seo

The Advanced Guide to Online Publicity Campaigns

Ali JalilPour June 27, 2024

0 0 23 minutes read

[Estimated read time: 55 minutes]

No one cares about your company or product.

Unless your CEO is Steve Jobs or your product is Google Glass, very few journalists and bloggers are going to write about you directly, because they’re reluctant to give free press to for-profit businesses. Few people are going to share something on social media that will only help a corporation to make more money. To gain significant media coverage and launch creative campaigns that spread through the Internet, companies usually need to insert their brands into larger stories.

In this post, I will help readers to do exactly that by detailing nine of the traditional publicity strategies that PR executives have developed over the past century. The point to remember:

Successful creative publicity campaigns can lead to countless new customers, sales, leads, social followings, and backlinks.

(Just see this recent study by Moz and Frac.tl that Kelsey Libert posted on the Moz Blog!)

By the end of this extensive post, readers will learn the answers to these questions:

What is Promotion as part of the Marketing Mix?
What specifically is publicity within the Promotion Mix?
When should marketers use publicity campaigns?
What is publicity compared to content marketing?
What is publicity compared to advertising?
What is publicity compared to public relations?
What are the major publicity strategies?
What are examples of publicity strategies in various contexts?
When should I use different publicity strategies?
How can I create a publicity plan?
How can I measure the results?

A full list of resources is provided at the end.

Table of Contents

An introduction to the marcom process

First, a brief review.

“Content” and “content marketing” are not strategies. Rather, “content” plays a role in the five marketing strategies that exist because marketing is simply the creation of a message, the insertion of that message into a piece of content, and then the transmission of that content over a channel to an audience. All marketing is “content marketing” because all marketing uses content.

The creation and distribution of “content” occurs within the framework of one or more of the five strategies that comprise the Promotion Mix: direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and publicity.

On Back to the Future Day in October 2015, I published a lengthy BTTF-themed Moz Blog post on the integration of traditional and digital marketing that goes into more detail. The post included a lengthy workflow process that marketers can use to develop an entire marcom strategy. Here’s a snapshot of the promotion mix that I illustrated in the article:

That prior essay gives a wide overview, but this post will take a deep dive here into the publicity part outlined in red. Here’s a quick overview of publicity before I go into the advanced part down below:

The Marketing Mix is comprised of the 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
The Promotion Mix (within the Marketing Mix) consists of direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and publicity, and each one is used at different times and for different purposes.
The definition of “publicity” (from a newer 2012 edition of an old textbook of mine): “Gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service, or your company via media.”
Publicity is specifically used to generate mass, top-of-the-funnel awareness. One SEO benefit is that websites gain natural, authoritative backlinks as byproducts of publicity campaigns simply by getting the media, bloggers, and the public in general to talk about the company or product online.
Publicity and creative campaigns can be executed over traditional communications channels (such as print, TV, and radio) or online ones (such as blogs, social media, and Internet publications).

PR versus publicity

One important note on terminology: “Publicity” and “public relations” are not the same thing, even though most people — and even most marketers — use them interchangeably.

“Public relations” refers to external communications and the management of relations with all of an organization’s “publics,” such as government agencies, influencers, local communities, and financial analysts.
“Publicity” refers the specific marketing strategy within the promotion mix that increases public awareness through media.

When people talk about “PR campaigns,” they are usually referring to publicity campaigns — and that is what this post will discuss.

Publicity versus advertising

Publicity and advertising campaigns — both of which focus on top-of-the-funnel awareness — each have their positives and negatives:

Cost – Companies pay to produce and place advertisements; they do not pay directly for coverage that results from publicity campaigns.
Control – Advertisers have complete control over the message that’s transmitted; publicists can only pitch journalists and bloggers, who will then write whatever they want.
Repetition – The same advertisement can easily be run indefinitely; every single publicity campaign usually starts from the beginning.
Credibility – Advertisements have less credibility because they come from an identified, paid sponsor; publicity is more subtle because it is seen as coming from the media itself.
Attractiveness – Advertisements need to appeal only to the end customer; publicity campaigns usually have to interest media gatekeepers first.

Another difference is philosophical. Advertising takes a product or service and pushes it out into the public domain. Publicity, as we will see, typically takes whatever is already occurring in the world and brings it to the product or service.

Earned and owned media

Following the rise of owned media in recent years, I have added the following part in bold to the traditional definition of “publicity”:

Gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service, or your company via owned or earned media.

Why? The same principles apply whether one wants to gain mass awareness over owned or earned media because human nature does not change. The subjects of news articles that gain mass attention are often very similar to the topics of which social media posts “go viral.”

