When it comes to link building, high-quality editorial links have the most effect on SEO and, as a result, your website’s Google ranking. For this reason, link creation is essential in digital public relations.
Your campaign will fail if you do not have the necessary reach. This could be the case even if you have a fantastic piece of content or a unique collection of data to share with journalists. This is why it’s important to invest in a good link-building strategy for your brand. By dropping mentions of your brand on high authority sites you can boost traffic to your website. More importantly, you can convert more leads into paying customers. Link building is almost like influencer marketing.
The audiences of high authority sites trust the opinions of the people running these sites. If these people talk about your brand, then their audiences will form a positive perception about you. The best part is that this positive perception will be ingrained in people’s minds even before these people come to your website to find out more.
Writing an email pitch
Before you start reaching out to various outlets with requests for them to insert a link to your brand in their content, you must learn how to write an outreach email. The best email pitches are short and engaging. Moreover, a winning pitch always highlights what’s in it for the recipient. In other words, it’s important to highlight your unique value proposition. How can the recipient of your email benefit from inserting a link about your brand in their content? By answering this question, you can highlight the benefit for the recipient.
It helps if you can identify common goals you have or common interests that you share. From there, you can explain how mentioning your brand will benefit the recipient of your email. We also can’t stress enough how important it is to build a relationship with people who can help with your link building. You should do this even before you have a link to share.
Now that we’ve talked about the benefits of link building, let’s talk about how to do effective link building for your brand.
How to do PR link building
1. Do some research
This is perhaps the most critical and time-consuming stage of the whole process.
Consider the goals you wish to achieve with your outreach. For instance, let’s assume that you want to sell material to individuals who are already interested in it. Perhaps they’ve written about this specific topic or something similar in the past. In this case, you can do research on writers who specialize in a specific subject.
How to do in-depth research for targeted outreach
Filtering the results is the most efficient way to avoid inadvertently contacting the wrong individuals when prospecting. If your campaign is targeted at a specific city or country, you can sort your search results by city or country.
You can glean many details about someone from their tweets. If you follow a journalist or blogger on social media, clicking on their contact card will take you to their Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn page. Since looking for someone’s social media accounts on Google may take a long time, this strategy can save you a lot of time.
Consider using this strategy to check if you and the other individual have any common interests. Remember that if you choose this approach, you will need to contact each person separately.
With the right research, you can learn a lot about someone before you’ve even contacted them. If your recipient is prone to overuse exclamation points excessively, try infusing your emails with a sense of fun and energy.
If you want to outreach to journalists who have written on a particular issue or subtopic in your niche, just compiling an email list of contacts based on the topics they usually cover is unlikely to be personal enough. In order to develop a more personalized strategy, you might want to consider signing up to use a media database such as the one at Pressfarm. This database contains the contact details of 1 million+ journalists, bloggers, and influencers across different industries. By using this database, you can connect with the right thought leaders to help you spread the word about your brand.
How Pressfarm can help with your media lists
If you’d prefer to avoid the whole process of building a media list, the Pressfarm account executive can also compile custom media lists with the best media professionals in your niche. With these media lists, you can do extended media outreach for your brand.
Do you need content to wow the people you’re emailing? Armed with a team of PR specialists, expert writers, and certified designers, Pressfarm can also take care of your content creation. With a professional press release, a few engaging guest posts, and an eye-catching media kit, you can capture the attention of your email recipients and inspire them to share a story about you.
Pressfarm can also help you to distribute this content widely for maximum results. Pressfarm submits this content to respected media outlets, startup directories, and professional networks. In this way, Pressfarm can boost your online visibility across search engines. Thanks to this distribution strategy, your target audience will have an easier time finding you through organic searches.
With the right package from Pressfarm, you can get your brand in front of the target audience you have your eye on.
2. Personalize your email outreach strategy
When it comes to public relations link building, it’s critical to personalize the content of your emails. This helps you to demonstrate that you’ve given careful consideration to whom to contact. It also shows that you’ve taken into account their interests and concerns. You can’t simply throw stuff against a wall and wait to see what sticks. Personalize your emails right from the get-go. After all, once you’ve already turned someone off with one impersonal email, it’s hard to get their attention again with a new email.
It’s a good idea to create aesthetically attractive email templates, but make sure they properly reflect your brand personality.
When designing an email template, keep the following points in mind:
- If you know the person’s first name, always use it
- Don’t make yourself the center of attention. Use language that emphasizes the importance of your material while quickly explaining how it will help the recipient’s audience. Rather than just saying, “Let me know if you find this helpful!” end with, “Let me know if you decide to link to this post in your article!”
- Keep the number of paragraphs to a maximum of six or seven. After you craft an engaging introduction, you need to add a few hundred words to complement some facts or a story.
- Include evidence to show that you understand what you’re talking about and back up your claims with referenced statistics.
- Think about your headline carefully. People are more likely to read your email if you seem approachable and genuine rather than aggressive or robotic. Make your subject line concise and direct yet fascinating, creating curiosity for more details.
- Put the most important content at the top of your email – use the inverted pyramid style.
3. Follow up on your emails
If your email goes unanswered, it’s normal to assume that the recipient is not interested. In reality, the average person receives tons of emails a day. Media professionals receive even more. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that a media professional could receive up to 100 emails per day. As a result, there could be many reasons why someone hasn’t replied to your email. Maybe it went unnoticed in their normal flood of emails. The recipient could also have traveled – in this case, it’s expected that they would be away from their emails for a few days. Perhaps they just got back from a long weekend and they haven’t finished catching up with their emails.
On the other hand, maybe the reason they haven’t gotten back to you is because of something you did or didn’t do. It’s possible that you didn’t include a clear enough call to action in your email. When someone is under pressure with lots of assignments, they’re unlikely to go digging in your email to deduce what it is you want them to do. Make sure you write a clear call to action. This way, a curious email recipient will know exactly what to do next.
The art of following up
For all of the above reasons, following up when you haven’t received a reply to your pitch is a wise move. However, it’s also important to make sure you’re not pestering someone. Two follow-ups are usually sufficient. If you still don’t hear back, then it would be fair to assume the person isn’t interested. Any more than two follow-ups, and you could be risking ruining a relationship with a valuable media contact. It’s important to avoid being too pushy when you follow up. You can do this by providing value or knowledge in a manner that will prompt a reaction.
4. Evaluate the results
After lots of planning, you are now ready to start your public relations link-building campaign and track the results. In order to evaluate your success, you’ll need to look at things like open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates. This is usually a simple task unless you’re scared of statistics or aren’t very good at dealing with data.
Don’t be ignore the fine print or statistics that don’t directly relate to ROI. The smallest details can come in handy when you’re trying to understand what worked and what didn’t go very well with your link-building strategy. Simply analyzing the results of your email outreach will allow you to identify how to improve the next campaign. The proof is in the pudding when it comes to effectiveness.
During your evaluation, you might find that emails containing emoticons get opened more. If that’s the case, then make sure you throw a few emoticons into your emails. Similarly, embedding an infographic in an email rather than delivering it as a file may lead to more clicks. You can’t pull these insights out of thin air, so make sure you invest enough time into understanding the results of your campaign.
Conclusion:
Doing link building for your brand might seem overwhelming at first, but it’s really all about relationship building. By identifying people whose niche aligns with yours and connecting with them in an engaging way, you can improve your link-building strategy. Remember that the responses you get will vary. These responses depend on the kind of outreach you do, who you contact, and the industry you target. Over time and with enough practice, your media outreach will generate better and better results.