How a legal regulation change can be used to trigger media coverage for your company.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak pr. My name is Jim James and this is the podcast for anybody that's got value locked up in their organization and they're just looking for ways to share that in simple and cost effective ways. Today I'm going to talk about how we got our client covered in an American trade magazine. Now, this is a big win for a client because getting published, especially with a long form article of about 1500 words, it's not an easy thing to do and it gives them the opportunity to use that article across many applications, not least of which is in their sales inquiry letters. So I wanted to share with you the way that I managed to get this client, a multinational manufacturing company, into a mainstream tier one publication in America, even though we are based here in the uk. So this is because it just shows you that anybody can do this with the right tool set and the right mindset. So this is how I did it. First of all, then we have the client wants to get into another market because they would like to start to get clients from this other market for their facilities in Asia. So first of all, what I did was I looked at the key media that they're interested in just by doing a simple keyword search in manufacturing and in medical. And I shortlisted 10 publications and I looked at those publications on a couple of different criteria. One was the kind of editorial that they currently have, what kind of articles they're writing to make sure it's in alignment with what my client actually wants to have shared. And then I looked also at the quality of the editorial. So I looked at how many contributed articles they already have, whether they have an editorial board, whether they have an independent editor or not, whether it's just a blog. And this particular publication belongs to the BNP Group, which is a well established trade media group in America. So I did my sanity checks, if you like, first. And then what we did was we used a similar web and similar web will show us the page rankings and the and the visitors to each URL. SimilarWeb is like the Lexa.com where you can start to look at the credibility and the rankings of these different websites. In this particular case, SimilarWeb gave us a visitorship on this website of some 80,000 visitors per month, which for a trade publication in plastics and manufacturing and assembly, I think is a, you know, is a good number. So I went through each of the different websites and some look great but have got almost no traffic, some have got great traffic but don't look so great. So obviously different publications and different publishers are driving their page views in different ways. And what we want to do is look for credibility in the media outlet. We cut this then down to just four media that were in our target market that met all of our requirements. And then I wrote a pitch. And the pitch that we wrote was to do with a new piece of legislation in America around the Affordable Care act. And also then to do with the requirements for manufacturers in the medical industry to disclose whether or not they're going to have a shortage of supply. Now this was due to some issues where some manufacturers were caught short when Covid struck and the supply chain got pinched. And some manufacturers were not able to supply the hospitals. And as a result there were shortages. And as a result there were issues for people with insurance claims, for example. But most of all, patients were not getting all the supplies that they needed. So there's a piece of legislation in America that I identified through just some online research, because what I did was I put into the, into the search term supply chain struggles with COVID And I looked at supply chain, supply chain delivery, medical device supplies and so on, because I was doing that to find something topical, but also I was looking for the hook. Now the hook in this particular case is this piece of legal legislation. And so if you're looking to create a pitch for your business, then then remember that this doesn't exist in a vacuum. This isn't about our client, this is about the market. So this is the context that we needed to create for a journalist to find a foreign, non US manufacturer to be of interest. Because in America right now there's a lot of talk about domestic manufacture, made in America, for example. And here we were trying to get a manufacturer that's a European based manufacturer, but with offices in Asia, factories in Southeast Asia and China, into the media in America and to offer their services as part of a global supply chain solution. So I did that by finding the hook. And that is this piece of legislation in America that says that pharmaceutical and medical companies must disclose if they are going to be short and be unable to meet their supply chain requirements. And if they are, then actually they can be fined for doing so. So this became the hook. So as you're looking to get your article or your piece or your interview into any publication, local, national, international, business or consumer, there needs to be a hook of some kind. So look for that and find that. So the next thing then we did was to write a pitch. And the pitch that I wrote had a little bit of, a bit of humor in it as well. Now, my headline was how medical device manufacturers can have their Covid cake and eat it too. Now, it was a little bit cheeky, of course, but the idea was to have a pitch that went to something a little bit different to the standard. Would you like to interview my client? So I wrote this pitch and it was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 paragraphs long, so it was possibly a little bit long. But what I endeavoured to do was to give the journalist enough of a story and background for them to take up the idea of the interview or the featured story. So in the first paragraph I wrote that I'm reaching out on behalf of my client and we think this is an interesting topic that we'd like to share with you. And it's how medical device manufacturers can have their Covid cake and eat it too, and how American companies can talk with our client to avoid falling foul of Section 506J of the CARES Act. So in that first paragraph I've given my purpose and the hook in order to get the media to take notice. Then my next paragraph was talking about the need of American device companies, medical device companies, to overcome the issue of the supply chain, really as a function of President Trump's actions against China. And then I put in the third paragraph that the United States is the largest medical device market in the world with $156 billion worth of turnover expected to grow by 2023 to 208 billion dol. And then mentioning that COVID 19 has created shortages domestically and also for manufacturers which export globally. And then in the fourth paragraph, I said that the World Health Organization Director General Tedros Gebra Braces said the world is facing severe disruption in the market for personal protective equipment. So this is my justification as far as the market is concerned for why there is an issue to be discussed in the media. And then I talk about the U.S. fDA CARES act and Section 3121, which amends the Federal Drug and Cosmetics Act. Then the pitch is, I've given you a story, I've shown you the industry issue. I've given you third party validation. Why don't you let my client talk to you about getting something that you might be interested in for your readers? Now, of the four that I wrote to, two wrote back, so 50%. One of them