By: Tawanda Carlton, Account Executive
This year, I discovered the power of organic content syndication and it’s made a huge difference in the way I approach pitching and landing coveted media coverage for my clients.
“Work smarter, not harder.” This is a phrase our team constantly touts to encourage smarter, and more strategic methods to be more effective in all areas within our day-to-day roles. For me, content syndication has been a way to help my clients create engaging content that is attractive to multiple outlets that ultimately lands into various publications.
There are many ways to syndicate content, however, let’s focus on pay-to-play, organic and earned syndications.
Pay-to-play syndication networks such as Outbrain, Taboola and Sharethrough help distribute your articles, blogs, and videos across countless news and blog sites that are relevant to your client or company’s product/solution offering. When done correctly, and strategically, this method can expand your audience, increase brand awareness and, in many cases, generate leads within their network.
While this is great for those looking to get a boost in traffic rather quickly, our PR team has found better traction and coverage with a more organic and engaging approach without using pay-to-play as an option.
I recently sat down with a few journalists and they expressed that with newsrooms shrinking and the desire for content expanding, most publications require that their writers publish anywhere from 1-8 pieces of content each day. This leaves them with little time to comb through pitches and more time to approve content that has already been curated. Identifying and capitalizing on this pain point has been invaluable for our agency and our clients. Our strategy has been to create content (i.e. blogs, articles, or videos) that aligns with a writer’s beat, is appealing to their audience, and is already written, edited and ready for publishing.
To achieve this type of syndication organically, it’s essential to think of the content you are creating as being an added value to the writer and the outlet’s audience. I’ve found it essential to ask the following questions:
- What does the journalist typically write about?
- What does their audience care about?
- What fresh and new ideas can I bring to the table?
Because of this, I have been able to regularly place articles and blogs with large publications and have the very same content republished on multiple sites. This has helped to increase our clients’ brand awareness and reach. For example, we targeted a few national “trade- specific” journalists and took our pitching efforts up a notch by providing detailed quotes (again, based on their beat and their audience) from our client, that the journalist could, in turn, use in their upcoming story. This method ended up piquing the interest of an editor from the Glassdoor Blog. With this single one media placement, we were able to achieve additional coverage with Fast Company, Entrepreneur and MSN.
We’ve also found great success by working alongside our clients on creating original, editorially sound, long-form pieces and submitting to the editor as a contributed article or guest post. During this process, For this, we researched national and trade-focused publications looking for content they may not necessarily have time to create. Again, journalists and editors are busy, so the easier you can make their job, the more attractive you become in helping them satisfy the rising demand for content in the 24-hour news cycle.
This method of, again, “working smarter not harder,” has resulted in solid media coverage that we have been able to continually leverage for our clients and our agency. The next time you are looking to expand your clients reach, consider how content syndication, whether paid or organic, can help you achieve that goal.
