If you are working to establish a media relations program or just want to increase your opportunities for editorial coverage, building strong relationships with the press contacts that are assigned to cover your company and/or industry is key to the marathon that is public relations. Here are four steps to building strong press relationships that will benefit your marketing and communications efforts:

1. Read and Comment on Their Articles

The best journalists and editors (the kind you want to build relationships with!) take great pride in the features and reviews that they put blood, sweat and tears into publishing.

A string of comments creates relationships between the commenters.

So, be sure to really read their stories and leave comments consistently, with your name and company name. They will appreciate your feedback on what you like about their stories, how you think your customers might benefit from their stories, and maybe even what you found inspiring or thought-provoking after reading their work.  They are in this profession to educate and inform, so they will enjoy getting your commentary on how you and your parties are impacted by the information they provided.  The more engaging your comments are the better, as they will help your name stand out to the individual you are trying to build a relationship with. The more your comments stand out, the more likely they are to remember you, respond to you, and begin to value your industry expertise and thought leadership.

2. Interact through Social Media

If the contacts you want to establish arelationship with are active on social media channels like Twitter or Facebook, take the time to follow them and interact with them there regularly. They are there because they either find it enjoyable to communicate with people in that way, or helpful in some way to their editorial efforts. So, look for them in social media and take advantage of the opportunity to send them messages, ask questions or answer their inquiries!

On the topic of inquiries, be sure to keep an eye out for any social media messages from these contacts where they are asking for references and/or story ideas. If you can be quick to respond with appropriate resources, this can be a great way to generate strong and positive editorial coverage for you or your company.

However, the conversation doesn’t always have to be about your area of expertise and should never be a sales pitch. Instead, keep your social media engagements with the press informal and genuine, regardless of the topic, if you want to build strong relationships with the press that go beyond just your professional expertise.

For example, if you see them tweet about a conference they are attending in your city, reply to them offering local restaurant or bar ideas. Or if they link to a favorite band or song lyric that you know, reply and make conversation about your common music taste!

3. Send Them Story Ideas

As you begin to follow their coverage and social media communication consistently, you’ll likely be able to predict what type of stories they like to cover most. When possible, email them with similar story ideas that you find compelling and that you believe will interest them and their readers. Keep in mind, these story ideas do not always have to be related to your company or product. In fact, the press contact will likely be more impressed with your correspondence if it’s just a story idea that you want to suggest and it doesn’t include a PR opportunity for you.

That said, while they will likely appreciate your time and efforts either way, this doesn’t guarantee they’ll take your idea or cite you in their article. But it will go a long way in showing the press contact that you’re following their work and interested in contributing to the industry at large by sharing your ideas. It also can’t hurt your chances of getting company or product coverage when you do have relevant news that you are trying to pitch as a story.

Strong story idea suggestions might include industry trends you are seeing, new industry statistics that point to uncommon conclusions, industry pain points you’ve noticed through your customer interactions, ways that a breaking news story is predicted to impact your industry, etc.

4. Stay in Touch

Just like building a relationship with anyone else, the strengthening of your press relationships will require patience, consistency and time. It’s important not to be a stranger and to take opportunities, like the 3 mentioned above, to interact with the press contacts on a regular basis. A good rule of thumb is to correspond with them at least once per month, whether that’s with something related to your brand or not. Be patient if your communication efforts aren’t fruitful at first, as just like any relationship, it can take several engagements (over months) to build trust and a mutual interest in corresponding.

Overall, your relationships with the press should be productive if you’re willing to consistently contribute strong and relevant information that they can use to better inform their readers. They’ll come to appreciate your insight and value your relationship as an industry expert as much as you value their ability to widely publicize your company or product name.

You can read more about media relations, and how to best approach it in these posts:

How Strategic PR Efforts Boosted One IT Company’s Feature News Coverage by 125%

Trade Show Media Relations: Do’s and Don’ts

TREW Top 9 List to Increase Your Product Launch Coverage

If you have a compelling product or an interesting service, you may grab the attention of a potential customer or a respected journalist. However, what do you do when they ask: “Can you tell me about someone who is actually using this?”

