Media Relations: 4 Reasons Its Not Working For You
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Some people say media relations is a lost art. Some people are right. In this 60-minute webinar, Katy Pollard — she of Listening Pig public relations — will remind us just how important our relationships with journalists are, and teach us how to recapture what so many of us seem to have lost.
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Media Relations: 4 Reasons Its Not Working For You
- 1. Brought to you by Agility PR Solutions Media Relations: 4 Reasons It’s Not Working For You PRESENTED BY KATY POLLARD Founder of Listening Pig PR
- 2. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM katy@listeningpig.com No-nonsense, down-to-earth PR support Hello! I’m Katy, former journalist turned PR pro who specialises in getting high-profile media coverage Sage Top 100 Global Business Influencers and No.1 PR Micro-Influencer of 2017 in the world
- 3. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Listening Pig Media Coverage
- 6. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM What will you learn? How to get journalists to stop ignoring you Why one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to pitching Bigger outlets aren’t always better How monitoring and measuring can make it all better
- 7. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM How to get journalists to stop ignoring you Three simple things you can do to get noticed
- 8. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM How to get journalists to stop ignoring you
- 9. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM How to get journalists to stop ignoring you katy@listeningpig.com
- 11. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM How to get journalists to stop ignoring you
- 12. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM How to get journalists to stop ignoring you • Nail the basics • Have a genuinely interesting story described in a ‘ten word top line’ • Make sure it is relevant to that particular publication
- 13. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Why one size does not fit all when it comes to pitching Three things you need to stop doing right now
- 14. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Why one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to pitching Photo credit: http://www.evilenglish.net/wp- content/uploads/2015/01/20090916_fingers_crossed_2743.jpg
- 15. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Why one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to pitching Vs.
- 16. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Why one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to pitching
- 17. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Why one size does not fit all when it comes to pitching • Don’t spray and pray • Don’t assume journalists want to be contacted the same way you do • Don’t be annoying
- 19. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Bigger outlets aren’t always better
- 20. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Bigger outlets aren’t always better What are you trying to achieve?
- 21. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Bigger outlets aren’t always better
- 22. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Bigger outlets aren’t always better
- 23. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Bigger outlets aren’t always better • When bigger is better • Revisit your PR plan • The benefits of niche publications
- 24. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM Monitoring and measuring can make it all better
- 25. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM How monitoring and measuring can make it all better Monitoring the media to see when and where your organization appears will give you the numbers you need to know if your media outreach is working. Measuring your coverage and analysing it will tell you whether or not the mentions are good, whether or not your message is getting across as you want it to.
- 26. Boost Your Media Relations with Monitoring www.agilitypr.com Media monitoring tools save time and realize greater productivity for media relations at every stage: Research, Outreach, & Reporting
- 27. Do your Research Identify top influencers Discover trends/topics Media Monitoring helps at every stage www.agilitypr.com 1 2 3 Outreach & Monitor Interest Connect with influencers Streamline follow-up Report on Impact Capture coverage Show outcomes not outputs
- 28. BULLDOGREPORTER.COM What you learned How to get journalists to stop ignoring you Why one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to pitching Bigger outlets aren’t always better How monitoring and measuring can make it all better
- 32. www.agilitypr.com Follow us on Twitter @AgilityPRS
- 33. In collaboration with Agility PR SolutionsSign up for Bulldog Reporter Filled with PR news & insights Daily or Weekly options available
Editor's Notes
- Having spent more than 15 years working in health and wellbeing and third sector organisations promoting their extraordinary services, and having bagged a CIPR Diploma and MA Journalism, I felt I had the experience needed to fly solo. So, my company, Listening Pig was born - to provide quality, no-nonsense PR to people who care about people. I work with XXXX I am also well known in the journalist and PR sector and was recently listed in the Sage Top 100 Global Business Influencers 2017 and named top PR micro-influencer in the world.
- I built a career out of getting high profile articles published in UK national press such as The Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Cosmopolitan and Stylist magazines. I’m also a Huff Post blogger. Writing is my number one passion and I thank my lucky stars that I get to do what I love most every single day and that people are willing to pay me for it!
