Top tips for best practice outreach

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Building up and maintaining solid relationships with media contacts and bloggers is an integral part of securing coverage for your product, brand or service. You can have the best story out there but if you don’t communicate it in the right way, it’s very likely that your call or email will be ignored. Here are some top tips to consider when embarking on outreach.

Get personal
This is across the board but particularly important to those targets who are on your high priority list. The content of your introduction email is very important. Always use the person’s name. If an individual on your contact list receives an email that greets them with ‘Hello blogger’ or worse, with an incorrect name, they’ll immediately delete. Put the work in to find the name of the person you want to approach before you send the email.

Make it relevant
Why would this journalist, blogger or target be interested in what you have to say? What have they written or produced before that has made you think your story, product or service could be a good fit for them or their media outlet? Where possible try to link your story back to something they have done before and use examples to prove that you have done your research.

A little flattery never hurts
It’s often effective to add in how you much you enjoy their work (be sincere!). Don’t go over the top but a touch of subtle flattery will let them know that you are familiar with their content and that you have cherry picked them as opposed to sending a blanket email that 200 other journalists or bloggers have also received.

Get creative
If you’re aiming to catch the attention of harder to reach targets, go above and beyond a call or email. Could you send a video, a unique gift or a hand written note perhaps?

Timing is key
National newspapers’ editorial meetings are typically at around 10.30am. For the daily papers, after 4pm is the worst time to call. Deadlines vary for different publications and programmes, so you’ll need to do your research and remember that turnaround time can be very fast if they decide to run your story. That said, content can be decided three to four months in advance for newspaper features and magazines. Bloggers usually work to their own schedule. Get a solid idea of timings for the people you are pitching to and plan accordingly.

Capture their interest first
If you are approaching via phone, you’ll usually find that journalists in particular don’t have time for chit-chat. So get to the point whilst also being friendly and warm. Plan what you want to say ahead of the call and sound confident but avoid sounding like you’re reading from a script! Keep it simple and don’t get caught up with fine details. Capture their interest first and then you can follow up with your press release.

Maintain the connection
Once you have established the relationship maintain it! Offer to take people to lunch or coffee to discuss your story in more detail if that’s appropriate. If they run your story, thank them and acknowledge that you noticed. Once a relationship is formed it’s easier to then keep in touch and you’ll gradually start to build a wider pool of key media contacts who may want to run your stories on a regular basis.

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