Curating a newsletter for your organization or putting together coverage reports are commonplace in the PR industry. A newsletter including all the coverage you’ve helped secure, highlighting the biggest and best stories is a great way to showcase your organization’s prominence in the industry, drive internal awareness and highlight earned media. To be successful, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with reports, subject matter experts (SMEs) and prominent publications in your industry. It’s also imperative to have a routine or tool for compiling and tracking coverage. To help you get started, I put together four key tips for writing a newsletter and coverage report:
1. Pick a tool for tracking coverage: It would be incredibly difficult and time consuming to manually track all media coverage. Here at Voxus, I primarily use Meltwater for tracking, but there are a number of similar products out on the market. It’s also important to track coverage through multiple different methods. For instance, I track coverage by keywords, publications, and authors, as well as keep track of competitor and industry news. Do some research and see what will work best for your organization. Also keep in mind these tracking tools are not perfect and you’ll likely still need to do manual searches to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
2. What to include in the newsletter: This might vary depending on industry, preference and need. But it’s a best practice to include all new coverage from the day, from larger features and contributed articles to smaller mentions. If you’re covering or tracking competitor coverage, include it last and keep it short and to the point. It should never overshadow your organization’s coverage and shouldn’t be highlighted or summarized in the same way.
3. Prioritizing important coverage: Always place big features, contributed articles, quotes and inclusion in top tier publications in the first section of the newsletter. The lower tier the publications and smaller the mention, the further down it can go. Coverage will vary day to day, and sometimes there won’t be a huge feature or top tier publication covering your organization. Still, continue to prioritize by publication and nature of the mention, even with less notable publications and smaller mentions.
4. Choosing how to write about coverage: The point of tracking coverage and including it in a newsletter is to highlight your organization and showcase the media opportunities you’ve helped to secure. Be sure to use short, concise language that gets the point across quickly and positively highlights the coverage. If you’re summarizing coverage on the same topic or product, don’t forget to use variation in the way you summarize it to avoid redundancy.
In any coverage report or newsletter you want to be thorough, which most importantly, means you aren’t missing any coverage. The most important part of curating a newsletter or coverage report is making sure it fits your organization’s wants and needs. Have frequent conversations about what your key stakeholders are looking for and how they plan to use the content, that way you can put together the best report possible.