I’m usually pretty good at including links in my blog posts (as I advise any of my clients to do) but surprisingly, I can’t find much about a topic that has been very near and dear to me recently – advising businesses on how to effectively leverage their media coverage and other news to their targeted audiences.

Myself included, I believe that PR professionals should take a hard look at how we are conducting business. Too often the end result of our efforts are in the form of a “clip report” listing out all of the media hits we’ve received for the month or targeted campaign. Although media coverage is an essential part of what we do, it is only the beginning to an end.

As a result I’ve come up with “5 Steps to Effectively Leverage Your Media Coverage”:

1 – Gain Organizational Buy-In - It is so important that the most influential departments of an organization (not just marketing and sales) understand the value of passing along successful media coverage to their targeted audiences. These departments don’t need to create new ways to communicate with their important audiences, they just need to understand the value in “merchandising” these stories to such audiences. By doing so your entire organization is hedging your PR spend bet by ensuring these audiences have seen the coverage…directly from you.

2 – Customize Your Distribution – Once you have buy-in from the most influential departments (i.e., sales, marketing, customer service, HR, IT, IR, etc.) you need to make sure the materials you are arming them with are customized for their specific needs. For example, HR might prefer to send something out to the employees via an email while sales might prefer some speaking points about the coverage since they typically meet face-to-face or over the phone. In order to support the entire organization, you must customize your correspondence accordingly.

3 – Designate a Department Contact - It is one thing to arm a department with the right tools to effectively communicate with their respective targeted audiences, it is another thing to assume they know what to do with these tools and/or will use them at all. As a result, you must have a point of contact within each department who takes ownership of this communications strategy. Someone who can train, advise and measure how effective such outreach was within each department.

4 – Measure Your Impact - Building on point #3…you must develop the appropriate mix of measurements that are consistent with you management team’s expectations. Typically this is a blend of quantitative and qualitative measurements. Quantitative might be tracking how many people each member of your department reached out to with these tools – via email, phone, in-person, etc. Qualitative might be some anecdotal feedback you received from your targeted audience about the coverage.

5 – Report to Key Management – Once you’ve discovered the right mix of measurements for this program, you have to ensure that the executive teams are able to see how such a program is being implemented across your entire organization. In addition, they have to see how effective such outreach is for the overall goals of the organization. Seeing that you’re creating a minimal amount of work and leveraging existing means of communications…they’ll likely see the value of such a program.

I’m sure I’ve left out some of the important steps or details but I believe we as communications professionals need to remember that the validation we create with media coverage is only as good as the number of targeted audiences that see it. What am I missing? As always, thanks for reading and/or joining the conversation!