Getting press for your company is really time consuming, expensive and can prove to be a difficult process. Maybe you’ve tried shotgunning out press releases to 200 journalists and not gotten a single reply.Or maybe you’ve tried hiring a PR firm for a few grand per month, only to see minimal coverage.Or maybe you tried to do it all yourself and spent hours and hours researching, browsing HARO and emailing reporters.Either way, it’s not a fun process.But what if I told you there was a different way.
- A way that wouldn’t involve mindlessly sending out press releases that are quickly ignored.
- A way that would be cheaper than a PR firm.
- And a way that can be almost completely automated.
Today, we’re going to go over how you can get press, with Facebook ads.
How to Get More Press with Facebook Ads
Now, everyone knows that Facebook ads can be a great way to attract more leads and customers. But almost nobody is using them to get the attention of reporters – which can be as valuable or more valuable than acquiring a customer if they story is widely read.
Here’s what you do.
One of the beautiful things about Facebook ads is that you can target people by their employer. I use that to target my dream clients for my agency.
So if we want to attract journalists, we just need to make a list of all of the publications that fit our industry and paste them into the ‘Employer’ field in our Facebook ad targeting.
We could target this even further by only targeting people with the Job Titles:
- Reporter
- Journalist
- Writer
- Freelance Writer
- Editor
- etc..
But that will really narrow down your targeting so you’ll need to have a much bigger list of publications in order to get your audience size to the level where your ads will actually run. If you make an ad group only targeting 100 people, Facebook will barely run it, if at all. So in this case, the more the merrier.
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Resource for identifying publications
List of Magazines by Circulation: This wikipedia page has a list of magazines ranked by their total subscriber base. If you have a more mass market product/service this could be a good one to look at.
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The Two Approaches to Advertising to Journalists
Subtle approach: The subtle approach involves you simply creating an ad that links to another piece of press you’ve received. So if you’re a software company that recently raised money, you could create an ad with that to other reporters. The hope here is that they will see the story, their interest will be piqued and they will be interested in doing a story on you. No hard sell or begging for a story which both reporters and businesses hate.
Direct approach: The direct approach is making it clear in your ad that you think you have a great story that their audience would love, and link to a page on your site that explains more. You can link to your press page or create a dedicated landing page which would explain more about what your story is, how your company fits into it and why now is a good time to run it. You could also include links to other articles you’ve been featured in.
If you can’t decide which one to use, test both by creating an ad for both approaches and run them both at the same time. Then measure their traction, and run with whatever is more effective moving forward.
How many journalists can I reach?
With Facebook ads costing around $1 or less, you could reach over 500 reporters for less than $500. Getting the attention of that many targeted reporters, you should be able to land at least a handful of pieces which could lead to a lot more recognition for your company and customer sign ups.
Give it a try today or email me if you need help getting set up.
