Personal branding has become a common phenomenon. And with commonality in every individual taking the plunge into personal branding comes a need for differentiation in positioning your brand as a trusted thought leader. And there’s nothing better than an effective PR strategy to make your brand stick – and not stale – in your audience’s mind.
We have all been talking about the usual traditional PR – contacting the journalists and getting our spot in the already small space in the print. While that still works, although differently, you cannot always find your way out to market on such a massive scale. Journalists have their own writing purpose for which they search for a story angle that might not always be about your brand (personal or company).
So how do you create your brand’s coverage with so much PR already happening both in print and digital?
Leverage these – and see for yourself how it helps you create a lingering personal and business impact on your audience.
- Use the new rules of PR. David Meerman Scott, in his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (5th edition), talks about this topic in detail. He mentions about how you can tap into the existing news in your industry or business area and write your own version of content commentary around that topic. For example: many global IT companies have a white paper for downloads on IoT, and so you writing another White paper(which is great for the content marketing part) may not always mean people will read what you publish. So what would be a good PR hack here? Create your own blog post on the research done on this topic and put your perspective on IoT differently: that way when people read these papers and also find your blog post in the Google news or search results, well you know you have readers and Web visitors as a result of your take on this real-time news commentary.
- Adopt the Skyscraper technique. When I attended the CMS Asia 2017, B2B Masterclass, I had the opportunity to meet Katrina Too, APAC Marketing Marketing Strategy and Operations manager with HubSpot. She talked about the Skyscaper hack that you could use to make your content stand out from the pack on the Web. So what does this have to do with your personal brand’s PR? Find out the most shared content on Buzzsumo and tweak the title and write your own piece with even better research, insight, and slant. Result? Tap into an already existing audience and surpass the most highly ranked posts with more visitors on your Web site.
- Conduct a content audit to see what works. Do an audit of your old content and see which ones drove the maximum engagement and shares. Repurpose your old content and break it down into sub-modalities. Analyze the ones that worked and repurpose them into content formats where your audience is at. A content audit will keep you wary of what types of content can be leveraged to create a news trigger or a commentary by studying the trends in the market.
- Use different platforms; no confinement. Medium and LinkedIn are great publishing platforms for writers; however, it all boils down to your brand’s purpose. Going forward, native is the best way to reach out to your audience, which also means PR will be personalized and contextualized as per your growing audience’s presence on different platforms.
- Find your community and amplify your content. Be it participating in LinkedIn group discussions or collaborating with bloggers and influencers in your field, look for ways to partner with like-minded people who can help you in amplifying your content. You best PR advocates are these set of bloggers and influencers who believe in your brand purpose.
- Believe in owned media. Your Web site is your best PR platform. Publish blogs consistently with the right usage of the keywords – and over a period of gradual seeding of content, people will find you. While paid, search and earned media should also be used, but only once you have injected your efforts into authentic and useful content for your audience.
How are you crafting your real-time PR plan?
Let’s chat!
