Is it a good PR pitch or a bad PR pitch?
January 22, 2009 by ShannonCherry
Filed under Marketing
Lately, I’ve been getting a ton of pitches from would-be public relations folks trying to get my attention to write about them on one of my other blogs: Startup Spark.
And most of them have been completely off the mark for the topic I write about. I mean, just because you represent a new author who wrote a book about stress doesn’t mean a generic pitch will work for me. Tell me why it’s important to my audience, not everyone else.
You see, the difference between a good pitch and a bad pitch is all in the execution.
The pitches that are used are the ones that are newsworthy, media-friendly and arrive at opportune times. All three working together gives a PR person the best chance of media coverage and publicity.
Other tips for creating a good pitch and avoiding bad pitches:
- Forming lasting relationships with the media can be more effective than sending a non-targeted email pitch to an editor or reporter who has never heard of you. These emails are often treated as spam and discarded by the media. It’s not enough to craft one generic pitch and email it to all of the editors on a media list.
- Most successful PR campaigns depend on strategically maintained pitches that get re-pitched frequently. Using a release distribution system that gets your release pitched once is considered by many in the industry to be a form of bad pitching. With hundreds of pitches sent to media professionals daily, yours can get easily lost. Retool and repitch to the same targeted journalists.
- Match the pitched story to the needs of the media source and its readers and viewers. That means a little research on the PR person’s part, matching the story to the proper media source. For example, a bad pitch would be pitching a story about dogs to a technology editor (unless the dog happens to be robotic). A good pitch would be pitching the same story to a pet magazine.
- Time is money, the saying goes. If you pitch to a journalist whose time is short and deadline driven, you get only a short time to pitch a story to them. The rule of thumb is 10 seconds or less to grab their attention.
image credit: robsk102, on Flickr
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Your post is really a refresher on what constitutes best practices in PR. It’s a shame that our profession is consistently judged by those practitioners who give the industry a bad name; if those wishing to engage in PR adhered to the simple guidelines you’ve outlined, our profession as a whole would have a greatly improved reputation.
PR’s bad rap is something we’ve covered on our blog as well – http://inmedialog.com/index.php/archives/prs-bad-rap/