Not all of your stories are newsworthy.
If you’re not on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence-controlled robotics or have the fastest supercomputer in the world, it’s probably hard to get journalists and media outlets charged up to talk about your B2B brand. Brands that struggle with this typically believe every editor is interested in their niche position in the B2B world and talk (or type) ad nauseam about what it is they do.
Nobody cares.
Even if it’s a trade publication and the writer covers your vertical, they still don’t care.
What journalists and editors do care about is writing quality stories their readers will enjoy and doing their job well. Your PR success depends on your ability to help them achieve that goal.
Here are three counterintuitive steps to secure more coverage while wasting less time:
1. The best stories aren’t about your brand.
Most media outlets don’t like to dedicate an entire piece to one vendor.
They’re job is to tell stories that will be as interesting as possible to the greatest number of readers. Unless your brand is already a household name, this means that the most impactful story pitch will tell your customer’s story. The outlet’s readers can relate to your customer because they are just like them.
[RELATED: Distracted audiences? Mind-numbing topics? Cut through the clutter with creative corporate writing.]
A story about how your customer did something awesome (and how you played a role in it) stands a better chance at being picked up than raving about how innovative your product/service is or its features and benefits.
2. Don’t talk about your product/service.
If you’re proud or excited about what your company does, go tell your mother. If a journalist was already interested in your brand, they’d already have reached out to you instead of being on the receiving end of your pitch.
Instead, develop a pitch to address what your customers—and the outlet’s readers—want to know. Speak in terms of their pain points. The odds are that that your company isn’t nearly as cool as the ecosystem in which you operate.
Bring in as many different perspectives and folds to the story as you can so that the reporter or writer can envision an engaging story with a story arc that shares real-world challenges and not just free publicity for your brand.
3. Be the oil can, not a squeaky wheel.
Any PR pro will tell you that if you ask 10 different journalists how they like to be pitched, you’ll get 10 different answers. However, one thing is for sure: PR pros’ jobs are to make the journalist’s job easier.
This means helping the journalist write about something they’re interested in covering rather than trying to convince them that they should write about something interesting to your brand. When you approach pitching the media from a service mindset and ask yourself, “how can what I or my client know help them reach their goals,” you’ll become a resource to reporters.
You’ll have to start by reaching out to the writer and in two sentences summarizing their recent coverage and writing style (to validate you know who they are and what they do) and then offer up a top-level executive in your company who has a reputation and can help the writer make sense of topics they’re interested in. After they use your spokesperson for the first time, then you can start pitching them your own story ideas.
Chancellor Shay is the director of B2B and infrastructure development for (W)right On Communications. A version of this story originally appeared on the (W)right On Communications blog.
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