Press clipping: why you need one in your communication strategy?

Be it a marketing, branding, or promotional campaign that you’re running on behalf of your clients or for your own agency, the one thing that we all need is quantifiable results.

Once you have such justifiable and shareable results, it becomes easy for your PR and marketing team to showcase the efficacy and the outcome of the initiatives undertaken to the existing clients as well as to prospects.

Showcasing a press clipping helps to keep existing clients engaged while encouraging them to stay invested. It also helps in convincing potential clients to get onboarded.

What is a press clipping?

A press clipping or PR clipping is an effective way to demonstrate the credibility of any brand by taking reference of its mentions on:

Print media sources like newspapers and magazines
Online media sources like blogs, PR websites, and forums
Broadcast media like television

A PR clipping for any business can be a compilation of brand mentions from one or more media sources that can be stored systematically and chronologically to document its journey as a business.

Lucidly, press clipping is the overall number of times your brand has been mentioned in media including both offline and online ones.

A PR clipping also establishes the credibility and reputation of a brand since more mentions in the media mean increased reach and eventually more people talking about it.

We all love to have a paparazzi moment, don’t we?

How and why can this be useful for your brand?

Tracking brand sentiment

Monitoring brand mentions over several media will help you gauge the topic of discussion regarding your brand as well as the sentiment around it. If required, a press clipping could also help you take corrective measures if the sentiment around any aspect of your brand hits the red line!

Assessing your relationship with the media

Is your audience cursing your service or are they happy with it?

A PR clipping, synonymously termed as media clipping, can provide you with a glimpse of the relation your brand has been able to establish with the wider spectrum of audience.

Knowing the topics and angles people relate to your brand

With the help of a press clipping, you could spot the connection between your brand and the market. It is beneficial to know about your brand-related topics that strike conversation among your audience just like the keywords within a search engine report.

It also helps you interpret your audiences’ perspectives on those topics.

Supporting business decisions

Whenever you deploy a new business decision on your service or product, you would like to know its immediate impact on your brand. That’s where a PR clipping might come in handy for you to understand the market impact of your new changes.

In case something starts going down the hill, you would know when to fix it.

Case studies

Monitoring your PR clipping would also help you to collect records from media where the audience appreciates your good work.

Having a PR clipping of your brand-based case study is a good milestone on its own that you can actually brag about!

Staying on top of industry news

Every brand wants to stay in the middle of the buzz and in the headlines (for good reasons of course). Once you make it to that front page, a press clipping helps you capture that frame and validate your good work. It will also help your business to stay relevant to the audience that will reward you with brand recall.

How do I build a press clipping?

The fundamental steps in creating your press clipping would be as follow:

Firstly, you’ll have to identify the media sources: (offline and online both) where you foresee yourself or dream to be called out. That includes industrial sites related to your domain of business, local news sites, or any partnering and affiliates with whom you collaborate such as your country’s Chamber of Commerce.
Establish monitoring frequency: Every media can have its own frequency of posting content and you would need a constant monitoring process to find if your brand got mentioned. This might sound tricky to do constantly however, depending on the size of your brand you may want to check these sources monthly, weekly, or even daily.
Run a search for your brand: This is quite a simple approach. You can put yourself in the shoes of your customer and try searching for your brand-related keywords in the defined sources to locate your brand mentions. That could also give you the sites where you’re being mentioned and then proceed to collect those in your archive.
Analyze your results: Once you gather all the information from the above activities, you must sit, analyze, and derive critical information out of all. A press report may be a good tool for your decision-making.

How do I build a great press clipping?

Well, the above steps for creating a press clipping might not have sounded very easy, have they?

Needless to worry, as the following steps will guide you in the right direction to create a great press clipping.

Keeping a copy of the information

Ensure that you keep a record of mentions, maybe by saving screenshots of the page where you see your brand mentioned. Manual capture of screenshots from several media (especially the online ones) while revisiting and refreshing the sources continuously is purely criminal!

Stillio helps you automate the process of screenshotting those brand mentions across multiple online sources. Interestingly, you can also configure the frequency of screenshots and feed the tool with the sources which you would like to monitor. Stillio does that job for you automatically and generate archives to store those press clipping in a chronological and orderly fashion. You would then be using those screenshots as you need without even putting in manual effort in the process. Stillio could be the handy clipping service that you can actually trust.

Organization

In the process of creating a good PR clipping, do always try to keep conclusions and prints separate. Also, saving prints in chronological order is a must, as doing this will help you to look back in time and gauge how you had been doing so far as a brand, right from the initial days. It will help you assess the growth that you have been securing. This helps your clients and investors to realize your credibility, stability, and your reputation as well.

Running a search for your competitors

Once you’re confident with the way your brand’s clipping is working, you could add a few queries on your competitors to see what they’re up to. For such activities also, you could rely upon Stillio to capture screenshots of your competitor’s brand mentions from various sites that you configure and save those for you in chronological pattern automatically for you to analyze and compare to that of yours.

Building a press page

Websites play a significant role in guiding the audience to your business. It is the first point of interaction with your business. If you fancy sharing highlights of the media and press clipping you’ve collected, you can add a section titled “Media presence” or “Brand Highlights” on your website and add those screenshots to showcase your reputation.

Conclusion

A press clipping or PR clipping is a brilliant aspect to include in your marketing and communication strategy. These are the proofs of your work and the impact that your brand is creating. It justifies the effort of multiple teams that power your brand from the inside out. Also, it stands as a good idea to use press clippings from sites of industrial bodies that frequently mention you on their homepage to back your reputation in front of your clients and investors.