Better together: Both earned and owned media awareness can support and reinforce each other, leading to massive awareness in both traditional and digital contexts.

The 9 ways to publicize yourself

Whether you’re looking to gain mass attention over earned or owned media outlets, here are nine of the specific types of stories and framing techniques that generally pique peoples’ interest.

1. Current news and trends

Journalists always want to publish whatever will interest their readers and result in more pageviews and subscribers. The first of the nine publicity strategies that I will outline in this guide is to get yourself directly inserted into major news outlets and blogs. There are three specific ways to do that.

1a. Direct news coverage

When people think of publicity, the most common thing that they imagine is massive media coverage of a product, company, person, event, or idea. Well, this specific type of publicity is the most difficult to receive for the simple fact that journalists, influencers, and popular bloggers get dozens — if not hundreds — of e-mailed pitches every single day that ask them to write about something.

It’s very difficult to make yourself stand out — most likely, writers will glance at e-mail subject lines in the inbox and decide in a microsecond which ones to open. (Most will be ignored, marked as spam, or deleted.)

Mike Butcher, the editor-at-large of TechCrunch — full disclosure, I contribute there as well — wrote a lengthy blog post last year that argued that the press release is dead and that tech companies should attempt to get coverage instead by sending e-mails that provide answers to a set of predefined questions.

Here are a few of the questions that he lists:

What is happening in the news *right now* that makes you relevant *right now*?
What is the problem that this company is solving?
How much traction do you have?

When Logz.io, the predictive log management platform for DevOps engineers, system administrators, and digital marketers for which I am Director of Marketing and Communications, launched late last year, this was the pitch that I’d sent to a relevant reporter at The Wall Street Journal:

As you can see, this first pitch defines the problem that we solve and then gives a current example of that problem occurring.

Her response:

That initial contact led to communication that resulted in this coverage in VentureWire (a sister publication of the Wall Street Journal):

We had other significant coverage as well by following a similar process.

Here’s another example. At BrightonSEO in 2015, Rebecca Lee of Dynamo PR in England gave this presentation:

A Supercharged Approach To PR SEO Success from Rebecca Lee

One of the agency’s clients was a clothing store that had happened to sell that infamous dress — was it white and gold or black and blue? — so the team drove to the store, bought one of the dresses, and pitched a media package that got an exclusive in the Daily Mail (see slides 64 to 70).

In the digital marketing world, the idea of “newsjacking” has been popularized by David Meerman Scott (no relation). However, the insertion of oneself into a current story or trend has always simply been a publicity tactic since before the Internet even existed. It’s a new buzzword that refers to an existing practice. (Just please use it for good and not evil, like using David Bowie’s death as clickbait.)

Publicity vs. “content marketing” pitching

On online marketing websites and blogs, I see pitching often being discussed by “content marketers” as a way to gain shares of and links to one thing or another. They should stop. I receive e-mailed pitches from PR executives and “content marketers” all the time — and I can tell within three seconds which one I’m getting.

How? Here is the difference between the two.

“Content marketers” pitch me:

1.) To share or link to some random article, and they do so often when
2.) I have no connection to or interest in the topic at all

Publicists pitch me:

1.) To write about an idea because
2.) They already know that I have a connection to or interest in that topic

I ignore or delete the pitches from “content marketers.” Following the pitches from publishers, I may choose to include their source, study, or idea in some future piece in the publications to which I contribute. Most “link earning” methods are poor imitations of traditional publicity practices.

Pitch in a way that will genuinely interest the people who you are contacting. Do not pitch thinly-veiled attempts to get links and shares for you or your clients.

1b. Contributed articles

Direct coverage — as described above — depends on a company either doing something newsworthy or riding the wave of some newsworthy trend. But there’s not always something relevant and newsworthy occurring at any given time.

In such a context, one alternative is to contribute articles to targeted publications.

However, I am not referring to “guest posting.” The real reasons to contribute articles to publications have always been to grow one’s brand and communicate an idea — as Jen Lopez once wrote on Moz, it should never be first and foremost simply a way to “get links.”

I get e-mails all the time from people offering “guest posts” or selling “guest post services” — and I know exactly what they have in mind. Almost every time, people who use the word “guest post” end up submitting 500 words of crap with a few links that have optimized anchor text. Don’t be those people — their jobs consist of nothing but filling the Internet with spam.

