21st Dec 2015 by Harriet Dalwood

10 Yetis Insight Blog - Why Print Coverage Is Still Important In Your Digital PR Campaign

The aim of the game when you’re a digital PR agency is, to put it simply, being able to generate lots of lovely follow links for your client. Typically, the success of a PR stunt, campaign or singular press release is measured on how many links it receives from online news outlets and popular blogs. If you receive a great deal of links from journalists you can expect many pats on the back coming your way, but if you don’t receive links then expect a few stern emails from clients asking what happened.

Despite what may be perceived from the above paragraph, generating follow links for clients aren’t the be all and end all of working on a PR account.

“WHAT ABOUT THE PRINT COVERAGE?” I hear you cry.

Well ask no more because in todays insight blog we’ll be exploring why print coverage is still important in your digital PR efforts, as well as the best way to ensure your 2016 PR campaigns can hit a healthy mix of both online and print coverage.

Online coverage is something you will want because it’s there indefinitely; if someone Googles your clients page, all those stories will show up, reminding you that you’ve done your job. Print coverage does not have this ability, most people won’t hold onto their newspapers, unless they’re hoarders, but this definitely does not make coverage you get printed any less valuable to a campaign.

It is true that print coverage has been slightly forgotten about and almost abused now that everything and everyone is digital. Coverage is coverage, but you can’t get a follow link in a broadsheet so what’s the point! This is not the attitude to have. Of course links are worth their weight in gold in the PR industry but print coverage still has its part to play and can be extremely effective in reputation building.

It’s hard not to get excited when you buy a newspaper and get to cut out a piece of coverage which is only there because you made it happen, but what is this worth? Well print coverage will often lead to online coverage. If a newspaper or magazine has taken a liking to your campaign idea and decided to print it, chances are they will also write a few words about it on their website, double whammy. Not only can print coverage lead to online coverage from that newspaper but it can also lead to other websites writing about it, especially if you’ve managed to secure a big piece in a popular national newspaper or glossy magazine.

Print coverage can also be very beneficial if your target audiences are older generations or those that may not be as tech-savvy as other demographics. It’s impossible to try and state that newspaper and magazine sales are on the up constantly improving, because they aren’t, but there are definitely audiences that still purchase them on a daily basis. Some of these audiences you would never reach with online coverage because they may rarely use the internet, as hard as that is to believe in this day and age. Some, god forbid, won’t even have social media so all those shares your campaign might be getting won’t necessarily be reaching everyone. This is why print further extends your campaigns reach to those harder to target audiences.

Something else to think about is a reader’s likelihood to absorb and retain what they’ve read for the rest of the day. A study conducted by Arthur D. Santana, Randall Livingstone, and Yoon Cho of the University of Oregon found that those who consume their news via print remember significantly more stories then those who read their news online. It was also found that print readers remembered more topics then online readers. Although this study was fairly small, it still provides a solid reason to still care about that print coverage.

Local print coverage is great to get as well; many will read their local paper to keep up to date with everything that’s going on in their area as these papers often have stories you wouldn’t find in nationals. Getting in these papers will further extend your campaigns reach.

Online and print coverage are both incredibly beneficial to your campaign in different ways. Online coverage is shareable, easy to digest and instant, it also (usually) provides your campaign with links which will make your clients instantly happy. Print on the other hand will reach those audiences you weren’t quite getting too before and they will extend your demographic tenfold. Print readers will also, apparently, retain the news they’ve read for longer periods of time, meaning they may remember your campaign longer than those who read about it online.

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