There is no silver bullet to increase sales. However, an integrated marketing and PR strategy can be one key to unlocking sales. Below are four tips for boosting lead generation and accelerating sales through PR and media relations.
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- Strategic media placements can help not only with general awareness for your company, product or service, but also with lead generation. Coverage in the precise publications that your target audiences read and with finely tuned messages about your value proposition, customers’ successes and differentiators can drive traffic back to your site and generate leads for your sales team to nurture.
- What happens to people who read your coverage and are interested in your product or services? Where do they go next? Most likely, it’s to your website to learn more. Make sure you make it easy for referrals to become leads – not only by making sure you have the right content on your site to help prospects along the funnel, but also by making sure you have a way to capture leads. This means, at some point, you need a way to get their information. While a generic “contact us” form might work, it’s less effective than gating premium content that people are willing to trade their email address to access. And once you have that information, you can nurture prospects and move them closer to a sale.
- Press coverage, along with mentions in industry analyst reports and product reviews, can offer third-party validation for your product and service, which can go a long way in nurturing your prospects and hopefully converting them. But first, you need to arm your sales team with this tool – make sure they know what collateral is available for them to reference with prospects. And make sure your press mentions are visible on your site for all visitors – whether prospects, media or otherwise.
- Measure your activities and their results with tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Marketo, Bizible and many more. These tools can help you uncover valuable insights into which media placement is driving the most traffic to the site, which placements are generating leads, what site pages are capturing visitors’ attention and more. When you have this data, not only can you report back to your CEO how PR impacted sales, but you can act on these insights to continue your success.