10 Yetis Insight Blog – 6 Ways To Widen Your PR Outreach

Making sure you can reach every single person that may be interested in your PR client is important. It’s easy to just contact the same list of people with similar stories and news pitches every week but this can lead to stagnant coverage and journalists bored with what you are offering on behalf of your client. Here are 6 ways to help you to widen your outreach and maximise coverage, as well and maintain your client happiness and peace of mind!

Go Global

Why only limit yourself to one country? If you think your campaign or story has legs to generate some great follow links for your client, then let it run and swim across the globe.

Sometimes the best way to increase your engagement is to send out an email or tweet to those miles away. Many seem to forget that the UK isn’t the only nation with credible publications. Do some research, see who else is writing about similar stories in the USA, Australia or Sweden. Just because you and your client are UK-based does not mean that PR opportunities should be restricted.

If that coverage on the American site has people talking and clicking over to your client’s site, then you have won!

Dare to ditch the release

This may seem a bit nuts to some; we are hardwired to think that the press release is the most effective way of getting our client out there and broadening their horizons, but with journalists receiving hundreds of release pitches a day; doing something different will be refreshing and may see the results you and your clients crave.

Applying a multimedia approach to your campaigns by using video, interactive widgets or infographics can explain everything a press release could but in a new, exciting and better way.

Widgets and infographics are incredibly shareable also so you can expect these to reach a much broader audience via social media channels and it might even catch the attention of an influencer you’ve had your eyes on for while!

Bluenod, baby

There are so many different tools on the World Wide Web that can help you identify influencers.

One of the best around is bluenod (www.BlueNod.com) which allows you to visualise dynamic twitter interactions. This not only makes it easy to identify influencers, it also helps you find influencers that influence those influencers (I’ll stop saying influencers in a second, I promise!)

Basically if you want someone to talk about your campaign or client but you know they charge £££’s or will just ignore your email, this tool will help you find the people that influence them. These people may be easier to speak to and if they do mention your campaign or client, the original influencer you were targeting may retweet the mention!

The tool is incredibly simple to use, even if it does sound really complex.

Just remember, once you’ve connected to an influencer, to make your pitch snappy. They probably receive tweets and emails about dozens of clients spread across the globe, so make your campaign as exciting as possible!

Keep contacts relevant

Influencers are constantly changing. Either they are growing, staying consistent or losing followers; these numbers will change every day and although it may start off as a slow change, if you don’t keep up to date with them, you could find that they are no longer relevant to your campaign next time you need them.

It’s also a good idea to review emerging influencers every month or so as catching these people early can be incredibly useful for clients.

There is no better feeling then finding an influencer to work with you, who’s passionate about your client, while they are still growing their own audience.

Keep your eye on client competitors

It’s important to keep an eye on what’s going on with your client’s competitors, not only so you can keep yourself motivated to do better for your client and try to match every single link they get, but also because you want to make sure you’re ahead of the curve at all times.

There are multiple tools out there to help you keep an eye on all that could possibly be going on for your client’s competitors including Ahrefs (www.ahrefs.com) and SEM Rush (www.semrush.com)

Both will help you track what websites your clients’ competitors have received recently, find out whether they are follow links and then it’s your job to replicate this.

These tools are amazing for broadening your horizon; they’ll help open your eyes to publications that are interested in subjects that your client may specialise in. They will also help build up structured contact lists for each of your clients.

Share the love!

There is no easier way to broaden your outreach then just being a nice person. I’m being completely serious right now. If you’re genuinely a sweet, kind-hearted person to those on twitter or if you actually converse with people before you start making demands via email, then the chances are those who are willing to watch, read or listen to the things you send them, will grow.

Keep smiling, ask people how their day was and actually care, make friends etc. etc.

Share the love people!