You can have the world’s greatest product, but if you can’t show how customers are using it and benefitting from the results, you don’t have much ground to stand on. Rarely do potential customers – and especially engineers and scientists – want to be the first to use a new product, and journalists will tell you to call back when you have a customer example they can share with their readers.

When you have those key customers who are benefitting from what your product offers, write a case study about the customer’s experience. Your case study will help you tell others about your product through a real-world example that illustrates how it was implemented and the benefits your customer is realizing.

Here are eight tips to make your case study be a great sales tool for you:

1. Be choosy when possible

When you are selecting a case study to write, choose a customer who will tell your story well. Find a customer who has significant, quantifiable results in an application that is relevant to the most people that will show other potential customers the value of your product or service.

2. Get ready for the ask

As you’re helping your customer solve their application with your products or services, mention that you’d like to complete a case study of their finished project. You may even ask if you can include a case study in your sales contract during negotiations before the sale is closed. This is especially helpful in the negotiation phase when your customer is asking for a discount or “freebies” throw in; you can compromise by including a case study that benefits you.

Also make sure that you communicate the mutual benefit of a case study for you and for your customer. Often times, the case study will highlight the benefits of your products or services, but it will also help the customer showcase their success. By later putting the completed case study on your web site, you help improve the customer’s web presence and further their company name.

3. Do the work

If you want a case study that showcases the benefits of your products or services, you’ll need to write it yourself. By writing it yourself, you can easily include key messages that you’ve defined for your company.

Write an outline of your case study and then conduct an interview with your customer to fill in any gaps. Make sure you can articulate:

• The problem your customer was trying to solve
• Other solutions they considered before choosing to partner with your company
• The new functionality or solution they now have because of your product.
• The results they’ve seen as a result

4. Get to the specifics

Write your case study in a way that relates to other potential customers and shows a quantifiable result. This case study for NASDAQ shows Charles Schwab’s success after switching to the NASDAQ Exchange. Although the case study is about a financial institution, NASDAQ conveyed Schwab’s successes in a way that made them relatable to any publically-traded company, showing that with NASDAQ, Schwab received a superior market model, lower trading costs and listing fees, and greater liquidity.

NASDAQ also shows that Schwab investors will save $2.9 million because of the company’s switch. This quantifiable result quickly and easily shows a potential customer the value of NASDAQ’s services.

5. Provide compelling first-glance content

Use prominent content in your case study to catch a potential customer’s interest. In this case study, a headline with a quantifiable result quickly catches a potential customer’s attention and draws them in. A reader wants to know how a large, successful company saved $100,000 using social media, what their strategy was, and what tools they used to do it.

Draw readers in with quantifiable, results-focused headlines.

6. Make approval easy

After you draft your case study, you’ll want your customer to review it. When sending it for review, highlight specific areas for them to look at, and include all images or screen shots you want to use, so that you can get all of the content reviewed and approved at once.

In addition, draft a specific quote that they can review and approve so that you can use that quote and its attribution on your website, in a flyer, or in a news release in the future.

7. Create a finished document

Make sure you have all the necessary elements for a compelling, effective case study.  Elements you need, are well-written, customer approved content and additional images or graphics, laid out in a finished document that clearly communicates the customer’s challenge, solution, goals or key factors, implementation, and results.

Put together all of the content you’ve created to form a branded, finished document.

8. Share, share, share

Lastly, share your success in all channels. Put the case study on your website, blog, share on social media accounts, and link back to your product or services pages. Bring it to sales meetings and include it in corporate slides. Write a news release around it and send it to relevant media, or put on the wire. Use your proven successes to generate new business.

Related blog posts:

Four Best Practices for Creating Effective Presentations

Content IS King – 5 Steps to Writing Effective White Papers

Summary:

See how an IT company with an emerging product in an undefined space used a number of different PR tactics to improve a key performance indicator – feature article coverage – by more than 125%, and achieve record web traffic and target media engagements.

Challenge:

The company wanted to create awareness of a new product in a quickly evolving, noisy, and undefined IT/networking space with aggressive competitors.

Goal:

The goal of the product launch was to create product awareness, garner media coverage, and begin to build relationships with key editors and analysts in the industry.