Here’s just one example from LinkedIn:

Instead, use the opportunity to brand yourself — and thereby your company — as a thought leader in your industry or sector by producing something that’s relevant, insightful, and, yes, newsworthy. Here are a few examples in the context of my company:

Now, I hate to bring up links because any tactics that I present will almost certainly be abused by some people — but I’ll take my chances. Links to your website can be inserted into contributed articles, but I highly recommend that you tread carefully. Do not build links just to build links. The point of a link in any contributed article should be to cite or refer people to an authoritative resource (that may or may not live on your domain):

If my company mentions “DevOps” — the next generation of agile development in the software deployment cycle — in a contributed article, then we may link to our “What is DevOps?” guide for the benefit of those who have not heard of the practice.
If we mention the “ELK Stack” — the open-source collection of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana that can be used in server and other types of log management — then we may link to our guide on “How to Install the ELK Stack on Amazon Web Services” for those who don’t know how to deploy the software stack.
Note: We usually do not place links to our home page, product page, or any other sales pages in the text of our contributed articles because more and more editors now understand the misusage of links and will remove them. Links to those pages will come as natural by-products of doing ongoing publicity campaigns in general.

Remember: Links are the least important parts of contributed articles! The point is to publish something that’s interesting, informative, newsworthy, or controversial enough that it will get attention for you or your company.

Still, the question remains: When should marketers publish articles on their blogs, and when should they contribute them to other publications? For the answer, I’ll refer you to my earlier Moz Blog post on that topic. Nutshell: Publish material on your website when its goal is to rank highly for desired keywords (SEO goals); publish material elsewhere when its goal is to build thought-leadership and brand awareness (publicity goals).

1c. Expert interviews

Once upon an analog time, publicists had to send pitch letters to journalists and media outlets to convince them to interview the “experts” who they represented. In “Public Relations for Dummies,” Eric Yaverbaum, Robert Bly, and Ilise Benun gave an example of such an inquiry:

Dear Robert:

Compact disc (CD) sales are booming. In fact, some music industry executives are projecting disc sales will surpass album sales by the end of the year.

The first “compact disc only” retail store, Compact Disc Warehouse in Huntington Beach, California, opened in November 20XX. It grossed nearly $1 million in sales in just 18 months operating out of a 1,200 square-foot store.

Now, Compact Disc Warehouse, Inc. is launching the first CD franchise offering to meet the national demand for the hottest home entertainment product in the music industry today.

Edward Dempsey, president of CD Warehouse, is an expert on why CDs are changing an industry that has been dominated by record albums for decades and how the retail world is gearing up to meet the CD demand.

If you would like to arrange an interview, please call our offices.

Sincerely,

Mitch Robinson, Account Executive
S&S Public Relations, Inc.

While publicists still pitch their colleagues or clients as experts today, it’s become increasingly common for journalists and bloggers themselves to ask for suggestions of experts. The most common platform is HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Here’s an example of a query that I recently saw in the thrice-daily email digest that I receive:

Through HARO, I’ve gotten interviews with either me or a colleague quoted in relevant publications including StackOverflow, IT World, and CIO.

The good part: The writers will almost always include a link to a website (if your pitch is accepted), and they will often mention a company or personal Twitter account as well.

The bad part: You’ll be competing with dozens — perhaps hundreds — of pitches. The moment that a HARO e-mail lands in your inbox, stop whatever you’re doing and respond within minutes. The closer that your e-mail is near the top of the reporter’s pile, the more likely it is that he or she will open and consider it in the first place.

Direct coverage, contributed articles, and expert interviews are three of the most common methods to get in the major media and popular blogs. Still, there are eight other strategies to increase mass awareness of you or your brand over earned and owned media outlets. The rest of this guide will go through them.

2. Tie-ins with TV shows & movies

Speaking of Back to the Future Day, countless big brands capitalized on the arrival of October 21, 2015:

Not only did the publicity campaign go viral on social media, Wired and many other major outlets noticed as well:

THIS WEEK, LEXUS introduced a short teaser video for SLIDE, a hoverboard that appears to not just live up to our Back to the Future II dreams but, at least stylistically, improve on them. Better yet, it’s more science than science fiction. Here’s how it works — and why you won’t find one at Toys’R’Us any time soon.

Why did it become so popular? People have emotional connections to their favorite TV shows and movies, and they’ll naturally be interested in anything that incorporates those programs and films. After all, a lot of marketing is based on appeals to emotion. Logical, factual arguments are boring.

In January 2016, Tom McLoughlin published a great case study on Moz that showed how he and SEO Travel gained more than one hundred links — many of which were on major media sites — by doing what he called “content marketing.” Their creative campaign tied travel destinations to filming locations in “Game of Thrones.”

In the extensive comment thread on that post, I argued that what he actually did was “publicity” because he followed the exact, traditional process that I have outlined in this post. I’ll let readers decide for themselves.

