A few drafts and revisions later, you have in your hands a beautifully redacted piece to pitch to the media. Now all you have to do is to get it published.

If it were only as easy as it sounds.

The barrier to getting your article — however masterful it may be — published is a big and important one.

Simply (and rather innocently) put, it’s just sending out an email with an attachment. Easier said than done.

Consider the amount of emails you, as a CMO in a startup, receive a day. How many is that? 50? Maybe even 70?

Newsflash: Journalists and editors can receive over 100 emails a day. And probably loads more if they rank among the likes of top international media such as Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

So how do you get your pitch noticed and article published?

Part of the key lies in the topic itself. In our previous post, we talked about how to create content that journalists want to publish.

But the work doesn’t end there.

Building and maintaining a relationship with the media and creating a good pitch is part of background work and foundation needed to support your content and as much time should be dedicated to these as it is to writing the piece.

In this post, we’ll discuss how to cut through the noise and create a good pitch that catches the attention of journalists. We’ll also detail some of the best approaches to build and maintain a relationship with the online media that have been tried and tested by us at Dear Content.

PR distribution services: Pros and cons

When you think about getting a message out to your community via the media, your first thought may be to hire a PR distribution service.

There are loads of such options available. And it’s what I would call a quick and dirty way to get your PR distributed — if that’s all you’re going for.

There have been many arguments made against the effectiveness of such tools. Their business model is based charging for the mass distribution of press releases. Even though they end up being published, viewership will be minimal as these articles often do not go through a journalist or editors’ editing (for various reasons).

Most, if not all of the time, they end up being published alongside the numerous other press releases who have arrived on the site through similar distribution services. It is rather unlikely that these articles are promoted by the media’s social media accounts. In other words, your reach will be low.

The first time you do it will probably give you a rush, especially if you see you’re getting links. And perhaps the second time too. But from then on, you are pretty much just getting links from the same domains repeatedly.

Where’s the SEO value in that?

But let’s forget SEO and link building for a minute.

Using a distribution service means there’s no direct contact with the media. That translates to losing the opportunity to establish long-term relationships with the journalists that matter — the ones that really have the influence and authority to make sure your press release gets the coverage it deserves.

Our approach at Dear Content involves building a mutually beneficial and long-term correspondence with the media. And the first step to getting that done is to identify your product/journalist fit: understanding whose coverage you can best enhance with your expertise and whose focus is the most relevant for your industry, service, and/or product.

Building a media list

Before you even begin to collect journalists’ names and emails, you should first identify the sectors you are in.

Yes, sectors, because there is often more than one that your business is related to. This helps to pinpoint the media outlets through which you can get the most relevant coverage.

The startup sector is already one that you definitely belong to. Other relevant industries could include technology, SaaS, financial services, logistics, etc. Note that some of these may overlap.

Next, you’ll want to begin collating contacts of journalists working for these media outlets that are most relevant to these sectors you’ve identified.

One way to do that would be to do a search for the keywords most relevant to your industry and go to the ‘news’ tab. From there, you have a list of media outlets that publish news regarding this topic.

Here’s an example of a search for ‘marketing automation’.

Voila! Immediately, you get three potential media outlets that you know cover your sector that you can reach out to.

Read through these articles to make sure their coverage is relevant to your company. Once you have determined which articles are relevant, you will want to obtain the contacts of the journalists who wrote them.

This is an extremely tedious but important step. As you search for the journalist’s contact, make sure to get his or her direct email, instead of a generic email such as editors@xxx.com.

While you’re at it, prioritise those whose beats include your sector as your content would be more interesting to them than a general beat journalist.

You may want to consider having two separate contact lists: one dealing with press releases and another for opinion/exclusive pieces. Depending on the size of the publication, this may be one and the same person, or different. For example, a journalist whose beat is finance may or may not be in charge of reviewing finance-related opinion pieces.

Making that first contact

After building your list of contacts, we recommend getting in touch with these journalists. This could be as simple as sending out a quick email or hopping on a short phone call to introduce your company and its area of expertise. Note that this shouldn’t be a sales pitch but an offer to be a valuable resource for the journalist.

This is beneficial in four ways:

1. It’s a way to confirm that you have the right name and contact details. Take the opportunity to verify his or her beat.
2. Otherwise, he or she can probably give you the contact information of the person you should be reaching out to.
3. You can find out more about the topics the journalist may be interested in receiving comments about and how you can help him or her achieve that.
4. Last but not least, a personal touch always goes a long way!