This was the most successful product launch in the client’s company history. As a result of this launch and ongoing outreach, the company now has a strategic and measured PR program, it’s visibility and coverage have increased,  and it is gaining on its competitors.

Campaign:

TREW Marketing sought to create a PR program for this IT company that would quickly address their known challenges – their product was emerging in an undefined market, the market is fragmented and crowded with many tools providers, and their primary competitor was aggressive in its messaging. To achieve success and address these challenges, TREW created a tiered media list of publications and editors, drafted targeted high-quality content, reached out to prioritized media, executed a major product launch, and now continues to build on the newly-established relationships and company awareness.

Step 1: Develop a Targeted and Tiered Outreach List

TREW sought to develop a strategic media list for the IT company. Developing the list involved extensive research including tracking competitor coverage, searching for new publications, categorizing journalist beats, and identifying the data and articles that had been the most influential for the IT industry. This research resulted in a list of more than 25 media contacts who write for an audience relevant to the IT company’s existing product offerings and soon-to-be-launched ground-breaking new product.

To prioritize efforts with journalists, TREW ranked journalists as high, medium and low priority, and established interaction goals with each group of journalists. TREW, with the help of the IT company, then executed both proactive and reactive outreach  based on occurring events such as new articles, blog posts, and company and industry news, and introduced the IT company to the journalist when the company and its expertise could be helpful.

Step 2: Plan and Create Quality Content

For the major product launch, TREW created several pieces of targeted content, starting with the news release. Based on TREW research and several launch messaging meetings, the release focused on the product’s unique benefits for the market and application-leading specifications that factually ensured the product would stand out prominently over aggressive competitors who had a larger voice in the market, yet a technically inferior product. In addition, TREW created a one-page flyer that highlighted specific pain points of potential customers and used diagrams and explanations to show how the new product saved time, cost, and set customers up for future success.

Alongside the news release and one-page overview, TREW helped develop the slide content, flow, and messaging that positioned the company and introduced the product. In addition TREW created article abstracts that company experts could write for publications. The IT company presented the slides in run-throughs of the presentation, each time making changes and adjustments so that their messages were clearly and accurately conveyed.

Step 3: Reach out to the Media

A few weeks before the launch of the product, TREW began to contact journalists it had begun developing relationships with since Step 1. TREW introduced the product and invited journalists to meet with the company leadership and technology experts to learn more about the product and how it would meet the needs of the journalists’ audiences.

Since the PR launch process began with researching the best contacts and building relationships, as outlined in Step 1, TREW already had a start on raising the company’s visibility with key journalists which helped ensure they would more easily accept the invitation to hear about the new product at the time of announcement.

Step 4: Launch the Product

The week of the launch, the news release was distributed via wire and the IT company met with journalists across the country. They presented slides, answered questions, pitched article abstracts or offered assistance with other articles where applicable, and TREW continued to watch the targeted publications for places the new product could be included.

Step 5: Sustain the Media Relations Program

With a successful launch underway, TREW continues to build relationships with key media for the IT company. By consistently staying in touch with top media and making valuable offers of expert spokespeople, new content, and company news, overall engagements (i.e., journalist responses) are growing. As TREW and the IT company look to build on this success into 2012, a key focus is on additional compelling content and ideas to strengthen relationships with editors and grow the IT company’s image as a leader in the markets they serve.

Results:

With the PR program development and strategic product launch, the IT company secured 125% more coverage than prior launches. Throughout the launch, the company received:

• Six times more feature article coverage than their top competitor in the launch month
• Strong feature article headlines and product messaging
• Industry analyst quotes in multiple top-tier publications
• Feature coverage in four of the targeted publications
• Article headlines that included key messages promoted through the presentations, news release, and additional information materials

This week, the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP) awarded TREW Marketing a MarCom Award. With more than 6,000 entries from around the world, the 2011 MarCom Awards were given to organizations including Burson-Marsteller, Northrop Grumman, Princeton University, Seimens, US Airforce, United Healthcare, Vistaprint, Weber Shandwick, Wells Fargo, and TREW Marketing.

TREW Marketing won its Gold Marcom Award for a promotional campaign around our downloadable e-book, Smart Marketing for Engineers. We stood out for our resourceful and creative approach to marketing a professional, well-branded publication.

