Email Subscribers On Demand, Working Your Public Relations “Hit List,” Part 2

The promised land for businesses is where you no longer have to search out leads and customers … because your perfect customers are searching for you! “Is it possible?” you ask?

It’s more than possible. It’s like gravity — or the law of reciprocity. When you begin working through the systems I started showing you in my last article, it will be nearly impossible to not experience this promised land. While the rest of the economy is running around in chaos, you’ll be calmly watching thousands of leads pour in on autopilot.

This is called leverage, my friend — where you can perform an activity and see results much larger (disproportionately so) than the effort. Sounds like my kind of marketing.

When we last left off with Part 1, we’d discussed two guaranteed ways to generate massive amounts of exposure by reaching out to media sites.

Today we’re going to continue with two more ways to grow your business through a well-defined and thoroughly planned-out PR Hit List.

Attraction On Demand

Again, we’ll be digging into how to actually manufacture this elusive “attraction” quality in your marketing. But for today the angle is different. The tactics you’re going to learn are a bit subtler.

If media sites and interviews are the front-end “hustle” to putting together your PR Hit List, then the two we’ll cover today (email lists and social media) are the “classy” brass tacks. And they’ll require a bit more finesse …

But the results — can be nothing short of extraordinary. Let’s dive in.

Email Lists

Leveraging someone’s email list is perhaps one of the more profitable strategies for boosting your exposure through a PR Hit List. That’s because email addresses are personal — they are inbound, and most businesses that have acquired a substantial email list have built a relationship with the list that you cannot build through blogs or media sites.

It’s one thing to publish content for a media publisher, and quite another to have a list owner promote you and your company to its email subscribers.

However, securing arrangements like this do have a higher barrier of entry. In other words, it’s much easier to get content arrangements with media sites than to gain access to the oh-so-coveted email list of a successful business.

I can say from personal experience, that email promotions have accounted for a sizable share of my company’s growth from zero to multiple six-figures in under five months. Done correctly, you’ll experience terrific results.

Social Media

Publishers with large Twitter or Facebook followings can offer a great way to send clicks and traffic back to your site.

When they do respond to your initial correspondence, it’s very likely you can go back and forth a bit to work out a way for you to “test” the channel and make sure it’s profitable before spending big bucks.

Having someone post a couple of times for a month will show you how many leads, customers, opportunities, etc., this channel opens up. A perk with this channel is it can be very consistent if you find one that works well.

Another option is to “trade” social media promotions. Using webinars or whitepaper opt-ins on social media can often be a professional yet effective way of driving leads.

The beauty of these PR “buckets” is that they all can work and flow together very seamlessly. For instance, if you finish up an interview and have a relationship with a social media channel, not only can you leverage the list and social media of the interview host, but now you can also “trade” a social media promotion, sending a couple of tweets or notes to his followers about the interview.

How To Build & Execute Your “Million-Dollar” PR Hit List

Let’s get down to some practical tips as we wrap up …

Creating a PR Hit List is less about planning, and more about executing. The setup of your own PR Hit List is very simple — simply create an Excel document, such as the one below, and fill in the details. And remember to execute!

An important point to note is that you do not need a giant list of hundreds of outlets to get started with something like this. I started very small, only reaching out to a handful of media outlets. And I didn’t have much experience or “clout” back when I first started doing this. So what I did was leverage all of these four together and played them into each other.

For instance, there was a site I really wanted to be featured on, but I knew I didn’t have the following to make it worth the site owner’s while to pay attention to me. So what I did was simple: I interviewed an expert, someone I knew would be a great addition to the site I wanted to get featured on. Then I reached out to the site owner and told him I had an interview with an expert (which related to the topic of the site, by the way), and offered to share it with his audience.

Now, this interview would make the site owner look good. So it was a no-brainer. I leveraged an interview with a media site and then followed up by asking him to share it with his social media following — three of the four main types of PR, all in one relationship, because I got resourceful.

That’s the key with this strategy: Get resourceful. Use all four pillars of this PR Hit List, and weave them into one another. Oftentimes you can get into almost any magazine, media site, social media, or email list if you just sit down and think hard enough about this: “How can I make this a WIN for this person?” That’s the key.

Closing

By following the techniques in this article, it is finally possible to enjoy the same results you’d expect to from hiring a private PR firm. AmEx Open Forum has a useful article about how to go about hiring a PR firm if you end up going that route — but the methods we’ve covered in this series should suffice some of your basic PR needs without the heavy expense; most of them range from $3,000 to $7,000 a month.

Expanding your marketing real estate online is perhaps the fastest way to produce massive increase to your business’ bottom line. Just one hour per week, consistently executing your PR Hit List will get your company in front of more people, more often, and generate more interest and leads on a consistent basis.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Daniel Faggella

Daniel Faggella is an email marketing and marketing automation expert with an obsession for customer lifetime value. He runs CLVboost, a boutique email marketing consultancy in Cambridge, MA, and regularly speaks on email marketing strategy. His clients range from venture backed startup companies to eCommerce businesses to established brick-and-mortar businesses.

(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)