It’s a good practice to build relationship with relevant journalists one by one, like the way you make new friends. But sometimes you just need to spread a message to the media as soon as possible. In this article, I’ll share a simple strategy example to scale your pitch efforts quickly.
Example background
Your company has launched a drone that carries a real human at this year’s CES. It has attracted worldwide media attention. But you also quickly became aware that the story were fading quickly from global media outlets, just like other big stories. You decided to do a series of test driving events in some major U.S. cities to generate new buzz. You now need to invite as many media influentials to join with you as possible. You have only one week left for the first event…
Build the media list
The first step is to build a media list that includes all the relevant media influentials. You can use Anewstip Tweet search to find out all the journalists that have tweeted relevant keywords in the past and add them to the same media list.
List the keywords
The keywords can be your company name, product name, competitors, and industry related keywords. First try to list only the most relevant ones and see how many results are there. If there aren’t enough results, then you can try to add more keywords.
Search and filter results
Let’s start with one of the keywords “drone”.
To make the results more relevant, you can use a combination of different filters, e.g. you can set the tweet time to “Past year”, language to “English”, sources to “All journalists” (to not include media outlets results). To further narrow the results, you can also filter the search results by the topics the journalists cover:
In this example case, topics like Technology, Consumer Electronics, Mobile Communications, Electronics, Technology Industry, Internet are all highly relevant. You just need to check the boxes next to those topics and click Apply, then only the journalists that cover such topics will be returned.
Add journalists to media list
After applying all those filters, the search results now look highly relevant. You can add all the results on the page by simply checking “Select all on page” at the top and then click “Add to Media list” next to it. You’ll be prompted to add these results to an existing media list or create a new one:
You can use this process to build a media list that contain hundreds of relevant journalists in half a day.
Pitch the journalists in the media list
The media list is ready and the next step is to pitch them in Anewstip Pitch.
Draft a personalized pitch message
In the new pitch page, click the To field to choose the media list you just created as the recipients. All the media contacts in the media list will receive the pitch as a personalized email, and they won’t be able to see other recipient’s emails.
In the From and Reply to fields, enter the sender name and email. They will be displayed to the recipients just like standard email sender information.
Make the pitch subject and body relevant and short. When a pitch message is relevant and personalized, it goes further. We covered how to craft a good PR pitch here.
Review and submit the pitch
Click next, and you’ll come to the Review and submit your pitch page:
You can preview your pitch to each recipient by changing the recpient at the top dropdown field.
You can also schedule the exact date and time to distribute the pitch. It might not be a good idea to distribute your pitch around non-working hours.
Track performance
You can track opens and clicks for your pitches on the Pitch page. More details is covered here.
Summary
It’s always easy to add hundreds or even thousands of journalists in a list without careful selection. But great results don’t come that easy. No matter it’s pitching one or hundreds of journalists at once, relevancy is the king. Search with relevant keywords, filter results with relevant filters, craft relevant pitch messages , and send the pitch at the relevant time. Keep close attention to the opens & clicks stats and challenge yourself to get better results next time.
