3 Ways to Leverage Your Media Coverage in the Sales Process

PR pros see it all the time. A company’s communications team secures an impressive piece of coverage highlighting their CEO, latest funding round, or new product. The team shares it with company leaders and calls it a success. And it is a success. Gaining any kind of visibility is hard work.

Too often, though, the trajectory of B2B technology media hits end here, as marketing and sales teams neglect the additional benefits of strategic media placements. This stunts B2B technology PR’s mission to build your company’s authority and ignores additional value that should not be overlooked in the sales process.

But there are a couple of ways you can keep your B2B technology PR wins working for you:

Give your coverage new life with a digital newsroom

Your earned media hits need a place to live long after they’ve faded from the front page. Fortunately, there are two ways for them to live on your website.

The first option for hosting media wins on your website is a newsroom. This is a dedicated section of your website that hosts all earned media coverage, major company announcements, and press releases. While newsrooms add credibility when leads are looking to understand your brand during their initial research phase, they’re also key in drawing the right people to your website through digital marketing. Earned media offers the type of varied content that helps digital ads and social media strategies showcase your brand’s authority.

The second, simpler option is to integrate news posts into your existing blog. This relies on the same principles as the newsroom to demonstrate your company’s authority but requires less development on your website.

These options allow your sales team to not only showcase important news articles to potential customers, leads and investors, but also to drive them to your website.

Expand your coverage’s  reach with digital advertising

The next step to using your media wins in the sales process is to leverage the new content pieces in your newsroom with digital and social media ads. This helps reinforce your sales pitch at all stages of the sales funnel.

Initially, this helps lay the framework for your sales team to reach out to new customers with little or no awareness of your brand or product.

As leads move further through your sales pipeline, demonstrating and reinforcing your brand authority in multiple ways is key. Retargeting ads that highlight this authority contribute to the overall efforts to convince your leads.

Ultimately, this will expand the original reach of the article and contribute to an overall lift in awareness of your brand, a key component in boosting sales.

Get your coverage in front of the right audience with email

Once you have a solid newsroom and are taking advantage of digital marketing, your sales team will also be equipped to take your earned media coverage even further with email.

As your sales team looks for ways to cut through your competitor’s noise, earned media coverage is more credible than promotional materials. Bylined articles promote your company’s unique brand of thought leadership, and hard news adds legitimacy to funding or product announcements. Your sales team should nurture leads with these types of coverage in three ways.

First, your sales team should take advantage of the opportunities these media hits provide to connect with contacts in your pipeline. Email marketing that highlights your most notable placement goes a long way to keep your company competitive and top of mind while customers consider your company.

Have any dream companies you’d like to capture in your sales cycle? The second way your sales team should be using media hits is through email outreach, targeting companies not yet in your pipeline. Earned media hits are excellent conversation starters with potential customers.

Bonus: Both of these outreach methods can be measured for impact in a marketing automation platform, like Hubspot.

And lastly, your media wins can be used for manual email outreach by your sales team to nurture leads during conversations that take place throughout the sales cycle. This should be second nature to your sales team and woven into how they communicate with your customers.

Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin and are at their best when used together. If your sales team isn’t using earned media to move your customers through each stage of the sales funnel, then you’re neglecting the full potential of your communications team’s efforts.