- As well securing high profile coverage, I also teach people how to do their own press work. As well as being a Huff Post blogger, I have my own Little Pig blog and I share lots of free advice and content about how to improve your media relations.
- I live in Yorkshire in the UK and embrace the country life. I love hiking with my Beagle, Ivy and Spaniel, Spaniel and my partner, Steve. We also have ducks and chickens and my company, Listening Pig was named after our pet pig Gwen, who sadly left this earth early this year but her clever spirit lives on in my company!
- We will take questions at the end
- It shouldn’t surprise you that people who write for a living are annoyed by bad writing. So, nail the basics. Editors and journalists receive hundreds if not thousands of emails a day. Your pitch has to get through the first hurdle of being noticed before it’s even opened. No. 1 rule: PROOFREAD. Typos, poor grammar, and incorrectly capitalised letters are all culprits. Most people have access to spellcheck these days, but it’s not infallible. Make sure you carefully check all emails before hitting “send”. Check email subject lines, email addresses, the body copy in the email and above all make sure you spell the journalist’s name correctly!
- Once, you’re satisfied you do this, next ask yourself is the story you’ve sent really interesting? No, I mean, REALLY interesting. When we work in companies, agencies, offices surrounded by senior people who are ‘really excited’ about the new product/ service/ sales team, it is easy to be swept up in the enthusiasm that ensues. But ask yourself, will anyone in the outside world care enough about your story? We have something call the pub test here in the UK – tell me if you have it over there. Basically, if you went to the pub or a bar with your mates and told them your story, would they be interested? If no, it’s time to rework the idea. Journalists live and breath stories. They don’t care about your company, product, new launch, new office mascot. They just want to hear good stories. So give it to them.
- You should be able to sum up your exciting story in ten words and that will be your email subject header to pique the interest of the editor or journalist. Think about that inbox full of thousands of emails – what subject header will make it stand out. Journalists call it ‘the ten word top line’. This is probably THE most important part of a pitch. A note of caution here, in my experience, journalists don’t like puns or smart comments, so just stick to the facts of the story – remember the Rudyard Kipling poem. What, why, when, how, where and who. Answer those questions in the ten word top line and you can’t go far wrong.
- The third tip is about relevancy. Is your story really relevant to the publication you’ve sent it to. Would you send a health story to a construction publication? No. The same principal applies to all publications. Even if they are in the same industry, each one has a slightly different outlook, a different perspective or different regular sections. Take a look at these two seemingly similar women’s magazines. You may think that because they are in the same sector, they cover similar types of stories. However, Cosmopolitan magazine targets women aged 18 to 30; their online site has a lot of blog style health articles and they have a heavy focus on celebrities and sex. Stylist magazine is aimed targets affluent 20 to 40-year-old female commuters with high end content that includes fashion, travel, beauty, people and careers news. The magazine aims to take an intelligent approach, covering a broader range of culture and tackling issues women face in their professional and personal lives. So if I pitch a blog style article called ‘10 top celebrity sex tips’ to Stylist, chances are I’d get no response. However, if I pitch the same article to Cosmo, they’d probably snap it up. Ask yourself if the story you have sent is relevant to the publication you’ve sent it to. Have you read the newspaper/ magazine/ website? If you don’t read the journalist’s publication – or section of publication - you’re unlikely to know what type of content they cover so you may have asked them to write an article or cover a story that is irrelevant to their audience. Take a look at the different sections they include. Review the media pack to see what demographic they target. Then tailor your pitch so that it fits their publication.
- So, are you starting to see now how we are tailoring our approach to the requirements of each publication? Blanket emails, or the ‘spray and pray’ approach is what we are often taught to do as young PRs. Write a press release, distribute it on a wire to as many publications as possible and then cross every part of your body in the hope that you get coverage. In my experience, this method is useful if you want to get out a news story quickly. Often, freelance journalists will scour the wires looking for ideas for stories and may quote your release in a feature article. So it has it’s uses. However, I find it more effective to think like a freelance journalist and tailor each pitch to individual publications. Yes, it takes a little longer but if you put in the effort, you get better results.
