This article was originally published on Forbes.com on March 29, 2024
RACHEL KULE, PURSUIT PR
Forbes Councils Member
When companies seek our communications advisory, there are a range of objectives that need to be met. Traditionally, companies value public relations as a way to expand, reaffirm and elevate their market presence. In some cases, a company may need to overcome incumbency bias to compete with brand names. In others, an established firm needs to reinforce its brand’s reputation or accelerate its growth goals.
While the needs vary, thought leadership content and earned media coverage are catalysts to achieving these objectives. To understand how this is possible, it’s best to start by defining thought leadership and earned media.
Thought leadership captures and elevates the insights and expertise of company leaders to a broader audience. It creates context and relevance that ultimately shapes and breathes life into media and marketing strategies.
Earned media is organic. It’s unpaid media where your views are endorsed, elevated and distributed by media outlets through interviews, published quotes and appearances.
Executive thought leadership creates lasting eminence through prestigious media coverage for both the C-suite, who also function as Chief Reputation Officers, and the company as a whole. This positions the executive as a thoughtful expert with insights that spark and shape dialogue at the highest levels of public discourse.
Given its inherent value, earned media coverage becomes the new asset executives need to advance their corporate reputation.
Media coverage is a significant win for any company.
It declares to the market:
We are legitimate.
We are here to stay.
We are relevant today.
We are operating at the highest levels.
We are not complacent—we are industry leaders.
Through proactive communication, executives can advance the perception of their firm and their services and broader business objectives. As I have written about before, communications must be a constant to earn crediblity in the market. Just like long-term strategic investors hold their positions instead of fleeing the market, companies need to stay the course with communications as a constant.
Rainmakers, top salespeople, are central to an effective approach, as I’ve written about here. With an executive spokesperson at the center, a company creates a meaningful thought leadership program that plays a significant role in driving a positive corporate reputation.
Overall, media exposure:
Expand brand awareness. Media exposure extends a company’s reach to clients, prospects, investors, and employees. The more the brand is visible in the market, the more the brand gains recognition.
Bolsters credibility. The organic nature of earned media inherently increases the credibility to an executive and their company. An executive with a voice in prominent media, which influences public perception, is considered to be credible.
Enables increased engagement opportunities with customers and prospects. Insights spark dialogue and coverage generates recognition. Media coverage promoting such insights:
Creates an informal opportunity to interact with a key stakeholder, building rapport.
Elevates your perspective, reinforcing your expertise as an industry leader.
Promotes a great reputation of the company’s credibility as a valued partner.
Produces a halo effect. “You are the company you keep” applies here. You may be quoted in the same article as other prestigious firms. Sharing the headlines with other luminaries will raise the firm’s eminence.
Promotes a positive culture. Talent wants to work at a company on the rise that has a solid reputation. An existing client can get a morale boost with media coverage as a reminder of the opportunities ahead and why they hired your services.
Compared to traditional advertising and performance marketing, media coverage earned through public relations is entirely organic. No pay-for coverage or clicks here. The organic nature of the coverage is advantageous when it comes to visibility in search rankings like Google, which favors authentic, unpaid content. Top-tier media, in particular, has an average domain authority of 90 or higher. This high score is an indicator of the prime visibility of top-tier media across major search engines such as Google. With organic content, businesses are primed to attract more traffic to their websites.
Overall, organic media exposure is a representation of the successful strategy employed by the PR team to earn—keyword, earn—the trust, interest and respect of major media outlets. Topical relevance, differentiation of insights, and source credibility are among the factors that come into play. A strategic PR firm will tell the right story, at the right time—and media coverage will be a measurable byproduct of such work.
Earned media also fuels the entire communications ecosystem. This includes opportunities to maximize the value of earned media through paid, shared and owned media.
Media exposure is just the beginning. There is always an upside to explore when media is effectively leveraged to fuel sales and marketing. We’ll cover that more in our next post.