Want to get your company featured in major publications? How would you like to drive lots of traffic to your website and generate more leads and sales from your target audience? Finding interesting facts, statistics, and trends and then sharing them can produce dramatic results when it comes to your content marketing and SEO efforts. You can gather this information with relatively simple research, and then engage in outreach to major publications to get media attention as well as high quality backlinks to your website.
Why Links From High Profile Publications Are Important
Many factors determine your rankings in search engines. This infographic from SearchMetrics, an enterprise platform for search experience optimization, shows various Google ranking factors.
As Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land points out in his analysis of this infographic, “The quantity and especially the quality of backlinks remains important.” Getting high quality links tells Google and other search engines two things; 1) your website is worth linking to, and 2) what you are saying is likely to be factually accurate (having your facts right is another ranking factor that may become critical). Simply put, trustworthy links validate your website in Google’s eyes. The only question is how do you get more links from trustworthy sites?
Give Writers Interesting Data
If you want to get trustworthy links from high profile publications, give journalists and writers what they want. What do they want? They want their articles to get read, shared, and go viral. One of the things that can make an article go viral is interesting data. Data makes a story credible. Interesting data makes a story credible and shareable.
Giving a writer interesting data is easier said than done. Some journalists receive up to 50 story pitches per day. When your pitch starts out with “I’ve got an interesting story…” then your pitch is already done. Most writers won’t read any further, because everyone thinks they have material for an interesting story. If you want to get through to writers, understand that the story is not about you. Put yourself and your company aside and share something bigger that matters to more people.
Interesting Data Comes From Research
Instead of pitching your “interesting story,” imagine you started your pitch with “Our recent study shows that…” or “We compiled data from 10 sources to produce this infographic…” Now you’ve got something interesting that sets your pitch apart from the others. You’re giving the writer something of real value.
In the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, authors Chip and Dan Heath note six principles to make stories interesting and powerful:
- Simplicity
- Unexpectedness
- Concreteness
- Credibility
- Emotions
- Stories
Data gives an article credibility and concreteness. If the data is relevant and actionable, then it will also be interesting. You can increase how interesting it is through simplicity, unexpectedness, emotions, and stories.
Putting It All Together
The running show review website RunRepeat.com helps runners find out what shoes they should buy. If you are a trail runner like me, it can be a challenge to find the running shoe that fits your needs the best. RunRepeat.com aggregates reviews of running shoes to give a more accurate and comprehensive overview of what running shoes are well rated by other runners. RunRepeat.com produced a study that was published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and 50+ other newspapers and top-tier magazines and newspapers. That’s a lot of high quality backlinks. How did they do it?
RunRepeat.com performed research to create two stories. First was the classic men versus women, in which they asked “Are women better marathon runners than men?” The results of their study gained the attention of over 30 newspapers and magazines including the Washington Post and The Guardian. Secondly they created a comparison of marathon performance across nations, which resulted in this Wall Street Journal article. These stories touch on key emotional centers, making the data interesting.
How did RunRepeat.com get their content in the hands of the right people to publish it? “First, I found the world’s 500 largest newspapers,” says Jens Andersen, RunRepeat.com’s founder. He explains how he found the most relevant journalist to pitch at each publication, meaning one who had written about research or studies related to running and marathons. From there he was able to find 72 journalists with a direct email that was publicly available. He sent a personal pitch to each one and agreed on an embargo, or a date and time before which the study could not be released. This way more top-tier newspapers are willing to publish the content because nobody likes to publish someone else’s old news. After the study was published Andersen pushed more standardized pitches to the rest of the list. The success rate there was surprisingly a lot bigger than on the extremely personalized pitches. The best part? “Now I have proved the quality of our work and built a relationship,” Andersen says. This will make his future pitches that much easier because writers and journalists know he’s bringing them valuable information.
Did it work? It can be difficult to sort out the results of this campaign from other marketing initiatives, but Andersen says since RunRepeat.com published their first study in December, their monthly traffic has increased 1,267%. You be the judge.
How To Perform Great Research
Good research, or at least good enough to produce good results, can sometimes be done in a matter of a few hours by compiling information or data from other sources. Putting this data into an interesting infographic or white paper can often generate large amounts of backlinks and traffic. Great research, the kind that gets into major publications, often requires more of a time commitment. Journalists will ask in-depth questions on how you compiled your data, who did the study, what was the purpose, and how significant your numbers are. Be prepared to invest enough time.
Great research is going to require data gathering and some ability to perform statistical analysis. A platform like UpWork can connect you with affordable freelance researchers and statisticians who can help you sort through the numbers if that’s not your thing.
Great Data Is Not Enough
It’s not enough to simply have great data--you need to present it well. A lot of companies have gone by the wayside because they assumed that having the best product meant they would win. Instead, they were beaten by better marketing, and they’re no longer around. Great data doesn’t sell itself. To pitch your data put it on a professionally designed web page or in an attractive infographic. Craft a compelling, well-written story, which can just be a brief paragraph, to go with it. You can hire an agency to work with you on this, or use a company like Visual.ly that connects creative professionals with clients like you. By putting your data in an attractive wrapper, it can get attention for years to come. This infographic shows how RunRepeat.com did this with their second study.
Have you used research, studies, or data to boost your content marketing and SEO efforts? Tell us how in the comments below.
