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Hidden Tricks to Optimize your Media Engagement Efforts

A lot of startup companies and brands often find it hard to come up with media engagement strategies, this often leads to a turbulent success that wastes tons of resources. If you don’t want to find your brand or company in this difficulty, read to the end of this article to get hidden insights we were able to uncover.

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What is a media engagement

Media engagement is the strategic creation of compelling and newsworthy content aimed at collaborating with journalists to secure press coverage for a brand or company. The goal is to enhance the visibility and recognition of a brand through media exposure, which can be achieved by understanding the preferences of the target audience and the type of content they respond to. This process makes it necessary to have a keen understanding of the flow of various media outlets, whether they are national, local, or regional to ensure the content aligns with their audience’s interests, therefore getting your desired reach and creating positive engagement.

The purpose of media engagement

The purpose of media engagement is to create the much-needed buzz your brand needs which can be reaching a new target audience, generating more sales, building relationships with media persons and to know how the public perceives and conversate about your brand or respond to your messages. To do so effectively, you will need a well-planned media strategy that will create a roadmap for your engagement efforts.

Relevance of a media strategy

Before you even think of coming up with engaging with the media, you will need to understand your basics and core reason of why your business is in the media to start with. According to Wikipedia, a media strategy: “is concerned with how messages will be delivered to consumers or niche markets.

It involves identifying the characteristics of the target audience or market as well as who should receive messages and defining the characteristics of the media that will be used for the delivery of the messages, with the intent being to influence the behavior of the target audience or market pertinent to the initial brief”.

With a clear media strategy, you will understand what kind of media outlets to pursue and when, remember every phase of your media interaction should be intentional, contributing strategically to the success of your business objectives. This ensures that every action taken in the media landscape is purposeful and impactful.

The power of personalization in media engagement

We all know media engagement starts with outreaching to a media personnel. This process is the most delicate as it determines if your content gets attention or not. By so saying, before even attempting to reach out to a journalist of choice, familiarize yourself with who they are, they type of content they produce as well as the publication they write for.

This will help you craft an email that sounds natural to their vocab, using their preferred style of communication, acknowledging their past work, and explaining why a partnership with them would be beneficial.

This is only the beginning; you need to understand the type of audience you are dealing with. Meaning you have to make go back to the drawing board where you have to find information on their demographics, preferences and likes so you can make data-driven choices and write your messages accordingly.

To ensure your content really stands out, consider asking the journalist if you can include interactive elements like polls, quizzes, or videos in what you share. This can make your content more engaging and memorable.

How to create a media engagement strategy

  1. Identify your media engagement goals

Now that you have recognized the need to extend the reach of your company or brand beyond your usual audience, it is essential to define a clear objective for this initiative. Your goal should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For instance, you might aim to increase your newsletter subscriptions by 20% within six months or boost car sales by 15% by the end of the year. It is crucial that your media engagement goals are aligned with your overall marketing and business strategies to ensure order across all marketing efforts and strengthen your brand’s message.

2. Choose the right media outlets that align with your business objectives

Now that you have a clear understanding of your goals, the next step is to identify media outlets that align with your business objectives. For example, featuring your car manufacturing business in a fashion magazine would be madness and unlikely to generate the buzz or engagement necessary for your business to flourish.

We recommend starting by identifying your target audience and understanding which publications they pay attention to mostly. Following this, conduct thorough background research on these publications to find the ones that regularly feature content relevant to your industry.

During your research, pay attention to the mostly used content style, the tone and language used and the journalists associated with each outlet. This approach will help you select a media partner that resonates well with both your brand and your intended audience.

3. Craft your content

Next up, focus on crafting your best content. This process may involve some trial and error, but with the support of your team, you will succeed. Begin by analyzing the existing content in your chosen outlet. Draft your piece and have others review it, comparing it against the best articles or blogs available there. Once you are satisfied with your content, you’ll be ready to proceed to the most critical steps.

4. Write a pitch

We already advised you check who the outlet journalist is, this is to ensure the pitch you will write is relevant and stands out among the hundreds that are competing for the same position you want for your company. It is important to remember that sending an email to a journalist requires strategic timing. Do not send an email randomly, instead, choose a specific time and day of the week for optimal impact. Tuesdays through to Thursdays are generally the best days to reach out, and the ideal time frame is between 10 AM and 2 PM, when journalists are most likely to check their emails.

5. Follow-up

Journalists are incredibly busy and might miss your initial email due to the number of emails they receive, or they might simply forget to respond because they are human too. Following up on your pitch shows that you are serious about working with them and that you are eager to see things through. However, it is important to follow up politely and not too frequently. Remember, don’t be too persistent because that can annoy them, and you certainly don’t want to risk being ignored forever. Always be respectful and considerate in your communication.

