Which came first, the content or the pitch?

This message is about some drama that doesn’t have to exist. It’s about the PR/Marketing version of the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

Many of the organizations I consult with have a “media team” and a “content team.” Even if they have different names, that’s how they break down. Or if the teams aren’t large enough to divide responsibilities that way, there’s still some pressure on communicators to serve both masters – “earned” and “owned.”

And they feel tension between those two paths. But there doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to sit across the conference-room and hash out compromises about who gets to “go out first” or whose story is whose.

In my most recent training for members of my Inner Circle program, we welcomed Drew Davis, who was named the “2^nd-most Influential Content Marketer in the World.” (It makes him try harder 🙂 To summarize his main point: You don’t have to fight over who gets your content first.

There are actually ways to make your story ideas MORE appealing to media by releasing directly to your own audiences first. How powerful is it when you’re approaching an editor who lives and dies by page views to say, “This piece has performed really well for us – it’s only been up for a week and already it’s our most-viewed blog post ever.”

Or what if you’ve tested different tweets or Facebook posts and found the phrasing that gets the most engagement? Wouldn’t that empower an editor or producer to go into an editorial meeting with data to support their contention that your story should get featured that day?

Of course, in other cases, you might see a benefit from the traditional path of reserving first rights for your third-party news media. That’s okay. Then you share their resulting stories with your audiences and drive more traffic to them. Everybody wins.

Drew shared with us the framework he calls the Marketing Momentum Curve. It’s a specific pattern and sequence to know what channel to deliver your story through, in what order, and for how long before you move on to the next channel.

Strategies like this are core to our emphasis in the Inner Circle this year, which is integrating our earned media expertise with the powerful strategies found in the owned, shared and paid realms of marketing.

You can watch Drew outline the Marketing Momentum Curve, plus see all of the other trainings we’ve done this year, if you join the Inner Circle the next time we open up enrollment. The best way to determine if that’s the right choice for you is to get on our wait list for notifications. That qualifies you for the $250 bonus I’m going to throw in for our early birds. Join that list simply by clicking here.