ChicExecs Senior VP of PR and Digital Marketing Kristen Wessel shares her three tips for making your media pitches stand out on Forbes blog. Below is a highlight from the article.
A good media pitch can put your brand’s story in front of thousands of people. You can build brand awareness, get more traffic to your site and eventually score more sales.
But if you’ve sent out dozens of pitches and haven’t heard back from a single journalist, it might be time to revamp your pitching strategy. Journalists may see upward of 100 pitches every day in their inboxes. They likely take one look at the subject line before deciding whether to read your pitch or delete it.
There’s no sure-fire way to score more features, but if you follow these three tips, you’ll write better pitches that help you stand out.
1. Be A Reader First
You’re probably eager to fire off a few pitches to your favorite journalists or outlets, but don’t contact them just yet. It’s a good idea to get familiar with an outlet before you pitch its journalists. This will help you figure out:
• Which journalists write stories in your desired niche.
• What kinds of stories the outlet likes to publish.
• Who the readers are.
• If the outlet accepts outside pitches.
• How to write a relevant pitch that gets a journalist’s attention.
2. Pitch Something Newsworthy
Every pitch needs to pass the “so what?” test. If a stranger on the street hears your pitch and says “so what?” it means your pitch probably isn’t newsworthy. Journalists want to cover timely, interesting topics that their readers want to see, so you need to make sure every pitch is actually newsworthy.
3. Optimize Your Pitch Emails
Emails are an art on their own. You not only have to write an awesome pitch, but you also need to format the subject line and body copy in a way that makes it easy for a journalist to feature your brand.
If journalists aren’t responding to your pitch emails, try improving your messages by:
• Personalizing each message
• Testing subject lines
• Keeping it short and skimmable
Read Kristen’s entire blog here.
