Press clippings are more than just snapshots of your brand’s success. They are a powerful weapon that can elevate your credibility, expand your reach, and drive more traffic to your website. So keep reading as I walk you through the impact of press clippings, the examples, tools, and templates. Are you ready to supercharge your brand presence? Let’s get started!
Key Points
- Press clipping involves tracking brand mentions in various media outlets to gauge public perception and enhance PR efforts.
- It helps measure PR effectiveness, monitor brand mentions, and improve reputation.
- Determine clipping frequency, choose monitoring tools, define evaluation points, classify media types, analyze tone, and compile data.
- Press clipping can significantly boost visibility and drive effective marketing strategies
- It uses tools like Meltwater, Cision, and Mention to monitor and analyze comprehensive media.
Press Clips
These articles, mentions, or features concerning your brand and business appear in many media outlets. These outlets may be newspapers, magazines, blogs, or online publications. Moreover, they simply mean articles or features that indicate your brand’s presence and credibility in the media.
Press Clipping
Press clipping is when your brand is mentioned in many media outlets. These mentions are essential to understanding how well the public perceives your brand. I remember the first time our brand was mentioned in a popular industry blog, and we were so excited about that experience. I suggested to my team that we celebrate only and use this opportunity to closely monitor our brand media presence.
Press clipping is very useful in marketing and public relations because it will help you keep track of your media coverage, conduct research, and build a positive reputation. If you wish to monitor what the media says about your competitors, press clipping is a great way to achieve that. They also help you to stay informed about your company or key individuals.
When my company invested in a press clipping service to track all our mentions, the price initially seemed too high, but the insight we gained was worth it. It assisted us in uncovering trends in how our brand is seen, and we were able to use this information to fine-tune our marketing strategies. This led to a more focused and effective campaign. See our video.
Read Also: The 9+ Step Process for Clipping Press Coverage Effectively
Benefits of Press Clipping
I worked for a non-profit organization, Good Horizons. This organization was dedicated to saving the environment, but it had challenges getting its message out there to reach the target audience. Through a community clean-up event, the organization managed to get a few mentions in a regional newspaper.
Surprisingly, a press clipping form that mentions became a game changer even though I didn’t expect much from it. I later decide to clip it out and send it to a few local influencers and community leaders with a personal note. I was doing that paid off big time within a week. Promising Horizons got up to 30% donations and was even asked to speak at the city council meeting.
Witnessing how a tiny press clipping made such a significant impact was incredible. Press clips are more than just a piece of paper; they can boost your credibility and connect you with the right people.
Also, press clipping has many benefits that make it a powerful tool for getting your message heard and making a significant impact. Some of these benefits include:
- It helps you to measure the effectiveness of PR or marketing efforts
- It enables you to stay up to date with all company mentions.
- It assists some agencies in summarizing, assessing, and reporting their work.
- It also helps you to improve your public relations
- It helps to evaluate the brand reputation of a company
- It helps to ascertain the effectiveness of some campaigns
- It enables you to measure your brand awareness
Staying organized is vital to maximizing these benefits. Our press clipping template below will help you quickly track and analyze your brand mentions.
Press Clipping Template
Read Also: What is the Press? Understanding The Role Of The Press In the Society
How to Make a Press Clipping
I have provided some steps you will take to make a perfect press clipping.
#1. Determine the Frequency With Which You Are Going to Do the Clipping
The frequency with which you clip will depend on the features of the brand you work with. Some companies do their clipping task weekly, others biweekly or monthly. You have to determine the frequency, stick to it, and adjust to the needful based on your unique brand needs.
I worked for a boutique fashion brand some time ago and am still trying to determine how often we should monitor our media mentions.
At first, I thought doing it every two weeks would be enough, but during a big fashion event, I realized we were missing out because we lost our opportunity to engage with influencers. After that incident, we started clipping weekly, allowing us to keep our brand relevant during fast-paced fashion week.
#2. Define the Monitoring Tools You Will Use
I remember when I first started monitoring mentions for AquaBloom, a company specializing in innovative water filtration systems. Finding the right tool was not as easy as I thought.
I tried searching on Google, but the search results were overwhelming, and I was presented with several monitoring tools. I tried testing them, but I found out that they often missed key mentions, especially in environmental publications. After much trial and error and a few frustrating weeks of unfinished clipping, I learned about the benefits of customizing the tool to the brand’s specific needs.
