Discover how a one-off media exposure campaign will get you leads

By Adam James

Do you want to use a one-off media exposure campaign to tell prospect customers about your new product or service, and generate new leads?

Want to get journalists on media read by your target decision-makers to write positive articles and features about your product or service?

One tried-and-tested two-pronged approach is to create powerful news stories together with authoritative expert-opinion pitching.

This is a tier-1 recommended strategy to secure eye-catching media coverage that will put your company in front of prospective customers, and generate new leads.

Here’s one example of how you can achieve this.

This example is related to health and social care – but the exact-same processes (with some modifications and tweaks) will secure as high-impact results in your industry.

EXAMPLE: Florence app is a new disruptive technology enabling nursing home providers to bypass traditional recruitment agencies and use the app to recruit temporary nurses directly.

The app saves homes up to 20% on traditional recruitment agency fees.

Florence was keen to use tier-1 media read by its industry  (in its case the care sector) to reach care and nursing home owners and senior managers i.e. decision makers – in order to help “get the word out there” directly to target prospect customers, generate new leads and sales.

In order to secure a wave of initial media coverage via a news story, it’s vital that you have a hard-hitting headline to grab your target journalists’ attention.

For Florence, the headline that was pitched was: “New app ‘revolutionising’ how care homes recruit temporary nurses

The full story included highlighting how the app was an answer to the pain point of the homes’ perennial struggle to recruit and retain nurses.

By addressing such pain points for the sector  – the story became markedly more than a straight product launch.

The story that was pitched also included feedback from care home uses of the app, so providing third-party testimonial and industry-relevant ‘case study’ for the app.

Next, it’s essential to commission an ‘editorial’ photographer to capture an eye-catching series of editorial images (big tip – hire an editorial photographer used to working with the media, rather than ‘corporate’ or ‘portrait’ photographers)

The second element to the campaign revolved around pitching for the Florence app founder, Charles Armitage, to write expert-opinion pieces to the target industry media, and so cement him as a leader in the industry and someone who understood the sector and its particular challenges.

For successful expert-opinion pitching it’s vital to (i) ensure that you are pitching an ‘angle’ that’s contemporary, and (ii) that the target media has not previously covered the angle you want to pitch.

So after doing our homework (no way you can avoid this, sorry!) we pitched the founder to write expert-opinion pieces on:

(i) How technology can empower temporary nursing home staff  – and improve care
(ii) How disruptive technology like mine is innovating nursing care practice

These below are the results for Florence.

By following the above process, these are the kind of results you should aim for:

• The news story secured coverage in six key print industry media and two web-based titles, driving in a new wave of sales leads
• The app’s founder started to position himself as a thought leader via two expert-opinion piece article in leading industry media

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