6. Monitor and measure

Monitoring and measuring your media engagement efforts is a must. By doing so, you will be able to identify if the outcomes of your media activities have met your expectations and achieved your set goals. To do so, you need to use the following metrics:

  • Check the readership of the publication you chose to work with.
  • Ask for feedback from the journalist of the publication, it will tell you if your article or blog did well or not.
  • Monitor new traffic on your website and social media pages as the audience would want to understand more about your company or brand.
  • Monitor the engagement your content receives such as likes, shares, comments and saves your article gets across all social platforms.
  • Monitor how long users stay engaged with your content. High engagement durations can indicate content effectiveness.
  • Weigh the difference between the money you used versus what you got back, increased sales mean a good return on investment (ROI)
  • Measure the amount of media coverage you receive in comparison to your competitors. This can help you understand your position in the market.
  • Check the bounce rate for visitors coming from media sites. A high bounce rate might indicate that the content on the landing page is not relevant or engaging enough.

Additionally, being able to monitor gives you an advantage to alter your strategies to make them more appealing to your audience’s needs and desires in terms of delivering content plus, you will be able to avoid the same mistakes you did for your next media engagement activity.

Enhancing brand awareness through social media engagement

While working to increase your brand awareness, do not underestimate the power of social media platforms. Social media is a tool that does marketing on your behalf and with the right strategy, a dedicated team and a loyal following, your company or brand will skyrocket with success.

Social media is the best at its game, it is free to join and cheaper to master. Here are some of the best social media platforms you can use to boost brand awareness and meet your media engagement goals:

  • Tik Tok: The newest in the game, but the best in targeting Gen Z.
  • Instagram: It has been alive for years and it is the best for sharing campaign photos and behind-the-scenes videos. Its visual nature helps in presenting your brand authentically.
  • Twitter: The master of real-time updates and hearing what people have to say about your brand and its efforts, use wisely to stay on top of trends and engage in conversations.
  • Facebook: The king of advertisements, never sleep on it.
  • LinkedIn: Represents professionalism and expertise, does your business or brand have the willpower to swim faster in a pool of experienced sharks? Then you might enjoy this app.

There you have it folks, as a brand, you don’t just stand out. Persistence, consistency, will power, determination and loyal supporters will take you far. When engaging with your audience on social media, it’s crucial to find common ground to foster understanding. As you post content, engagement may start small, but these efforts are the seeds for future growth and the achievement of your goals.

Ensure you are consistent in your posting, so that your followers may be able to trust and rely on the content you promised to deliver.

Additionally, actively ask for engagement from your followers because you can share content but if you are not saying anything even through or after your messages, you will remain stagnant. Therefore, encourage engagement by ending posts with a call to action, inviting responses, or prompting further interaction.

Common pitfalls to avoid when it comes to media engagement strategies

When you are working on getting your brand noticed through media engagement, it is important to remain clear of a few common mistakes. These mishaps can make your efforts less effective and might even turn people away from your brand. Here are some tips to help you keep your media engagement efforts stay on track and win your audience:

Not having clear goals: It is of most importance to know what you want to achieve with your media engagement. Without clear goals, it will be hard to measure success and improve your strategies over time.

Sending mixed messages: Always be consistent in what you’re communicating. If your messages are all over the place, it can confuse the people you’re trying to reach and weaken your brand awareness and overall brand voice.

Not knowing your audience: Different people choose different media platforms. Make sure you know who you are trying to reach and tailor your messages to fit their interests and needs.

Not building relationships: Think of media engagement as building a long-term partnership rather than just sending out information for 5 minute fame. Strong relationships with media outlets and journalists can lead to more opportunities to showcase your brand.

Bad timing: Timing your announcements or campaigns incorrectly, like during a major unrelated event, might mean your message gets overlooked. Pick the right moment for the biggest impact.

Being unprepared for crisis: Always have a plan for handling tough situations, like bad publicity. This helps you control the story and protect your brand.

Not tracking results: You need to keep an eye on how well your efforts are working. This means checking if more people are talking about your brand and if you’re reaching more audience plus restructuring accordingly.

Ignoring new trends: The world of digital media changes fast. Keep up with new trends so your engagement strategies stay fresh and effective.

Not offering value: Always provide something useful or interesting in your communications. This could be helpful information, a fun story, or something else that adds value. This will make more people want to pay attention to your brand.

 

Save your brand and your reputation the embarrassment, we can help you tailor your personalized media engagement strategies. Simply contact us for more information and we shall deliver.

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