Ever wondered how to get featured in a magazine? This article will help you understand how the professionals do it. Get your company or self in a top magazine. Build credibility and awareness for your brand and products through traditional or digital pr.
Overview of Article
- What is Getting Featured in a Magazine?
- The First Thing to Know about Features
- 5 Steps to Getting Featured in a Magazine
- Things to Avoid
- Why You Should Get Featured in a Magazine
What is Getting Featured in a Magazine?
While getting featured could mean a front-page feature for your company, getting featured can also be a mention within the magazine itself. This article will focus on the later, getting mentioned briefly within the magazine itself. In addition, a hand-held magazine is different from a digital magazine on a popular website. This article will focus on digital magazines distributed over the web, such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, or Fast Company. That is not to say you cannot get a front page feature on a printed magazine. We believe focusing on the easier features can help develop a brand into the possibility of getting a bigger feature. It is difficult to go from zero to hundred in other words.
The First Thing to Know about Features
Good features are not about you. Good features are a way for you to provide value to a target audience. How can you help them with the 30 seconds you have? Can you inspire them? Can you teach them something? Can you provide a resource? What value can you bring to the table? In today’s age, everyone is getting advertised to thousands of times a day. Do not directly advertise your brand, or you will be ignored. Provide great value to the audience via your brand and people will notice. A good feature is about your brand getting a chance to provide value to your target niche.
5 Steps to Getting Featured in a Magazine
We have narrowed the steps on how to get featured in a magazine to five easy steps. Review the steps below.
Step 1: Define your Niche
Learn who you want to provide value for. What are their needs? What are their goals? What do they think about? What age is this niche? What interests these people? Would they be interested or know someone interested in your product or service? Are they a potential buyer? These are all questions you need to ask yourself when defining a brand niche. The more you understand the niche, the better. While trial and error is nice to find what works, do some preparation and look at past historical data to truly find a good brand-niche fit.
Step 2: Find Credible, Brand-Aligned Magazines
Once you understand your niche, find magazines that cover that niche of individuals as an audience base. If your customers are obsessed with technology, find credible, tech-focused magazines that you know they love to read. The brand-magazine-niche fit should feel natural, not forced. A bakery in an emerging technology magazine would not make much sense. Well, unless, the bakery had some innovative new machinery to bake some awesome cakes. Point taken though. Find magazines that fit your audience and your brand. It will make pitching and creating the feature much easier.
Step 3: Create Natural, Value-focused Articles or Mentions
Create articles focused on providing value for that niche via your brand. Make the articles natural, and do not try to force your brand. Everything should connect naturally, and make logical sense to the audience. Transition words are your friend. Use transition words to create the natural flow between value-focused content and how your business is there to help. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. Ask yourself what you would think of the article. Do you think the content is helpful? Do you think it provided value to your day or life? Is it something you would want to read all the way through? If you answer “no” to any of these questions, rewrite for value-add. Polish your article and remove grammatical errors. A tool like Hemingway is a great way to boost article review with AI.
Step 4: Pitch the Feature to the Magazine
Magazines love content that matches their niche and identity. Since you have already created content that does this, you just need to get it in front of them. You need to find a way to get their attention and build a relationship. Sometimes, magazine companies need money shown to them to get attention. You may have to pay a feature fee to get access to advertising on their magazine. Each magazine has their own unique editorial process. Learn more about this process, and who is in charge of this process. We do not recommend spamming the senior editor of a magazine. That is the best way to get lost in the sea of emails.
Find the best point of contact and send a short, to-the-point email with the content already attached. Explain why there is a fit between your brand, the magazine, and the audience. Then, explain why the feature demonstrates this fit dynamic and ties everything together. Be patient, be responsive, and understand there may be sponsorship expenses. If you follow these rules, the pitch may be the beginnings of a long-term relationship. If it get lots in the sea or denied, try again in a few months. Again, the worst thing you can do is spam someone’s inbox with requests. Editors are people too.
Step 5: Share your Feature
Congratulations, you have been featured. Now what? Share your feature with your network, social media channels, and email list. Demonstrating a relationship with a magazine that fits your brand-identity will develop further brand credibility and awareness. Another great way to show off your features is to add it your website. Many brands have the magazines they were featured in on their homepage. A press page is an additional way to add your feature to a website. You got a feature. Brag a little, and show off how amazing your brand is.
Things to Avoid
Avoid being overly promotional. Being overly promotional looks fake. The worst thing you can do with a feature is to look fake and destroy trust. It is important to understand you are talking to another person. If you were talking to another person, would you start spitting promotional fact after promotional fact. No. You would look at ways to start a conversation and to give them a taste of what you have to offer.
Avoid breaking set magazine editorial guidelines. One of the easiest ways to not get featured, or, in worst case, not get a chance to be featured ever again is to break editorial guidelines. Editors already have a backlog of content and receive hundreds of pitches a day. Let me say that again: hundreds of pitches a day. Waste their time once with content that blatantly does not follow their guidelines, watch yourself get blocked and banned from pitching forever.
Why You Should Get Featured in a Digital Magazine
Now that you understand how to get featured in a magazine, here a few reasons you should go forward. Brand credibility is built when you are mentioned a credible publication. Influence and authority will develop in your niche through the feature. Search engine optimization is important when trying to rank your website in Google. Getting mentioned by a high-authority is guaranteed to give your website some Google credibility going forward. Your feature can lead to increased search traffic to your website, especially if the feature goes viral. Do not count on it going viral, though.
Interested in Getting Featured in a Magazine?
This article was written by Adogy, a Digital PR and SEO agency, that can help you get featured in premier digital magazines and publications. Schedule a call with us today, so we can learn more about your brand and how we can help you meet your goals.
Related Post: The Guide to Effective Media Placements
Sources for more information
- Define Your Niche: Learn more about niche marketing with Forbes: Why Your Business Needs to Niche: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2021/03/09/why-your-business-needs-to-niche/
- Content Marketing: Get content marketing tips from Copyblogger: Copyblogger: https://copyblogger.com/
- Clear Writing: Improve your writing clarity with Hemingway Editor: Hemingway Editor: https://hemingwayapp.com/
- Magazine Discovery: Search for relevant publications with MediaFinder: MediaFinder: https://www.mediafinder.com/
- Understanding Editors: Awai explains the editorial process: Awai: https://www.awai.com/
- Sprout Social (https://sproutsocial.com/): Learn social media marketing strategies to promote your features.
- HubSpot (https://offers.hubspot.com/how-to-build-a-brand): Gain valuable insights on building brand trust.
- Brand Authority: Moz explores the concept of brand authority: Brand Authority: https://moz.com/brand-authority
