Public Relations Strategies: Landing the Pitch

When navigating public relations, it’s a good idea to have a clear strategy and follow it. Aligning your PR process and business objectives is a good start. A public relations strategy is a systematic, planned process of messaging and media outreach. Are you thinking, “We need press” or “It’s time to send out press releases?” Those are good notions, but you need to think about WHY you’re doing those things.

Landing the pitch is one of the most important parts of your public relations strategy. A solid PR strategy is about how you want to achieve a specific communications objective. It’s best to have a goal in mind; for example, are you looking to increase brand awareness or set a growth objective for your business? Perhaps targets in your segment gravitate toward social media for their news and information. If so, you can focus there to sell your product or service. Also, are you trying to get attention locally or nationally, or is it search engine rankings you are after?

What Exactly Is Landing the Pitch?

To gain success with a PR strategy, you need reporters’ attention. A pitch is how you do this. Basically, it means sending a message or calling a reporter or editor about yourself – and making it interesting. Media professionals receive a lot of pitches, most of which aren’t interesting to them. This is how your announcement must stand out. Think of it as a sales process for yourself and your business. A failure to land your pitch will prevent you from executing your public relations strategy.

How to Land the Pitch

With great pitches, you can establish yourself as an industry thought leader and even become a voice in a national conversation. A clear strategy and a consistent message can help you leverage the media in executing your PR strategy. Landing a pitch can be tricky, but the process can be broken down into what’s called the ABCs of landing your pitch. These are:

• Attention: Grab the reporter’s attention with an outstanding news hook. Additionally, consider the FBO concept, or first best only. This means that, no matter how many similar products are out there, yours is the first something or the best, or the only one that is that way. Also, the reporter’s beat must match what you’re announcing. If you’re trying sell cryptocurrency to someone who writes about sports, you won’t have much success.

• Brag: It’s important to not go overboard. Stick to realistic numbers. If your app for predicting cryptocurrency prices is right 89% of the time, it might be more believable than saying it’s always 100% correct. Of course, no one is correct all of the time. If you continue claiming you are, it can put your credibility on the line. But you can boast if your product is a success and is the best at achieving results that benefit consumers in a new and exciting way.

• Care: You also need to explain to the reporter why he or she should care about your story. For example, you can tell anyone you want to race, enter a marathon and win. But why should people care about that? To spark interest, a connection needs to be formed. Perhaps you promised a dying family member you’d win the race and achieved that objective. Or, not only does your crypto app make accurate predictions, but it helps investors beat the odds as well. The idea here is to know what the reporter writes about, form a relationship with them and address their needs for a story that will get ratings, clicks and/or circulation.

How Your Pitch Helps Fulfill Your Objective

A reporter is looking for a story to sell. Most reporters stick to a certain beat, or subject or topic. You can use online databases to find reporters who write about specific beats. But on the most basic level, you need to put yourself in a reporter’s head and consider what their audience is most interested in. Your pitch should speak to that. Think of this as a doorway to getting your target reporter to care about the story you want to tell.

Learn More About Landing the Pitch

To be noticed, landing the pitch requires speaking to the reporter’s audience. You can learn more about the process involved in achieving success by downloading “Stop Being Invisible.” It’s available as a free eBook or paperback to purchase on Amazon. It goes deeper into the ABCs of pitching to reporters and also includes a few examples of effective press releases.

In addition, you’ll find step-by-step guidance on how to execute an effective public relations strategy. But if there’s more that you need, Comms Factory can help. We offer a range of public relations and marketing communications services, including press release writing, blog writing and press release distribution. Eager to share our knowledge of how to best communicate with your audience, we can offer advice and services that raise awareness of your product, service or message, as well as gain free publicity and achieve business growth.

You don’t have to be a public relations firm to communicate your story. Anyone can become effective at landing the pitch. There is a dynamic you can learn from our services and resources. But we can provide PR support that lands you news coverage and even gets you booked on major networks as an expert.

Continue browsing our resources to learn more. Also feel free to obtain our book and/or schedule a consultation with us to learn more about landing the pitch.

Photo by Anna Shvets: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-black-blazer-holding-smartphone-3727469/