- How do you usually contact journalists? Email? Phone? Both? Journalists are like human beings (!) They each have preferred ways of working, times of day when they are more proactive and work schedules to follow. Some prefer email. Some prefer phone calls. For example, on daily papers, journalists usually have a very early morning meeting to determine the stories for the day, they then spent most of the morning writing those stories to a lunchtime deadline and then will spend the afternoon looking for new stories for the following morning’s meeting. Chances are if you pick up the phone at late morning, you will be faced with a writer on deadline who does not welcome your rambling ‘hello, how are you today?’ lengthy greeting. Have you ever asked the journalist what they prefer? Emails? Phone calls? What time of day is best to contact them. If you make a journalist’s life easier, they will be more receptive to your advances. By and large, a good rule of thumb is to email first. If you know the journalist is receptive to calls or if you have a good relationship with them, then follow it up with a call. A note of caution – leave it a while so they have actually had chance to see your email! Imagine how annoying it would be if everytime YOU receive an email, you also immediately received a call from that person asking if you’d received the email?!
- This leads me neatly onto my third tip – don’t be annoying!! I remember working in a newsroom and having persistent regulars who phoned daily with “stories”. They usually turned out to be rambling, shaggy-dog stories with no newsworthy element at all. As you can imagine, they were treated with the kind of disdain usually reserved for mud. At best, they were laughed at; at worst, ignored. This sort of person may have had a particularly amazing story one day, however they were not taken seriously, so we will never know. Don’t be that person. Now I’m not saying never call a journalist, just that if you do, don’t be annoying.
- Yes, big publications and sites feel like the Holy Grail, and I’m sure we’ve all worked with at least one CEO who wants to be in The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. And if you want to improve your website’s search rankings, there are 20 top news sites you need to get coverage in (I can share these at the end if you want). With the right story, timing and hook, this is very achievable. However, don’t assume that bigger is better.
- Revisit your goals and targets (because you did create a PR plan, right?!) What are you trying to achieve with your media relations? Who are your target audiences? What is the best way to reach them? Too often as PRs we jump straight to the solution, without fully considering the problem we’re trying to solve.
- Sometimes a niche publication will target exactly the right group of people who need to hear your message. If you sell animals clothes, chances are a Ferret magazine will reach your target audience better than any national publication can. And think a bit wider here too. Don’t just go for the obvious sector you think your company sits in. So, maybe you sells shoes and you’ve been sending press releases to retail publications to support your sales team. You hear that your Marketing team has some research results that the shoes you sell are being bought by seniors because they are comfortable and hard wearing. So, consider revising your PR plan to target publications that market to seniors.
- Don’t underestimate the value of getting coverage in a local publication. National journalists often scour local stories to see if any can be scaled up to a national level. Most of us will be familiar with making a national story relevant locally by pulling out specifics relevant to local areas. Think the other way around too. Can you create local stories that have national appeal?
- Augment wire with personalized emails, social media connection to influencers 600,000+ Journalists, Bloggers and Influencers 160,000+ Media Organizations 200+ Countries 20+ Languages 2 million+ updates annually done by global research team Database Consistency: High value on accuracy and low bounce rates Duplicate detection Enforced format guides for editing fields Mandatory fields
- : Media monitoring tools pinpoint the top influencers discussing your brand, industry, and competitors, enabling you to quickly build customized lists for media outreach. Stay abuzz: Media alerts and reports show which topics are trending in your space. This insight helps you jump in on important conversations and hone journalist pitches. Outreach & monitor interest Engage with influencers: Reach out directly to those talking about your brand or your competitors. Better yet, see their social media activity and contact details to learn more about them and exactly what they specialize in Gauge journalist interest: Use detailed email statistics to go beyond open and click rates, and dive into who's opened your emails and where they've clicked. Detailed coverage reports: Track and report on your earned media with visual coverage reports. Get coverage details including outlets, journalists, media type, and more. Benchmark coverage over time so you can evolve as a communicator. Demonstrate PR impact: Show leadership the true results of your earned media coverage and how it contributes to business objectives with PR measurement and custom media scoring.
- We will take questions at the end
- I’ve got a template that I use time and time again to pitch to journalists and it has secured me hundreds of pieces of coverage. And I’m happy to let you have it for a special price. I will email the link to it after the webinar.