Whether you’re a start-up or an established business free publicity is valuable for you to get your marketing message and brand promise out.
What you’re ultimately trying to do is to get prospective customers to like and trust you enough to try out your products or services.
To do this you can advertise – but there are two problems with this:
1.Advertising can be expensive … particularly if you’re just starting out on your business journey.
2.Advertising is not perceived as credible
Another way, of course is to get free publicity.
So, the question is how do you get your content in front of your target audience (for free)?
4 publicity tactics you may want to consider
1. Write press releases
Both online and offline (physical) newspapers and magazines are content hungry. It has been said that most publications get more than 50% of their content from sources other than their own journalists, this is a huge opportunity for local entrepreneurs to increase their footprint in their industry.
Publications are always looking for something newsworthy that is of value to their readership. If you’ve got what they want, they will publish it.
So, look for the newsworthy angles in your products or services. Your article won’t get published if it is a pure product punt. And, if you persist with product punts you’ll be blacklisted and all your work will go into ‘file 13’.
2. Social Media
This is a no-brainer. Your target audience is sitting on social media waiting to consume relevant information that is useful to them. So, make sure that you at least have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube and Pinterest for starters. Anything you post on this platform is free.
3. Blog Posts
You may have heard the expression that ‘content is king’. Well it is if you want to position your company as the go-to expert resource. One of the best ways to position your company so that your target market sees you as a trustworthy brand is to blog.
We suggest that you add your blog to your existing website. So, every time you write a blog post, you get more content on your website. The search engines then rank you higher because you are a ‘resource’ site that is giving a better reader experience.
The rule of thumb is to write posts of up to 250 words. And, if you post once a week due to the usual time constraints experienced by entrepreneurs, does suffice.
Once you’ve written a post, be sure to share it with your followers on all your social media sites. It makes sense to get more eyeballs on your work.
Ensure that you have social sharing buttons on your blog posts so that your readers can share your articles with others too.
4. Networking events
Ok, so these aren’t totally free because you normally have to buy a meal or a drink or two. But, it’s close enough.
Your job is to expose your company to as many people as possible. Networking is a low-cost way to do this. The more people you meet with the more you can share your company’s story.