When you create a great piece of PR content and place it with press, you shouldn’t just stop there. To make the most of your marketing dollar (pound, euro or more!) you need to optimise and amplify your earned coverage following the PESO model – paid, earned, shared and owned. One of the easiest ways to amplify coverage is using your paid media – the channels that require cash to extend your influence beyond your owned and shared networks.

Whether you’ve amplified content already with owned and shared methods, it’s always worth considering paid options. For example, if you’ve posted a piece of content on LinkedIn to your company page, the author has posted it too and it’s been shared by employees and in groups, it may also be worth doing some additional paid social media spend.

So on LinkedIn, you could put paid spend behind the company post about a byline. LinkedIn allows you to set up sponsored content for existing posts (or you can make a brand new one) and target a specific group of people, perhaps marketing managers and marketing directors at retail companies. You can cap the amount of money by day and by campaign to limit your spending. Once done, execute your campaign and watch the clicks, shares and likes on your post roll in. Make sure you use a trackable link to measure impact on the website and see what people do once they land there.

When you have a chunky piece of content like a whitepaper or a research study, it may be worth investing some money into paid search advertising against certain keywords relevant to that piece of content. Google AdWords has a tool called Keyword Planner, which can be used to see which keywords have a high search volume (over last 12 months), the suggested cost-per-click price and how competitive they are, i.e. are other people bidding on those terms. Once you have your keywords planned and your budget set, you can start placing display adverts in search results that generate traffic to the landing page for your content.

Another paid option is content discovery platforms, like Outbrain, which places content at the bottom of media sites to direct readers to articles they may also be interested in reading. Companies like Madison Logic can also help to generate leads through a publisher network. This is particularly valuable for any high-quality content, such as a whitepaper. By working with publishers, Madison Logic tracks the behaviour and content consumption of users. The technology collects ‘intent’ data from the past 90 days, which enables the identification of the right targets.

Over the past four weeks, Firefly has been detailing how brands can use the PESO model – paid, earned, shared and owned – to amplify content and coverage. Sometimes companies will spend lots of time on content creation, but don’t invest enough time into content distribution. This just gives you a ‘create once, use once’ scenario, when it should really be ‘create once, use many times’. But by following this

Tune in next week to download our full report that’ll have all our tips in one place, so you can use PESO tactics to ensure PR doesn’t stop after earned, and you can your results further to provide measurable ROI on your PR spend.

Shared media can act as a powerful amplifier of PR content and coverage beyond a simple media relations campaign.

It makes sense – brands need to look to make the most of every piece of content, improving ‘bang for buck’. For example, if you have a byline attributed to a member of staff, that can be posted to their personal LinkedIn account via the publishing tool. When doing this, just make sure you include a trackable web link back to your website and a note that this has appeared before ‘Originally published in XYZ’. It’s also advisable to wait a little bit before republishing content to LinkedIn that has already appeared in a publication, perhaps even with a change to the top and tail of the piece. To push this piece out further, ask the author to target and share the piece in relevant industry groups on LinkedIn, but no more than two or three to avoid spamming people.

When it comes to sharing media, the best tool at your disposal is your workforce. One easy way to encourage sharing among your workforce is to create a newsletter with shareable content that can be pushed out to their personal social media accounts, with pre-written tweets and updates. Another good tactic is to provide employees with social media influence with some training. For example, you could train your sales team to use LinkedIn to post content and take part in conversations in their feed and in groups.

It’s also important to have visual content available for sharing, which will improve impression and clicks on social media. Something simple like a photograph works, or even an infographic. Whilst they may have lost their media clout, infographics still hold a very important role on social media, and having one that can be cut into bitesize chunks can create good content for your channels to influence sharing.

Two final things to consider when sharing content – if you have a presentation or content that is suitable for Slideshare, you can get extra eyeballs on the content and get some good Google juice (Slideshare has a high domain authority). Another option is video, like a talking heads interview-style piece to discuss research, whitepaper and opinions on YouTube or Vimeo.

Over the coming weeks, Firefly will be sharing tactics on how to use owned, shared and paid options to help take your earned media and PR content further. Tune in next week to learn about how to amplify coverage and content using paid channels.