If you are in PR, you have no doubt faced a client who wanted to know why you would bother to get coverage into the media when “no one reads the paper/watches TV/listens to the radio anymore.” Anemic trust in the media doesn’t help the situation.

The fact is that in our online world, media relations has new life. Those articles are posted online. Google loves media sites and gives them high authority scores, which means your media coverage is part of your search profile that’s viewed by all your stakeholders, including potential employees, customers, and (meta) other journalists.

Negative coverage has a zombie-permanence to it. So does positive coverage.

Data from a recent report from ARPR gives us a much fuller picture of how media coverage impacts sales.

Their data shows that leads generated from a media story outperform web traffic by 56% and even outperform paid search. People coming from a media story are just better leads—they stay on-site longer, they bounce less, they engage more and they convert more.

We know about MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and SQLs (sales qualified leads). In PR, we are always looking for relevance…how about the EMQL: The Earned Media Qualified Lead.

I know for many people inbound marketing feels very reactive, but this is a case where you can be proactive as well. In the old days, we used to “merchandise the clips,” which meant buying a reprint and mailing them to customers. Today, we can share them on social, on our websites, and the ARPR report has specific data on success rates when a sales rep emails media coverage to a potential customer.

Note: these are all productive engagements with people who we are sure didn’t see the story in its original incarnation.

Last thing. In this world, smaller media outlets punch above their weight. Sure, the Wall Street Journal is better, but an appearance on a small podcast or in a local publication can still create the impact we’re talking about here.