How To Make Ads That Get Free Press

When it comes to sales, people hate being sold to, but they love buying. The best companies I follow hide their advertising from their customers.

Two weeks ago, this was the strategy I used with our start-up, Tacit Intelligence: where I wrote a piece of content and turned it into a “boosted post” that led to getting free press coverage.

Here’s the post:

It’s racked up nearly 43K impressions and nearly 1,200 views on the article itself, and it got picked up by another newsletter.

It was also reshared by the head of Datacom New Zealand, an advisor to NASA & a few other notable figures.

Here’s how I did this by design, and how you can get PR without having to directly pitch people.

1. Make good content and post it on your own personal profile, make sure to tie it to a trending news headline to get extra coverage (I wrote about this process in last week’s newsletter)

2. Make sure you’ve got a company page on LinkedIn (set it up here if you haven’t)

3. Go to LinkedIn Advertising

4. Once logged in, click " Advertise “> " Create “> “ Campaign “

5. Name the campaign > “Engagement” > “Schedule” (I usually run these campaigns for 14 days)

6. Go to “Audience”
   > Choose the countries you want to advertise in
   > Set up the target person you want to read your article (e.g., your target customer) by selecting > Audience attributes > Job experience > Job titles
   

   

   Targeting by job title

   
   Then select > Audience attributes > Company > Company name

   

   Add the media outlets to your targeting

   
   You’re blending in media outlets and reporters into the ad mix so they see it as well
   

7. From here, move to the ads section and select the post you wrote from your own profile and run it at $15 a day

With any luck, media outlets and other newsletters will pick it up of their own volition, just as happened to us.

The best ads are the ones that don’t look like ads, and when people don’t think you’re advertising to them, they’ll promote you for free.

If you’ve got more sophisticated ways of doing this, ping me on [email protected] - I’d love to learn from what you are doing

Sales Over Marketing

For every business I’ve either started or bought, I’ve put way more energy into improving the product or service than I have into marketing or sales. Because when you get that part right, marketing and sales don’t matter as much.

We’ve had many periods at our gym, for example, when we’ve stopped marketing. Sometimes for upwards of a year. Yet we’ve continued to slowly grow over time.

However, if I am to do sales and marketing. Sales come first.

There’s no better way to learn how to market than doing face-to-face sales.

You quickly learn how to start conversations, what gets people excited, what they’re worried about and so on.

All the wee things you pick up in these conversations tell you exactly how to market your thing.

The conversation starters that work should be your ad hooks.

You can build your offers around the things that got people excited in your pitches.

The promises, guarantees, or features you focus on on your website or elsewhere should address the “what abouts” you had to resolve in your sales conversations.

You can run A/B tests, fake backdoors, and all that other good technical marketing stuff, and, over a long period of time, use those tactics to figure out how to market something.

But it does take a long time, normally costs a lot of money, and I doubt it gets you close to what you'd learn from selling.