To promote the book, the TREW crew used a variety of channels including web marketing, public relations, social media, email marketing, and a video, all timed around a global, technical industry conference.

“We pride ourselves in creating custom marketing plans and activities for our customers that support their business goals,” said Rebecca Geier, Principal of TREW Marketing. “It was only natural for us to create a successful campaign to promote our own product using the marketing strategies, channels, and activities that we recommend and implement for our customers.”

Results of the award-winning promotional campaign included:

• 600% in web lead growth during the book launch
• 217 news release postings in the first two hours
• 47 media views of the news release by journalists within the first two hours
• 4505 Twitter users reached with news of the book and a link to download
• Average visitors to trewmarketing.com from Twitter during the launch spent more than 15 minutes viewing more than 10 pages on the agency’s site
• 60% of traffic from LinkedIn to trewmarketing.com during the launch came from first-time visitors to the agency’s site
• 35% higher email open rate from email marketing than the industry average
• TREW email marketing for the book achieved double the industry average for clicks through email
• 10 engineering firms interviewed at industry conference to personally promote the book and TREW’s services to potential clients
• 65 YouTube views of the video

In August 2011, Wineman Technology and Tecnalia Research introduced Dynacar, a fully validated, real-time vehicle model simulator for developing and testing passenger and light commercial vehicles. Dynacar is fully developed by Tecnalia and produced with the help of Wineman Technology, The platform is created in National Instruments LabVIEW Real-Time and integrated into a vehicle’s design and test platform using Wineman INERTIA software, NI VeriStand, and off-the-shelf PXI control and test hardware.

That being said, Wineman and Tecnalia made the natural decision to release Dynacar in the US at NIWeek, National Instruments’ annual user conference. By using Wineman and Tecnalia’s business partnership along with the proven National Instruments LabVIEW and NI VeriStand platforms, and promoting the product at NIWeek, the companies were able to share their news through multiple channels.

• Wineman and Tecnalia released their news on the first day of NIWeek, and let relevant journalists covering the conference know of the announcement.
• They had a significant presence on the NIWeek show floor with a booth staffed with Wineman and Tecnalia experts. In addition, both companies joined together for joint press meetings at the conference.
• Dynacar was featured in the NIWeek keynote, which was uploaded to YouTube and posted on Wineman’s facebook page.
• Dynacar was covered in top engineering publications including Automotive Testing Technology International and Design News.

Overall, it was a highly successful launch. The product was covered in print, in video, in the conference keynote, and across the web. In fact, Dynacar received so much publicity that traffic from PR efforts around the launch more than doubled Wineman’s average monthly web traffic from referring sites.

This week, TREW Marketing announced Smart Marketing for Engineers, a free guidebook for technical business leaders marketing their products and services. Available for download on our site, the publication addresses the specific challenges of technical, B2B marketing and outlines the firm’s proven process to grow awareness and generate demand.

We know that engineers and scientists passionately develop products and services but are often unsure how to effectively generate demand and make every marketing dollar count, so we created Smart Marketing for Engineers for small- and medium-sized business leaders to provide a practical, easy-to-read guide with clear steps and real-world examples and results.

The new guidebook leads engineers through positioning and planning, website development, content creation, search marketing, turning leads into sales, and social media. You can use the free guidebook to understand the marketing investments that will have the greatest impact on their business, and create or streamline their marketing plans accordingly.

As you’ve seen through this blog, we have led B2B clients through the marketing strategy and execution process outlined in Smart Marketing for Engineers, with results including:

• 156% growth in web traffic and 800% increases in clicks from an implemented paid search strategy
• 100% increase in pages viewed from newly designed websites and 43% open rates from email marketing campaigns
• Growth in natural search relevancy, coverage in 11 top-tier online websites, and nearly 12,000 web impressions following a product launch

To download Smart Marketing for Engineers, visit http://www.trewmarketing.com/smartmarketing/index.php.

The five-word phrase has come up in marketing discussions in every company across America: “We should start a blog.”

Marketers smile. A new vehicle to reach our audience. Sounds great.

