Monitoring press coverage and maintaining good relationships with reporters are critical aspects of marketing. They increase brand awareness, establish credibility, and generate positive publicity.
For example, a tech company launching a new product can gain wider exposure through a respected tech journalist's coverage. Articles by journalists are more trustworthy than paid advertising, enhancing a company's reputation.
In a crisis, strong reporter relationships ensure accurate reporting and quick response. Finally, companies can provide newsworthy stories to reporters for positive coverage.
HARO Newsletter
HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a platform that connects journalists with sources for their stories. Subscribing to their newsletter can help individuals or businesses gain media exposure and improve their brand visibility.
G2 has a great article on how HARO can be your breakthrough into the world of PR. The way it works is that you subscribe to a newsletter and receive three emails per day. They contain a lot of queries broken down into different topics.
Typically, there are around 100-150 queries per email, thus you are looking at 1000 queries per month.
HARO Query
As you can see from above, this is a typical HARO query. The journalist provides the deadline, the question, and the requirements. You can respond to the query with your pitch within the given timeline.
To respond effectively to a HARO (Help a Reporter Out) query:
Read it carefully and respond quickly.
Being concise and showcasing your expertise can help establish credibility and increase your chances of being selected as a source.
Provide your contact information and follow up politely if necessary.
These tips can improve your chances of gaining valuable media exposure for your expertise or business. And most importantly - if you can answer fast, your chances increase 10x. And that's what we are going to do here.
Press Monitoring Dashboard
We will use the HARO newsletter as a source to create the Press Monitoring Dashboard. It will allow us to:
automatically parse incoming emails into separate queries
extract keywords and detect topic
react automatically and send our pitch based on the conditions
build trends per category and see where we can apply our SEO strategy
We will use the following tools:
Bitskout - HARO template, custom topic categorization and keyword extraction
Make.com - to glue everything together
monday.com - visualize our dashboard
Video Instruction
Setting Up Make.com Scenario
Our scenario will look like this - it will be triggered by a new email from HARO and then will go over each query, providing parsing and analysis of those.
1. To start, let's add a Gmail Watch Email module. After you've added an account, you need to set up a filter. We will monitor emails from a specific address:
2. The next step is to split the email into separate queries. We will use Iterator for that and the Split function from Make.com
If you take a closer look at the email, each query is separate with a long line of dashes. Thus we will use it for our advantage.
Take the dashes line from here:
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3. Now, the output from Iterator is a query thus we need to set up the Bitskout Template for that.
This template will extract data from the HARO query and parse it for you:
4. Once you've created a plugin, we need to add it to our scenario:
The input text should be the VALUE from the Iterator (actual query text).
5. The next step is optional but very useful. Let's set up the custom topic categorization. To do that we'll create a new Bitskout plugin and categorize the query:
6. To tell A.I. what you want to do, you need to add examples. You can then query or requirements as a source of information and then add a label like below:
We recommend starting with 5-10 examples and then adding more depending on the results.
7. Once you are done with examples, press Finish and continue to the next screen to give a plugin a name.
8. Once the plugin is created, we can add it to our make scenario. To see the values of Query and Summary, right-click on the Bitskout module in make where we add the HARO plugin, and choose Run Manually Once. Then add to the field the sample query and run it:
As a source for analysis, we pass the field "Query" from the previous Bitskout module.
9. Next step is to add a Keywords plugin. This step is optional but highly recommended if you are after SEO.
10. Now, everything is done and we can write data to monday.com
Now, our scenario is ready for parsing. Run a couple of examples and check if the tasks are created correctly.
Typically, most of the errors come from the empty values, thus, have several runs to see if everything is working correctly.
Conclusion
What we tried to show you in this article is the capability of automations help you get an important edge over the competition and even the market. As you can see, these are not rocket science. It takes around 30-40 minutes to set up the above automation and it can forever change your marketing and brand trajectory.
Establishing relationships with journalists early on is a vital component of any company's marketing strategy. By building rapport with journalists, companies can tap into their expertise and industry knowledge, and gain valuable media coverage for their products or services. This can help increase their brand awareness and boost their credibility in the eyes of potential customers.
Journalists are always on the lookout for engaging stories and expert sources, and companies that cultivate relationships with them can be better positioned to provide these. Additionally, having a relationship with a journalist can provide a competitive edge over other companies that don't have such connections. It can also help companies stay ahead of industry trends and news, enabling them to stay relevant and competitive.
Therefore, establishing relationships with journalists early on can provide significant benefits for companies in terms of credibility, exposure, competitive advantage, and crisis management. It is an essential element of any comprehensive marketing strategy that should not be overlooked.