How To Increase Brand Awareness and Get Featuredin TOP Media With a $57 Budget

Introduction

Brand awareness is a multi-faceted and multi-channel process that heavily relies on working effectively with the media. Yet, those highly valued publications every business is after remain expensive and hard to obtain.  

Top media platforms charge thousands of dollars for promotional articles and often mark such pieces as ads, which is not what companies look for.

In this case, we will look into one of the quickest and cheapest ways of getting published in the top media sources without being flagged. This method has been repeatedly tested on ourselves and our clients.

Challenge

Get free media coverage in top crypto and business outlets for BDC Consulting brand awareness.

Baseline

Every month, our PR team looks for free placement opportunities in the top media. Typically, we offer either research results or expert opinions. In 2022, the interest in expert materials decreased significantly, so we decided to make the most out of our crypto market research.

Predicting the study subject that would resonate with the media and potentially go viral is not always possible. Journalists' and editors' attention largely depends on the current agenda, so essential but long-run ideas tend to give way to hotter, spur-of-the-moment topics.

Dedicated to confirming this trend, we decided to go along and release a quick study on a topical subject. We started by forming the following criteria for approaching our survey:

• The topic should be based on up-to-the-minute news.
• It should cover the entire crypto market.
• Come up with a format that we can implement in a week.
• Free data collection.

How We Did It

We chose the aftermath of the FTX collapse as the topic of our study. Three days after the event, the subject was as relevant as it gets, especially because the entire crypto space was in disarray about what would happen next.

We decided to survey crypto projects’ C-level executives for quick data collection. Having created a wide network in the industry, we managed to reach out to hundreds of projects, attempting to get the management’s opinion.

Survey Requirements

Since all the respondents are busy people and due to the lack of economic incentives, we formed simple requirements for our researchers. 

The survey must:

• Be concise and take no more than 3 minutes.
• Not cause difficulties answering.
• Deliver results that are of interest to the respondents themselves.

Five Questions for C-level Execs

Eventually, we compiled a five-question survey:

1. At what mark will the BTC price stop its decline?
2. Will stablecoins lose their peg to the USD?
3. Do you plan to invest in crypto within the next month, given the current state of the market?
4. What project areas do you see as the safest investment opportunities at the moment?
5. Which project areas do you think have the greatest growth potential?

Responses: 

We contacted respondents via personalized emails and posts in closed chats and gathered the necessary information within 24 hours. As a result, 53 people returned with the answers, making for a foreseeable conversion level: almost 100% for a personalized approach and about 5% for chats.

Connecting With the Media

It’s worth mentioning that we pitched some media outlets in advance while still drafting the survey. After contacting journalists and editors of the relevant media outlets, we did not receive the desired response at this stage.

It took a week to finalize the report and upon completing we distributed a press release announcing the survey and its main thesis via the EinPressWire service. It cost us $57. At the same time, we reached out to journalists from the top media outlets ourselves, offering to use the survey as a basis for their materials. 

Results

The results met our expectations. The survey got published in several Tier1 media, including Forbes, Fxstreet, IBTimes, and DailyHodl. 

On top of that, we secured over 200 mentions from the press release distribution and over 60 article reposts by smaller outlets worldwide. The material got translated into French, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, and other languages.  

The publication of the survey inspired numerous social media reposts and discussions.

Insights

• Publications in top outlets are expensive, hard to get, and often flagged as a promo. Instead of pitching expert opinions, offering analytics-backed newsbreaks that fit into the media’s agenda makes more sense.
• Choosing the right study subject is crucial: ensure it is based on recent events, highly relevant, and of interest to the entire industry.
• An expanded network of the industry’s top managers will simplify data collection. A topic they are eager to discuss acts as an additional motivation. 
• The distribution can cost close to nothing if your study is hot and happening.
• Two weeks of meticulous work are enough to conduct a survey, prepare the report, distribute it, and start reaping the fruits.