Here’s a personal confession: I love “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” (Should I say that I was a fan of Joss Whedon before it was cool?) Almost twenty years after the premiere of the cult TV show in 1997, there are still many business, non-cultural articles written about the program today:

I still read every article that mentions “Buffy.” Every. Single. One. How many people out there will also read and share anything that mentions their favorite TV shows and movies? Here some other examples of corporate tie-ins with popular programs: “Scrubs” and “Scandal.” And don’t forget Google’s huge tie-in with “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” as well as Spotify’s tie in.

Here’s how Lego is publicizing itself among fans of “Doctor Who” partly through this Facebook post by the official “Doctor Who” page:

Nutshell: Movie and TV show tie-ins are often cheaper than direct product placements (see the next tactic below) but the benefits, when successful, also tend to be less. Product placements cost a lot of money, but that price also pays for some of the best professional media creators and distributors in the world (the producers of “Friends,” the writers of “Seinfeld,” and the special effects team at Marvel). Tie-ins are usually not officially associated with a film or television show, so brands that want to create something for the fans need to do it themselves.

Questions to ask

What movies and TV shows are enjoyed by your target audience?
If you’re a mass consumer brand, then you might want to target a show such as “Friends” (see below for an example of a related publicity tactic). If you target people in the tech or startup worlds, you might want to target the new seasons of “Halt and Catch Fire” and “Silicon Valley” this year.

Marketing creatives and collateral

This will depend on your targeted channels and ability to create content for those channels.
For example, you could create blog posts, contribute articles to relevant publications, or create videos that include references to the programs and movies.

Getting earned and owned media coverage

Most likely, you’ll want to give relevant media outlets and bloggers a “heads up” that the movie or TV-show tie-in will occur soon and that they might find it interesting enough to write about.
Social media posts that feature and articles that discuss the tie-in content can be “liked,” shared, repinned, and retweeted.

3. Product placements

On January 6, 2000, the sixth-season episode of “Friends” entitled “The One with the Apothecary Table” aired on NBC (see the clip above). I hope I’m not spoiling any fan’s love of the esteemed show, but it was purely a product placement episode by Pottery Barn. (According to Entertainment Weekly, it was also only one of several product placements over the run of the program.)

Sure, the plot might have been a little far-fetched. But it worked. Here’s what a Williams-Sonoma executive once told a trade conference in Chicago (the article is archived here):

Williams-Sonoma Inc.’s Patrick Connolly told attendees of the Catalog Conference in Chicago not to think of themselves as a catalog, but rather as a brand…

The catalog’s name is mentioned repeatedly, as Rachel furnishes her apartment with numerous Pottery Barn items, telling her roommate Phoebe the goods came from a really cool flea market instead of a mass market retailer.

The episode, which is shown numerous times annually in syndication, is “the gift that keeps on giving. The phones light up with catalog requests every time it airs.”

Of course, not every product placement works. After seeing Pottery Barn and “Friends,” watch these clips of Bing in “Hawaii Five-0” (the new one) and Toyota’s self-parking Yaris model in “Bones”.

You cringed, right? If you ask five marketers to describe the elements of a successful product placement, you will get six answers because the issue is very subjective and not quantifiable. A lot of marketing is art, not science. Still, I’ll offer my opinions here on the differences between these three examples.

“Friends”

The incorporation of Pottery Barn was done in a way that was within the realm of possibility in the world of our six friends — Phoebe is certainly a weird enough person who could randomly have had an aversion to mass-market furniture.
The product played a central role in advancing the plot of the story and was not inserted out of nowhere.
As a result, viewers’ suspensions of disbelief were not interrupted (for the most part).

“Hawaii Five-0” and “Bones”

No one has ever said “Bing it!” — and, most likely, no one ever will. Imitating your competitor in such an obvious way only shows that you have nothing interesting or funny to add, and product placements need to be interesting or funny to be memorable.
Taking thirty seconds out of a one-hour crime drama to have a forensic anthropologist show her FBI-agent partner a self-parking car does nothing to advance the plot.
The insertions were completely artificial, so they did little except to ruin viewers’ suspensions of disbelief and their entertainment experiences.

Nutshell: Product placement is an expensive, high risk, and high reward tactic. Whether you’re successful like Pottery Barn or a failure like Bing and Toyota, people will be talking about you the next day. In addition to the thousands or millions who directly saw your brand in the placement, others will be writing and blogging about the placement and sharing it on social media as well. (But maybe that was the point all along!)

Of course, you can always take a self-deprecating approach to the whole thing. Just remember: prime-time TV product placements cost thousands of dollars per second!