PR professionals cheer. A low-cost way to specifically explain our business! Let’s do it!

Executives and engineers cringe. Waste precious time on blog posts, only to get lost in the information overload that is the Internet? No, thank you.

The last thing that TREW Marketing will advocate for is wasted time, but, one of the first things that TREW Marketing will advocate for is a clearly communicated message to your target audience.

Creating Quality Content

Blogging allows for a streamlined platform where companies can talk to a targeted audience about industry challenges and trends in order to advocate for their company and products.

For example, we can use content that we have put together over time on the TREW Spotlight blog to show you best practices in print advertising, email marketing, style guides, pay-per-click advertising, and public relations. This content doesn’t talk directly about TREW products and services; instead, our blog provides best practices and talks about industry challenges, solutions and trends. A blog shouldn’t be a sales pitch, it should be a way to show your customers and prospective customers that you know what you’re talking about, that you understand the challenges and solutions of the industry, and that you provide measureable results.

Reaching Your Target Audience

Your blog should be hosted on your site as a culmination of your company’s content. The blog is a hub where other online outreach vehicles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) point, so that when someone engages with your tweet or Facebook update, they are directed to your blog, where they can find more information than what can be expressed in 140 characters, and can interact with the rest of your site, including your products, case studies, whitepapers, etc.

The TREW Spotlight blog.

A lesser-known fact about blogs is that you can use your blog to get your content directly to your audience through their email, like a basic e-Newsletter with a simple format, using a service like Feedburner. Feedburner is a free service that provides email subscriptions to your readers. Simply create a Feedburner account, and then follow the instructions to setup a “subscribe to posts via email” widget for your blog.

The Feedburner widget.

Readers who subscribe will now receive each new blog post that you publish via email, allowing them to engage with your company via their inbox, and giving them the opportunity with each new post/email to click through to your site. If you’re interested in Feedburner, you can read more about how to use the service.

In April, Wineman Technology celebrated its 20^th anniversary. Anniversaries are a great time to showcase what your company has been through and what you’ve accomplished over time. Often, employees have their hands in the day-to-day work of a company, but marketers have the time to interview and dig deep into the history of the company. After conversations with the engineers at Wineman, we uncovered extremely newsworthy details about the company’s history. For example:

• Over the course of 20 years, Wineman boasts a 31% average yearly increase in revenue
• Wineman is home to 11 engineers with LabVIEW development certifications
• The company furthers hands-on learning by donating to institutions like Michigan Technological University, where students are building a mobile laboratory

To promote Wineman through their 20^th anniversary, we created and wired a news release, sent customized news pitches to targeted journalists, and published specific web content that drove traffic to Wineman’s web site.

Creating a News Release

News releases get a company’s information to its audiences clearly and provide credibility. Well-written news releases are often covered by multiple outlets and online news sites, ultimately increasing a company’s web presence. As a result of our Wineman’s news release, their 20^th anniversary was covered across the globe in outlets like CNBC, Yahoo! News, and Reuters.

Sending Customized Pitches to Targeted Journalists

TREW uses email news pitches to reach targeted journalists. We spend the time and effort to create customized press lists for each of our clients to ensure that we’re starting conversations with the most relevant journalists for their products and services.

For Wineman, we sought local coverage to celebrate the company’s accomplishments. We reached out to journalists in the mid-Michigan area, as well as large, industry-wide publications, and received coverage in a wide range of outlets (including the Facebook page of a local, influential business alliance, below). Because the local publications are more interested in a human interest story and how the company has impacted the local economy, and the industry publications are interested in how the company’s technology has developed and what solutions they have created over time, we created two different news releases – one for each audience. It is important to customize news for your audience and send journalists something that is valuable and interesting to their unique audience.

Creating a CTA with Specific Web Content

A developed news release that is sent to targeted journalists also needs to have a next step for readers, a call-to-action (CTA). In Wineman’s case, we created an interactive timeline on Wineman’s site, where readers could go to see images and details about Wineman’s history. The URL for the timeline was included in the wired news release and in the outreach to journalists. Each date and on the timeline provided images and details about Wineman’s history, along with links to more information on other parts of their site.

Happy 20^th Anniversary, Wineman!