Every business would like to get featured in relevant media publications frequently. Especially if there is a launch or exciting development, you would like full spread article features. Yet, a lot of businesses struggle with it, more so if they are low on resources. Here we look at a low effort and commonsense approach to setting up the fundamental PR infrastructure for your business, without spending money on it aka “Organic PR“.

This post is part of my Efficient Marketing Series where I look at marketing activities that deliver results but are very low on cost and effort.

In this tactic, we leverage the one key advantage of social media – the ability to search for specific individuals and connect with them. While ‘social media marketing’ is usually thought of as building communities, engagement campaigns and paid ads, it’s networking value is often not tapped fully.

Organic PR is Essentially A Networking Hack

Setting up your Organic PR infrastructure is a simple hack of social media networking,

1) Identify key media writers in your domain – Here I am assuming that you are in tune with the news & trends in your business domain. You can set up Google Alerts or other notification tools to widen your net. You should know about any news articles and features that are highly relevant to your domain. Once you spot them, check who the author is!

Tip: Choose your industry domain topics wisely. Not too broad because that would make engaging with the media folk difficult. Not too niche, otherwise you won’t find enough number of media folk to engage with. Remember, as your domain widens, so does the irrelevancy for the media folk. Start as niche as possible and then keep widening the circle as required.

2) Introduce yourself to a few of these media folk every week. The introduction should be personal and natural. Since these writers are writing about your industry domain, they are very likely to respond or at least take note of your message. The more relevant your business is to them, the higher chance that they will want to connect. If you can follow up with a call or offline meeting, all the better.

Tip: Are there any specific market trends, stats, consumer insights that you can offer to the writer? While you introduce your business, it is good if you can highlight other areas where you can add value also. You should position the brand or specific individuals in the company as subject matter experts. Being in the industry, there will be certain areas of which you are very well versed. Position yourself as a subject matter expert in these (because you are one!).

The above two steps are the key starting points, and most likely, you have done this a few times already.

3) The success of this tactic depends on your diligence. Once you connect with these individuals, you want to establish a simple communication channel with them. For example, via email or whatsapp. Also, create a master list of their names / designation / publications and other details – so you can access that information quickly in the future. (Add them in your CRM as a separate category if you have one).

Tip: Setting aside as little as 30 mins, once a week, will payout in the long run. Though it requires time from the founding team or other senior team member.

4) How often can you message them? Sticking to a periodic interval of connecting with them will set a routine in the relationship. It will create a momentum for your team to churn out good content while also create a familiarity with the receivers. Depending on how often you can come up with relevant and interesting news, you can choose to message them once in two weeks or once a month or any other frequency that makes sense for your domain and business size. I would suggest sending out a message at least once a month.

Tip: Your messages shouldn’t be only about your business-related developments. Ideally, you want to share industry stats, trends, insights that you glean during your work. This will slowly establish you as a thought leader in the space. They will think of you when they are doing any associated news pieces in your domain.

Moreover, if you share only your business-related news then they can publish it only if it is really big news. Often small companies don’t have any such news. So it is better to position yourself as a thought leader in the industry and get smaller “expert bytes” for industry matters. Create a culture of commenting on recent news, identifying upcoming trends, gleaning insights into your consumer group and so on.

5) The content can be low effort. It doesn’t have to be an in-depth report or survey or other time consuming piece. Once in a while, if you can manage, then try to churn these more impactful pieces. But you can work this tactic with good low effort content too. Your product analytics and customer service teams are getting a lot of direct customer feedback which in turn gives you demographic/industry data. Understanding and analyzing this data is a crucial part of business growth anyway. So, you can additionally use it to fuel your organic PR efforts.

For example: In my early days, I found recruiting good digital marketers for my agency team very difficult. I faced a plethora of challenges and eventually after much effort, I had a breakthrough. I devised a system with the help of a client CEO and it worked really well. And then I implemented it for the other businesses I worked with. Thus, I now had a recruitment plan for smart digital marketeers. Soon I wrote a whitepaper on it and even published an article on it on a leading B2B publication INC42. (Read the article here).

Similarly, in your industry the day to day challenges that you are solving are all good, useful media content. The only requirement is that you need to spend a small bit of time diligently building your media relations and then consistently updating them.

6) Nurture deeper relations. Once you have the above system in place where you are sending some press-worthy news to media influencers every few weeks, you can also build 1-1 relations with a few of them. Over time, nurture deeper relations by sending exclusive content to certain people. Exclusive content is valuable for them and they could reciprocate by giving you a bit more media space.

These are the 6 steps to be followed diligently to set up your Organic PR efforts. Over time, they will reap good rewards.

Once you can afford it, you could either expand this PR effort in-house by appointing a dedicated resource. Or you can hire an external agency to augment the work.

Have you tried this approach internally? How did it work?