Now, whenever I advise clients like AquaBloom or anyone confused about the monitoring tools to use for press clipping, to look beyond the big and famous names and find a tool that understands their market.
#3. Determine the Points to Evaluate
Now that you have your tools, you need to define what you are evaluating. This may be the time your brand is mentioned in the media, the traffic publications cause, or the number of times your brand is mentioned in social media.
It is important to define the indicators you will evaluate to know what you are looking for in a particular and focus on your efforts.
#4. Classify the Appearance According to the Media
I recall my first experience managing PR for WaVes. Every bit of the publicity brought me a sense of great Success. Later, I had to admit that we needed a clear way to categorize and track where our brand appears.
This is because categorizing your brand’s media appearance is important. It helps you to analyze the channel that works best for your brand. Additionally, I assure you that you need such clarity to make a difference in preparing future PR strategies.
First, you need to know where your brand has been seen. You will want to separate traditional media like newspapers, radio, and TV from digital media like social media, podcasts, and websites. Knowing where your mentions come from will help you know what works best for you.
#5. Analyze the Emotional Tone of Each Appearance
The tone of every media mention determines whether you are being praised. When WaVes started gaining media attention, I discovered that it’s not all about where you are mentioned but how you are mentioned, whether positive, negative, or neutral. You need to know how your brand is perceived in the market.
This analysis is like a qualitative report for your brand, helping you assess its impact and position in the market. I recommend creating a simple tracker to monitor media publicity and its emotional tone to achieve this. This will help you identify trends and adjust them to your PR strategy.
#6. Compile all the Information in a Document
Finally, compiling everything into a visual document is the last step in creating a comprehensive press clipping. It feels like a difficult task, but it’s worth it. Some time ago, I was handling PR. The company I worked with, which created this document, was one of the most valuable tools in our strategy.
This document is your brand story told in the public with information organized with text and graphics to enable you to see clearly how your brand is perceived. Making decisions that will prove your media presence in short and medium terms will be easier if you clarify this document.
Read Also: What Are Press Pages?: Understanding What Works and How to Create One (+ Examples and Templates)
Press Clipping Tools
When you hear press clipping tools, it means media monitoring tools that help track and collect mentions of a brand, individual, or company across different media channels. These media channels can fall into print, online, broadcast, and social media categories. The following are some top press clipping tools that will assist you in monitoring your media presence.
#1. Meltwater
This press clipping tool is a comprehensive media monitoring tool for your media outlets. It provides real-time insight from news outlets, social media, and blogs. Moreover, it offers features for media analytics and influencer engagement.
I first used the Meltwater tool for press clipping during a client’s campaign. A new product was launched, and every mention on several platforms needed to be tracked. Meltwater proved to be resourceful, for it captured real-time insights from every angle of the media and offered analytics that helped me identify the influencer who drove the most engagement. So, if you desire a media monitoring and proactive tool, think about Meltwater.
#2. Cision
Cision is another press clipping tool widely used to monitor coverage and analyse media trends. It has a media database that distributes services and reporting capabilities. I found Cision a game changer because the first time I used it, it could identify trending topics and the right journalists to cover the company’s story. I was assigned to monitor press coverage and understand media trends that can impact our strategy. This press clipping tool worked perfectly and ensured our company stayed proactive.
#3. Mention
This tool allows users to track mentions across many platforms. It is not just about tracking every mention but also understanding the context and sentiment behind those mentions. For example, if a well-known blog gets a negative review. This tool will enable you to engage with the author quickly, address the review, and turn a potential PR problem into a positive customer experience. When using a real-time media monitoring tool like the one mentioned, you define the key terms and phrases you want to monitor. Also, think about how people might talk about your brand.
How to Do a Press Clipping?
- Select a service from the media monitoring list. First, look for a tool for PR clipping.
- Make a suitable query. Select what you wish to track.
- Collect and analyze the PR clipping findings.
- Access a user-friendly dashboard that includes all of the results.
- Create an automatic report.
What Is an Example of a Press Clipping?
For example, a public relations clipping could include media mentions on social media, in an online magazine, or a newspaper. This concept arose when businesses studied newspapers to see how reporters depicted them, removing any reference to their company.
How to Format Press Clippings?
- Contact details and ‘For Immediate Release’ appear at the top.
- To summarize the news, use a title and an italicized subheading
- The initial line contains both the new location and the news peg.
- To provide background and extra details, write two to three paragraphs.
- Bulleted information and/or figures.
- Detailed company information is at the bottom.
References
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