3 Ways to Get the Media to Listen to Your Brand Story

Wikipedia

If you want to share your brand story with journalists, you have to know how to pitch the story to them. We often tell clients there are three ways to pitch reporters. In many cases, you can use these approaches in combination in order to target and reach the media professionals who are most likely to reward your brand story idea with space in their next article.

Three Ways to Pitch Your Brand Story to the Media

1. Traditional – Despite the ubiquity of social media, or perhaps, because of it, phone and email aren’t dead yet! Make sure you know how the journalists on your media list prefer to be contacted. If they prefer a phone call, prepare what you are going to say in advance so you’re not rambling when you call. If you are sending an email, keep it brief and to the point. If you are including a news release, append a text-only version to the end of your email. And don’t send an attachment! Reporters don’t have time to open and read your Word documents and PDFs.
   
2. Social – Social media is being used by more journalists as a way to locate and contact expert sources. You can use social media to connect with journalists and share their stories. Forget wit; brevity is the soul of social media. When you have only 140 characters to make an appeal that a reporter will want to follow up on, it forces you to think about the core of your pitch.
   
3. Expert – Ultimately, the best way to connect with a journalist is for them to reach out to you and your experts. If you want to be sourced, quoted and referenced by the media, then you need to make your experts available via source repositories and databases. Among those we recommend are Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and ProfNet from PRNewswire and NewsBasis.

Let me know what works for you.

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