PR or opinion piece

There is an ongoing debate among public relations professionals over the effectiveness of press releases. While we cannot vouch for the effectiveness and approach of others, we can share some of the strategies that have worked best for us.

These include press releases through which we have received numerous backlinks, mentions, and significant coverage. We also recognise that these results may be industry-dependent. But that aside, what we have found to be important is your willingness to facilitate the journalists’ work and provide the commentary and information necessary to do so.

With an introductory contact made, you’re ready to start the content writing process. But how do you decide whether to it’s going to be a press release or opinion piece?

At Dear Content, one of the first few questions we ask ourselves before making this decision are:

• Is what we want to communicate time-sensitive?
• Does the message what we want to communicate qualify as news?
• When was the last time we sent out a press release?

Press releases: Frequency matters

As a general rule of thumb, company news should be sent out as a press release since the idea is to get the information disseminated as far and wide as possible. And since press releases are distributed to more media, that’s way more coverage.

The downside to that is that there is no exclusivity (a big deal in the media industry) and it is not as personal. But more on this later.

It is easy to get drawn into the benefits of a press release. But the wider coverage it offers as opposed to exclusives doesn’t mean you should be running to the media with every single update or idea as not all novelties nor topics make for press release material.

For example, a particular industry pain point may be worth addressing. But if there has been little to no developments surrounding it lately, your comments on the matter may not be worth a press release as there simply may not be enough attention.

A product’s soft launch or the official start of beta testing may also be exciting to your company, but look at the big picture and consider whether it is newsworthy enough for the industry as a whole.

Sometimes, it may be better to shelve such news and wait for a bigger update. Sending out press releases too often will risk saturating the media and jeopardising the bond with the journalist you worked so hard to establish.

In the words of BrewDog Co-founder James Watt:

It is not so much about the boy who shouted wolf but the boy who shouted new product, new press release, new idea, new feedback until everyone stopped listening. Don’t shout too often, so that you can make sure it truly counts when you want to roar.

For instance, every press release you send to journalists has an opportunity cost. There is only so much a journalist will cover a company or a project: the more information you send, the less receptive he or she will be to that information.

—James Watt, Business for Punks

On that note, if you’re a startup with an acquired reputation and are expecting to receive a new round of investment, you may want to consider laying low for a few months prior to making the announcement.

At Dear Content, our recommendation would be to aim for an absolute maximum of one press release every quarter. An exception to this would be if an unanticipated event happened and it’s making headlines across the media and you wanted to lend a voice to this time-sensitive development.

That’s not to say that you should go months without making any contact with your journalist friends. And that’s where exclusive opinion pieces play a role.

Exclusive opinion pieces: Fostering that relationship

Exclusive pieces, as its name suggests, have very limited reach. What it gives you in exchange is a fantastic opportunity to build on your relationship with journalists.

As mentioned earlier, exclusivity is a valuable tool in news. Offering a well-written and opinionated piece to one media outlet is essentially giving them sole rights to publishing content that no one else has access to.

The content of your piece can range from many different topics and angles, but it should be directly related to the media’s focus. From our experience, these are the angles that have worked best for us:

• Reaction to another opinion piece that’s published on the site
• Reaction to a piece the journalist himself or herself wrote
• Reaction to a study by an established consultancy
• Reaction or opinion of a current topic that’s trending in the industry

Exclusivity aside, the contact you make with journalists when offering them these exclusives makes sure you are kept on top of their minds during the respite between one press release and the next.

How to send an email pitch for press releases

The first rule of the game: Never send out your pitch email (scheduled or otherwise) on the hour.

Here’s why.

You know how marathon runners take off in a swarm at the start of the race and how hard it is to keep your focus on just one individual runner because they’re just all bunched together and look like bees escaping from their hive that’s just been attacked?

That’s pretty what your email will look like if you send it out at the start of the hour: lost in the crowd.

Perhaps people are just attracted by the lovely round zeros at the start of every hour, or perhaps they use a distribution service for which the default time is always xx:00.

Whatever it may be, you’ll want to avoid sending out your press release on the dot because of the deluge of other press releases that get sent at the same time.

Here’s a look at the torrent of press releases received at 9am.

So when, then, should be the best time to send out your email pitch? There have been countless studies done on this. And while there doesn’t seem to be a golden hour, the consensus is clear:

• Best window: between late morning (from 10am onwards) till early afternoon (around 1 or 2pm).
• Avoid: Mondays, Fridays, and definitely weekends

Format of email

Email subject

Let’s begin with your email subject, which should be short, concise, and encapsulate the main point of the piece being pitched. There’s no magic number as to how long email subject should be, and the debate on this is ongoing.

