Owned Media

We’re not just writers. We’re also publishers.

At Mainland, that means we can take your stories and publish them in one of our custom publications alongside best-in-class journalistic reporting on the news and issues affecting specific industries, providing your stories with the same trusted, authoritative voice that has earned each of our publications a wide readership of industry professionals. Crucially, every story we write for your brand is also SEO-optimized to attract the most relevant audiences and lives on your brand page — your own digital newsroom with content designed to guide your prospects through your sales funnel.

Demand for new content never ceases. To stay relevant, your brand needs to add to the conversation frequently and regularly.

Do you ever think about how much information is on the internet? Virtually everything that’s ever been written, recorded or babbled semi-coherently into a webcam is on there in some form or another. And yet, it’s never enough.

The good news is, whether you know it or not, your brand has a lot to talk about. Every day, everyone on your team, from the executive office to store-level employees, are coming up with new ideas, interacting with customers, solving problems and building a company. Those are stories that people relate to, and in many cases, they are stories people aspire to. You just need to know where to find those stories, how to tell them and where to put them. Better yet, we’ll do it for you.

We’ll work with your team to find the best stories and put them in front of the right audiences. Our team of writers and reporters will interview people at every level of your company, carefully crafting questions to draw out the most compelling stories that align with your brand’s goals and messaging. And we won’t stop. We’ll keep asking questions, writing stories and building your brand’s narrative so that you remain top-of-mind among the audiences you want to reach. Because there’s always new content, and your stories need to stay at the top of the pile.

There are two ways to secure promising leads for your business. You can tell your story to the largest possible audience and filter out the uninterested or unqualified candidates, or you can tell your story directly to a pool of candidates who are already likely to be interested and qualified. Think of it like fishing: you can drag a net across the bottom of the lake and pick out the fish that turn up along with all the boots, tin cans and other debris, or you can drop a line right in the middle of a school of salmon and pull up one after another. An effective marketing strategy uses both methods, but the latter is notoriously tricky to pull off

Most businesses don’t have access to a single venue where professionals from across their industry gather. Even if they find such a hub, it’s not always easy to secure real estate for their story. That’s what makes Mainland’s custom publications a profoundly lucrative opportunity for our clients.

Our custom digital publications offer a trusted, authoritative voice, providing news, updates, guidance and discussion surrounding niche industries, all combining to create an invaluable resource for professionals from all corners of those industries. By placing your stories in those publications, you’re not just getting in front of the audiences who are most interested in them, you are also backing them with all of the credibility and expertise we have developed through years of reporting and writing on industry news and trends.

When your brand’s stories are published in one of our customer publications, not only will they appear alongside well-researched and widely trusted non-sponsored reporting on the news in your industry, they will also collect in a landing page dedicated exclusively to your brand, providing your own digital newsroom with content designed to guide your prospects through your sales funnel. More than a blog, your newsroom will become a wellspring of rich, thoughtful, personal stories about your brand and they people on your team, all crafted by our expert storytellers specifically to resonate with your target audiences.

Each brand that engages with 1851 receives a dedicated page that features SEO-rich, longform feature stories about the people driving the brand’s growth and success, designed to appeal to potential franchisees. Because the content is hosted on a third party industry publication, the brands earn instant credibility.

Telling a brand story on its owned website is not enough. Prospective franchise owners are looking for third-party content and franchisee testimonials to learn about a brand before they reach the point of inquiry. Using 1851’s AMPD technology, brands can drive informed traffic from the right candidates to read these great human interest stories, based on specific demographics and target markets.

Every Saturday morning, our team wakes up (separately!), makes coffee, prepares breakfast, and settles in for about five hours of Bon Appétit videos, Jimmy Fallon clips and SportsCenter highlights, just like everyone else. As much respect as we have for the written word at Mainland — it’s still the bread and butter of storytelling — we understand that video content is an incredibly important component to a marketing strategy. So when it comes to telling your story, we want to put you on camera. And not just you, but your team, your employees, your franchisees, even your customers. We want to hear from anyone who can validate your brand.

At Mainland, our philosophy of storytelling revolves around people. We believe that at a fundamental level, people are interested in reading and watching stories about other people. By telling your story on video, audiences aren’t just learning about your brand, they are learning about you and your team. They are looking into your eyes, seeing and hearing your passion for the brand, and they are putting themselves in your shoes. That’s how you build relationships, and that’s how you grow a brand.

Mainland offers creative services to help make sure your brand looks and feels like a million bucks. This is done through:

Most people will tell you that in a crowded social media landscape, it’s difficult for a brand to stand out. They’re wrong. Brands have a surplus of owned media content, which can be leveraged to attract engagement on multiple channels. The trick is using that content to engage the voice of your audience. That’s how brands win.

At Mainland, we see a huge opportunity to create engagement-driven content and bridge communications silos so that your social media amplifies your stories.

In theory, social media is a godsend to brands. Social media platforms offer an easy, cost-effective way for brands to engage directly with consumers on a massive scale. That’s an opportunity most companies would have forked over half their budget for 20 years ago. In reality, social media brand management is a chore. Worse, it’s a potential minefield, where at any given moment you might say the wrong thing at the wrong time and end up on the wrong Buzzfeed roundup.

Let us take that off your plate.

Mainland can build your brand a robust social media presence, posting regular updates on every channel in your brand’s own voice. Crucially, we stay on top of the news and social media trends so we know how to approach the conversation (and when to shut up entirely). We’ll build a following of fans and leverage each platform’s unique tools to get your messaging out to your existing followers and new audiences.

We can also implement paid social media ad campaigns to put your brand in front of the audiences you want to reach, whether they follow your accounts or not.