Photo by Amanda, of Flickr Creative Licences
Whatever business, whatever its size – and even with the fabulous possibilities of social media – 70%+ of PR work remains media pitching to journalists or editors.
So, what is it that would make journalists continually “bite” at your media pitches?
Well, here’s an anecdote about Adrian, the founder and MD of one of our clients.
Adrian launched the UK’s first-ever independent garage franchise, and when looking for PR assistance he briefed us: “We want to get the word ‘out there’ about our business”.
For Adrian, “out there” (or brand awareness) meant reaching key audiences through positive coverage in national, as well as specialist business-to-business (b-to-b) media and regional media.
Now it can be a challenge to get SMEs – especially a single garage – heavy-weight profile-raising coverage in national media.
But we sat down with Adrian for an hour, and asked him questions about his business life and career – to get “his full story”.
It was during this conversation that we discovered Adrian was a former high-flying London recruitment manager who, before setting up his profitable garage business, “did not know how to change a wiper blade”.
Moreover, he’d built his business from scratch to a £1m turnover in three years. That’s when “the story” headline clicked – “Former City Slicker who could not change a wiper blade builds £1m garage business in three years”.
Sure enough national media published this story, helping ensure his business’s name started to get “out there”. What’s the message here? It’s this. When pitching to national media you HAVE to find the story ‘hook’ that makes a journalist bite.
Journalists are hyper-fast deleters of emails. So, both the email subject line and news release must “hit the mark”. If not, within a fraction of a second your carefully-crafted news release is in the junk folder.
But get it right, and a positive story of your business will be featured in national media with an audience reach of millions
That’s the power only good PR reaps.
P.S. “Adrian” is actually Andy, and this is what Andy thinks about us