Your PR efforts are resulting in interviews with journalists and bloggers. But, are you maximizing your PR opportunities to drive visitors to your website? Many traditional publications will post online versions of their articles giving them double the opportunity to drive potential customers to your website. Maximize your marketing reach with our Strategic Marketing Guide for Media Interviews.
What’s your angle? Journalists and bloggers usually approach an interview with their predetermined angle and tone. Parallel Path recommends taking a proactive lead with your interviews to maximize your marketing efforts, otherwise you risk missing an important opportunity. You are doing company interviews for one reason and that is marketing.
Four Strategic Tips To Help Drive Your Company’s Marketing Efforts:
- Determine your marketing message before the interview.
Decide the marketing objective of the interview: Brand, Product, Service or Promotion – before conducting the interview. Each of these topics will have a different tone. Know how to speak about each of these marketing objectives. You should decide and drive the interview in your direction. If the journalist or blogger tries to take the topic away from your objective, then bring it back and keep it focused on your goals. - Speak your customers’ language.
An interview is not the time to be creative in describing your brand, product/service or promotion. Use the common language of your target customer. You do not want to leave your audience scratching their heads trying to connect the dots. - Know your SEO keywords that support your marketing objective.
For every marketing objective your SEO agency should provide you with a list of keywords. Decide in advance which keywords you want to have included in the interview. Repeat your keywords regularly and throughout the interview. Adding emphasis to those keywords will let the interviewer know that they are important to you. These keywords will represent the language of your customer as well further integrating and supporting your brand, audience, and SEO efforts. - Request to have a link back to relevant content on your website. Do not assume the media will include a link to your website. You need to take a proactive position with getting that valuable backlink. Ultimately, it’s the most important strategic move you can make during the interview. Make sure the interviewer gets the URL correct. Go ahead and write it down for them, text it, email it, spell it out, do whatever it takes. As a follow up to the interview, email them the URL. It is shocking how often interviewers misspell names, URLs, and get other important details wrong. “Any press is good press just spell my name right.” Yes, that also applies to URLs.