Savvy communicators know that there is more to a perfect pitch than simply good writing, and media relations is not just about distributing these stories to the media. To break through the noise of millions of pitches out there, knowing your audience, being on point with your story and building long-term relationships with journalists are essential ingredients.
PR pros need a data-driven strategy to reach their goals of securing high-impact media coverage for their brands. Understanding what to pitch, to whom and what’s working / not working requires access to relevant information. This means that pitching must start with the right data and end with measurement.
In this blog series, we’re sharing a proven data- and technology-driven process for building the perfect pitch and nurturing your media relationships, which has been used by Onclusive’s customers to achieve extraordinary outcomes for their brands.
Where do you find impactful journalists for your pitch?
Recent industry polling indicates that showing the ROI – in other words, the bottom-line impact – of PR initiatives is now a must-do for the modern communicator. This means that you’ll want to identify which journalists, influencers and publications are having the biggest influence on your business – driving the most website traffic, social media engagement, brand interactions, and revenue.
One way to do that is to use smart technology to help you out. For example, with robust media profiles like those in Onclusive’s contact database, you can quickly gauge which authors meet your impact criteria based on their recent activity, social amplification, influencer score, reach and more:
You can also expand your range by finding new authors with similar profiles who aren’t writing for you yet – for example, journalists who write for competitors or who recently started covering topics relevant to your brand.
“With Onclusive, we have been able to show progress in gaining share of voice relative to our competitors, identify new media outlets and reporters, and develop a better understanding of what works and what is less effective”
~G2 Crowd reviews, two time Onclusive Client, mid market Financial Services Company (51-1000 employees)
Earning their attention
Earning the attention of your target journalists is by definition a long-term strategy, and it’s about consistently giving them what they want and need in the simplest, most concise and digestible way to make their jobs easier.
This requires not only understanding your ultimate reader audience, which you can do by researching their demographics, psychographics, behavior patterns, attitudes and readership data, but also digging into the journalists, influencers and bloggers that cater to this audience.
Spend the time to read, listen to and note what impactful authors write about, how often and in which publications. This process, which can otherwise take weeks, has been simplified and accelerated by solutions such as Onclusive’s robust Author Intelligence™ profiles, which give you instant access to recent articles and social media activity across multiple outlets for millions of authors around the globe.