then said, actually, this is interesting, but I'm not quite interested in that angle. But I've looked at your website, your client's website, and I am interested in some of the 3D mold printing technologies, because this client can actually do 3D printing in 72 hours. So the journalist was interested enough to take the time to then look at our client's website and come back to us with some, some questions. What I then did was to feed these questions back to our client who then sent them to the technical director to, to write something. Because this level of detail is well beyond what I can answer in terms of manufacturing capabilities and so on. So we, we got back from the technical writer or the head of manufacturing and engineering a piece and at the beginning it had too much of the client's name and too much about we. So we had to go back and say actually this is going to be an article, not a brochure. So it needs to be written as a piece of, if you like, authoritative writing as a third party, as if the journalist was writing it themselves. I then asked them for some images and some graphics which they, they didn't really have readily available. They had one of their Hero 3D printing studio, but in talking to one of the salespeople they had some 3D animated images in a PowerPoint presentation. And I was able to extract those by saving it to a zip file and that separates out the images from the PowerPoint. Otherwise no one had the original source file. So by using a little trick I found on the Internet, I was able to extract these little 3 second MP4 files and I then sent the article, plus the photograph of our spokesperson, plus these little animated videos and the stills of those across to the, to the publication. Four days later. The editor hasn't written back, so I wrote to him saying I have sent you this material. Hope you've got it. Is there anything else you can you need from me? I also wrote him on LinkedIn to say I've sent this just to check your email because sometimes the email goes into spam and two days later the article appears and it's a long 1500 word article. Now it doesn't end there. So what's happened is that the client and we have then reposted that article as it appears. But as this online publisher has got gated subscription access to their content, it can't be seen by all and sundry without them subscribing. And not everybody wants to now become a subscriber. So what I did was I did a PDF print of that article in its entirety and shared that with the client. The client is then putting it on their website as media coverage, linking it back to this original website. Of course, because we're not in the business of stealing content just of repurposing and sharing it. And then this will be shared to the staff, but also to the partners. And it's becoming then part of what the LinkedIn content that we're sharing for this team online because we manage their LinkedIn. So from one small idea, we're able now to have a piece of validated content that's being seen on a website with over 80,000 visitors per month. We've been able to take that content and we're able to repurpose it fully branded and use it as part of the sales material inside of the publicity material that appears on the client's website and social media channels. The value of this, if we were to be paying for this kind of advertising exposure, 3, 4, 5, US$6,000 would be the price if you were to buy this much space in this publication. But if you were to buy the space, it would have the word advert on it. It would be known to be a placement. But as public relations, it has the editorial connection with the editor because it's positioned as a Q and A with this company and the editor of the publication. The obvious implication being that they've removed any of the obvious sales pitches and done some credibility check. The other publication that I've mentioned has said that they also like the content, but they've got a slightly different article because each article will need to be personalized for each editor who of course will be writing to different audiences. The other publication is in the medical device industry, so a little bit more niche, a little bit more focused on the devices themselves, where the other one is about manufacturing, the industry of manufacturing. So we've got more detail about how the device works and the role it plays within the COVID testing program, because that's more what their audience are interested in. So in our Speak PR program we talk about Storify, personalization, engagement, amplification and to know this is a case study from end to end of the storification, building out this narrative around these new federal Care act and amendments. The personalization which is reaching out to these individual editors, sending yes, one pitch, but then taking back from each of them what they would like personally engaging with content that's relevant for their particular audiences, that's authoritative, that's comprehensive and that's complemented with graphics, amplifying it by taking what they've written and sharing that across social media channels and the client's dedicated website. And then to know which is to check the metrics, knowing that through similar web they get 80,000 views on their website. But also our client now is already getting pickup through the LinkedIn reposting that other people want to get this article. So end to end a little bit of a mini case study and when the second piece comes out we'll then have our second article. So to get a 50% strike rate is pretty reasonable. New tools are helping people in PR to have personalization at scale. There are some tools that I'm looking at including Unless for example and Evergage and Nosto, which are enabling us to start to have web content which is customized according to the context and the profile of the visitor. So there are some ways that software is helping for self segmentation so that we can create contextualization. So not just personalization but contextualization of content on our website, but also in the pitches that we write for the media. Now currently we do contextualization for the media through our own knowledge and our own expertise as PR people, but that will over time become augmented by the technology. And already I've mentioned some websites like Prowly that already have the information about what the media are looking for and what else they're writing about. This is also the case with the Haro reports from Scission, for example, or on Telum. So currently we're looking at that manually, but AI is picking up very quickly to match what journalists are looking for, what they've already written about. But what they won't do is create the hook. The AI won't do the work that I've done in finding for example this care act and stitching together the different elements of the market context, the client offer and the outreach. So there will still be a role for all of us and a challenge, but also the thrill of getting coverage into a mainstream publication and making something happen from nothing and ultimately helping our clients or your company to generate more magnets for sales inquiries. So thank you for listening to this episode of SpeakPR. This is really a case study in getting covered about something that's interesting to you. I hope you found it useful. You can find more about this and others@eastwestpr.com or take part in our SpeakPR Co hosted masterminds. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much for listening. I wish you the best of health and a profitable business and if you are looking at the elections, pray that they're all safe and due process of democracy.