Some experts maintain six to ten words is prime, while others say more is also acceptable. Whatever the ideal, you want to avoid a subject so long it trails off with an ellipsis in their inbox view.

Do not underestimate the power of a well-crafted subject. 85% of journalists decide on whether they want to explore a pitch based on the email subject alone. Give as much thought into this as you do with crafting your press release.

Email body

Include a short summary of the piece in your email body. This means ideally nothing longer than two sentences, and directing them to the full version.

Given these tight restraints, refrain from too many formalities and get straight to the point.

Your email body is also where your press release should go. The idea is to facilitate a journalists’ job as much as possible, and while .pdf or .doc attachments may seem much neater and more professional, it still is one unnecessary barrier from accessing the contents of your press release.

Who to send press releases to

This is where all that strenuous research into journalists, their beats, and their contact details comes into play. Before pitching, it’s important to get a basic understanding of the hierarchy. A typical media outlet will have varying roles of editors and journalists.

• Editor: This is the person who assigns journalists stories to cover and has the final say over what gets covered and published.
• Journalist: If the journalist’s beat is relevant to your article, you may pitch to him or her directly. Even though editors are the ones who give the final nod, journalists themselves do have influence over their stories and can also pitch stories to editors.

Be on standby

The job is not done after you have sent out the press release. A journalist’s job is to dig deeper and verify where necessary.

If your company has a dedicated content writer who drafts the press releases and manages your relationship with the press, have him or her and the internal subject matter expert on standby throughout the day to respond to any follow-up queries from the press. This is especially important if your press release is time-sensitive.

How to pitch an exclusive opinion piece

When pitching an opinion piece, personalise your email not only to the media but also to the journalist or editor.

Explain why you’re offering to them, how it’s relevant to their coverage, and why you think they should publish it. If it’s a reaction piece to an opinion piece published on their site (be it by an external party or their own journalist), include a link to it.

To facilitate matters, attach a photo of the subject matter expert and clearly spell out his name and position in your company.

As mentioned earlier, exclusivity is gold in journalism, so make sure to state clearly that it is an exclusive. You will also want to give them a date before which they should inform you if they’re interested in publishing it. Otherwise, you risk waiting for a reply that might never come and its exclusivity means you’re unable to offer it to another media.

Be a little realistic and give them a deadline of at least two to three days. If there is no response from them after a day or two, you can send a gentle nudge. And if the radio silence continues, it is probably safe to assume that they are not interested.

Here are two templates you can use to pitch an opinion piece.

Case in point

On behalf of a client, we had been maintaining a close relationship with one of the most prestigious news publications in the logistics industry by offering exclusive pieces.

These efforts paid off recently when one of its journalists reached out to us to get comments from our client covering five different topics.

Thanks to having kept tabs on industry developments and good planning on our end, we already had a press release on one of the topics prepared and scheduled to be sent out the following week. To facilitate his work, we sent him the piece as an embargoed press release.

This helped him in two ways:

• He had more time than other media to edit the piece as he saw fit and to ask for follow-up comments.
• He was able to use the comments for other articles he was working on that had a strict deadline.

Such a spontaneous outreach is exactly what you should be aiming for with your digital PR strategy. By fostering this valuable relationship, we were able to maintain this top-of-mind awareness with these journalists.

The result?

At least four mentions in as many news articles on their website and coverage in a printed publication that will make its way to international industry trade shows and events, as well as online dissemination to its readers and subscribers.

Maintaining a relationship

Offering exclusive opinion pieces is one way to go to build a relationship with a journalist and keep you on top of their minds. But that can be time-consuming and certain startups simply may not have that many resources to be constantly offering exclusives.

Another way to go about it would be to follow these journalists on social media — both from your corporate account and from your subject matter expert’s personal account (if any).

It is common for journalists to post general comments and their opinions industry news and trends, which provides great opportunities for you to chime in and provide your two cents worth, and perhaps even get a gentle debate going.

Want to learn more?

• How to create a lead generation campaign with downloadable content
• The power of Smarketing to convert your blog into a lead-generating machine

Lin

Lin’s an ex-journalist who’s found her new love in content marketing. In her spare time, she’s on a secret conquest to find a solution to never having to cut her nails again.