A large portion of what we do as PR practitioners focuses on strategizing which target audiences our clients need to get in front of to sell a product or services, and then build a campaign and story ideas around it.

After our announcement news/thought leadership commentary/contributed article runs in strategic publications, it’s common for clients to sit back and simply hope the right people find it. After all of the work to land the opportunity, relying on the people who need to see it to come across it without actively and regularly putting it in front of them sounds pretty silly when you say it out loud.

We’re here to guide you through maximizing the third-party endorsement you’ve landed! Let’s take your stories further and make sure they’re getting in front of the right people is via Sponsored Content campaigns. Specifically, we’re talking about maximizing content created for media or other channels and utilizing social media ads to increase visibility and as a bonus, grow a client’s social media presence.

An Example to Follow

We did this for our client VivaLNK, a medical wearables and platform provider.

While VivaLNK’s media relations campaign kept them in the news, the Sponsored Content campaign kept the engagement and conversation going, growing company awareness among its target audience. Content for the campaign was pulled from two sources: press hits and LinkedIn articles from the CEO, positioning him as a thought leader on IoT, connected devices, telehealth and more. Topics for content were determined by job role and industry to reach prospects across various stages of the company’s sales cycle.

The LinkedIn Sponsored Content Campaign grew the company’s presence amongst key targets: medical device companies, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, and IT companies:

  • LinkedIn page impressions increased by more than 150 percent several months in a row
  • Clicks to strategic content and the website increased by 500 percent.
Where to Start

If you are leaving your media relations campaign to do all the heavy lifting around a great piece of content, you aren’t maximizing the opportunity. And if you haven’t considered a thought leadership strategy for your CEO or executives on LinkedIn, with its growing publishing capabilities, you’re missing opportunities to not only join the conversation but lead it. Not to mention, LinkedIn’s news team scours the platform for experts and news published by users.

Start by seeing if your target audiences are available on LinkedIn’s campaign builder tool. Then identify the press hits you’ve garnered that would be of interest to those targets that are available/appropriate. At a minimum, this will help you maintain or rebuild interest around your press coverage.

Where earned media is difficult to attribute to results, Sponsored Content campaigns allow you to track results, providing insight on what kind of messaging resonates with particular audiences.

If you’re simply letting your media coverage come out and sit on Google, hoping that a potential client or customer sees it, think about how you can take it a step further, and we’d also be happy to chat through it, too.