Why Paid Promotion of PR Is So Important

Are you extending your PR efforts with paid promotion? If not, you’re leaving a lot on the table. This is why.

Earned media coverage is well trusted and it has a built-in audience — a much larger one than your business probably has on its own. Still, a news article isn’t likely to reach your full target audience. It’s more likely just a sliver, especially with how fast things fall below “the fold” these days.

There’s a similar thing about influencer content. It’s pretty well trusted, gets generally high engagement and instantly opens up a new audience, but it’s seen by just a portion of who you could and want to be reaching.

Really, in today’s “content jungle,” the days of just organic are over. Paid amplification is pretty much needed to squeeze the full ROI out of earned and social coverage.

That said, not every single piece of content warrants (or needs) paid media extension. And there are a lot of options when it comes to paid.

How We ID Content for Paid Promotion

We typically look for pieces of coverage or content that are already performing well organically; they’re driving good traffic or seeing high engagement on social media. These pieces can be brand posts or mentions (via influencers or user-generated content).

We also make sure they’re trackable; they should have a linkback to the website, a custom affiliate or promo code (to capture related sales), or some way to measure ROI on paid spend.

Where We Extend Content

Depending on the goal at hand, there are lots of ways to tap into paid channels to amplify content and extend campaigns. They include:

• Content syndication: We reach here often for high-quality earned media coverage (whether online article, video, or audio). Syndication basically serves up the piece as “recommended reading” either on similar articles or to a targeted user (based on criteria such as first and third-party data, audience type, geo and place of business). It also includes retargeting.
• Promoted social posts: If you’re only using influencer content organically (in your business’s feed and theirs), you’re just scratching the surface of potential. We always suggest investing more money upfront to get the usage rights to share influencer content across paid as well as earned and owned. We've seen significant returns by doing so — up to 400% ROI. Social channels have also made this increasingly easy to do, providing the ability to promote the post directly from the influencers feed, rather than through the brand’s channel. This also helps maintain authenticity.
• Display + Social Ads: Most ads are built with heavy-handed product imagery, messaging, or deals. Using influencer content in an ad can really help it stand out. Likewise with featuring a great piece of earned media or inclusion in a highly trusted analyst report; it gives the ad instant third-party validation and credibility. If your PR/social asset is on-message and doing well organically, you can likely put it to work for other parts of the marketing funnel by supporting through online advertising.  

These are just a few options we turn to often, as a core component of our Performance Communications programs. What’s amazing about all of them is that they extend the reach of your content in a highly targeted way, built around specific audience attributes. On many channels and platforms, paid amplifications can also target specific companies to support Account Based Marketing, which is becoming more and more necessary in the B2B space.

These days, campaigns and content really do need to be supported on all channels to maximize impact, with paid amplification as a critical element to get hard-earned and high-quality coverage in front of your audience and move prospects further along their journey with you.

Lisa Zanchi and Rosalie Morton contributed to this post.