingusing the frameworks suggested in this article, using my tried-and-true techniques to get you started.
You can target regional and national media with local news coverage.
Lastly, don’t forget to get creative with the medium you use to grow your local brand, and keep your story on new local platforms.
The more you stand out from the competition in a credible way, the easier it will be for brand building and story placement.
More resources:
Featured Image: Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock
